http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9979/02/index20article7.html
The field of elementary particle physics is entering an era of unprecedented potential. New experimental facilities, including accelerators, space-based experiments, underground laboratories, and critical precision measurements of various kinds, offer a variety of ways to explore the hidden nature of matter, energy, space, and time. The availability of technologies that can explore directly an energy regime known as Terascale is especially exciting. The direct exploration of the Terascale could be the next important step toward resolving questions that human beings have asked for millennia: What are the origins of mass? Can the basic forces of nature be unified? How did the universe begin? How will it evolve in the future? Moreover at Terascale energies, formerly separate questions in cosmology and particle physics become connected, bridging the sciences of the very large and the very small.
… One of the great scientific achievements of the 20th century was the development of the Standard Model of elementary particle physics, which describes the relationships among the known elementary particles and the characteristics of three of the four forces that act on those particles—electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force (but not gravity). However, in the energy regions that physicists are just now become able to access experimentally, the incompleteness of the Standard Model becomes apparent. It is unable to reconcile the twin pillars of 20th century physics, Einstein’s general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. In addition, recent astronomical observations indicate that everyday matter accounts for just 4 percent of the total substance in the universe. The rest of the universe consists of hypothesized entities called dark matter and dark energy that are not described by the Standard Model. Other challenges to the Standard Model are posed by the predominance of matter over antimatter in the universe, the early evolution of the universe, and the discovery that the elusive particles known as neutrinos have a tiny but nonzero mass. Thus, despite the extraordinary success of the Standard Model, it seems likely that a much deeper understanding of nature will be achieved as physicists continue to study the fundamental constituents of the universe.
…Elementary particle physicists use a wide variety of natural phenomena to investigate the properties and interactions of particles. They gather data from cosmic rays and solar neutrinos, astronomical observations, precision measurements of single particles, and monitoring of large masses of everyday matter. In addition, crucial advances historically have come from particle accelerators and the complex detectors used to study particle collisions in controlled environments. Today the most powerful accelerator in the world is the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, which is scheduled to be shut down by the end of the decade. A more powerful accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, is scheduled to begin colliding protons in 2007. Both theoretical and experimental evidence suggests that revolutionary new physics will emerge at the energies accessible with the LHC.
Beyond the LHC, physicists around the world are designing a new accelerator known as the International Linear Collider (ILC), which would use two linear accelerators to collide beams of electrons and positrons. Together, the LHC and an ILC will enable physicists to explore the unification of the fundamental forces, probe the origins of mass, uncover the dynamic nature of the “vacuum” of space, deepen the understanding of stellar and nuclear processes, and investigate the nature of dark matter. These tasks cannot be accomplished with the LHC alone…. Elementary particle physics has been a centerpiece of the physical sciences throughout the 20th century. It has inspired generations of young people to become members of the strongest scientific workforce in the world. It also has attracted outstanding scientists from abroad to come to the United States and contribute to the nation’s intellectual and economic vitality.
In addition, particle physics has generated waves of technological innovations that have found applications throughout the sciences and society. The protocols that underlie the World Wide Web are developed at CERN, and the two-way interactions between particle physics and high-performance computing and communications have continued to blossom. Particle physics has generated critical technologies in such areas as materials analysis, medical treatment, and imaging.
… The demonstration that neutrinos have nonzero masses may be one of the first signals of the new physics expected in the years ahead, since the observed masses are in the range predicted by theoretical ideas that unify the forces of nature. In the future, neutrinoless double-beta decay experiments could demonstrate that the neutrino is its own antiparticle, which would greatly strengthen the case for interpreting neutrino masses in terms of unified theories of the fundamental forces. Furthermore, proton decay experiments might show that the proton is unstable, which would confirm one of the most basic predictions of unified theories.
… With experimental access to the Terascale at the LHC and the proposed ILC, the particle physics community is poised for discoveries that could revolutionize how we view our world and the universe.
— Committee on Elementary Particle Physics in the 21st Century,
National Research Council,
Revealing the Hidden Nature of Space and Time:
Charting the Course for Elementary Particle Physics
Filed under: natural philosophy
