“‘Colliders have been the tool of choice for particle physicists to look at smaller and smaller particles. All a sudden we are realizing that we can use them not only to understand things at smaller scales, but for understanding them as a whole.’ Jonathan Feng, an associate professor of physics at UC-Irvine, sees the potential the new CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) holds for understanding the make up of our universe.”
I attended a lecture a few months ago from a particle-cosmologist (now that’s an interesting job description…). He made the point that over the next few years we should see a number of accelerators coming online that will have the capacity to create cold dark matter. (And if they can’t directly create the particles, they should act to place pretty strict bounds on the mass-energy that candidate particles could have.)
The upshot is that we should know in a couple of years whether all this speculation about dark-matter and dark-energy is legit, or if it’s just the latest version of the luminiferous ether.
I’m kind of rooting for dark matter to really exist. The idea that we have only encountered 1-5% of all the gravitational entities that exist is wonderfully exciting to me. Think how much more is out there to discover!
(Via Physics Org.)
