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Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

Just found this, so ironic considering there would be no LHC without the work of Crookes. Doing work on web pages a couple of days ago, I noticed that the revisionism is approaching epidemic proportions with many of the pioneers all-but deleted from the history of science. Those who edit Wiki and other web pages continue to deny affiliation with sceptical organisations. It's hard to imagine just what's gained from changing history?
E-mail from Michael Roll to Brian Josephson, February 27, 2003
To Professor B.D. Josephson

Bearing in mind this report [by Thomas Travers] regarding the shoddy work of Dr. Richard Wiseman. Would you please be kind enough to help me put a stop to the outrageous attack on Sir William Crookes that is being shown on television, on a regular basis, to the students of The Open University?

I have written to the Principal pointing out that this giant of subatomic physics, Sir William Crookes OM, FRS, is being destroyed by scientific pygmies. No supporter of Sir William has been allowed to balance this appalling hatchet job that was made by Dr. Richard Wiseman and his fellow parapsychologists. They have all started from the base that the mind dies with the brain in order to appease orthodox scientific dogmas.

The Principal of the Open University has not even acknowledged my letters of protest. He will have to take notice of a letter of complaint from a Nobel Laureate for physics. I have recorded this programme and will be pleased to send you a copy if you have not already seen it. The final word is given to a young female parapsychologist who completely writes off the lifetimes work of Sir William Crookes, and by implication, Sir Oliver Lodge FRS. His writings make it very clear that the study of survival after death must be approached as a branch of physics - that we are dealing with natural and normal forces in the universe.

Michael Roll
http://www.cfpf.org.uk/letters/2003/200 ... r2bdj.html
 
That's cherry-picking in the extreme on your part, it wasn't Crookes's work in physics and chemistry that Wiseman was questioning, but his involvement in spiritualism, and the question as to whether his work in parapsychology was as objective or as well conducted as his work in the harder sciences.

They have all started from the base that the mind dies with the brain in order to appease orthodox scientific dogmas.

It could be argued that Crookes started out from the then orthodox religious dogma that there is an immortal soul in order to appease conventional religious mores of his time.

You can start from either viewpoint and see where the evidence takes you. Wiseman argues that Crookes's parapsychology work was flawed.

Asking a Nobel Laureate in physics to back you up in a field in which he has no expertise is a variant of the "appeal to authority" argument in debate - i.e. a very clever man thinks so, so it must be right.
 
I find your post fascinating, not least because of the characters involved and their personal agendas and I think we need to put this into perspective.

I wrote to Richard Wiseman not long ago because I wanted to use a newspaper article about him (below) and I also wanted an explanation about his call for a different set of rules for parapsychology:
"I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven, but begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal? I think we do. (...) if I said that a UFO had just landed, you'd probably want a lot more evidence. Because remote viewing is such an outlandish claim that will revolutionize [sic] the world, we need overwhelming evidence before we draw any conclusions. Right now we don't have that evidence." Richard Wiseman Daily Mail, January 28, 2008,"
He failed to answer any of my questions, but sent me a link to his sceptical web site at the page below.

‘Heads I Win, Tails You Lose’: How Parapsychologists Nullify Null Results
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/heads_i_w ... ll_results

It seems that he not only wants to stymie parapsychology, but he also objects to the use of psychics in parapsychological experiments. I can only assume from reading the page that he would prefer that all psi experiments be conducted with known sceptics to ensure a null result each and every time. I question his claim to be a scientist as the psi-missing effect is no secret within the parapsychological community.

Brian Josephson it seems, was excluded from a workshop on the Foundations of Physics simply because of his work in the paranormal. Again, this makes one wonder about the agenda as many of the historical figures, founding heroes of physics, were involved in just such studies, as was Crookes.
http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/art ... nvite.html

It may have escaped your attention that the position of orthodox religious dogma is the same as that of sceptical science when it comes to Spiritualism or any departure from Christian dogma and I'm sure that Crookes was well aware of this fact.
 
Now you too can be a nuclear physicist! :D

LHC@home allows public to help hunt for Higgs particle

The Large Hadron Collider team will be tapping into the collective computing power of the public to help it simulate particle physics experiments.
Among other pursuits, the effort could help uncover the Higgs boson.

The effort, dubbed LHC@home 2.0, is a vastly updated version of a 2004 effort to enlist the public's computers to simulate beams of protons.
Advances in home computers now allow simulations of the enormously more complex particle collisions themselves.

The LHC facility is the world's most powerful "atom smasher", occupying an underground, 27km ring beneath the Swiss-French border.

"Volunteers can now actively help physicists in the search for new fundamental particles that will provide insights into the origin of our Universe, by contributing spare computing power from their personal computers and laptops," read a statement from Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research which runs the LHC.

Along with the grandeur of the accelerator itself came an unprecedented computing infrastructure to handle the 15 million gigabytes of data produced at the LHC each year.
The Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid is a 100m-euro network designed to handle the flood of data and distribute it to scientists worldwide.

The LHC@home project will complement this network by splitting up the gargantuan task of simulating the collisions, feeding those computer simulations back to the scientists for comparison.
"By looking for discrepancies between the simulations and the data, we are searching for any sign of disagreement between the current theories and the physical Universe," says the LHC@home 2.0 website.
"Ultimately, such a disagreement could lead us to the discovery of new phenomena, which may be associated with new fundamental principles of nature."

The project is just the latest in an increasingly long line of "citizen science" projects in which the power of the public's home computers is put to use in solving scientific problems; the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and the fabulously complex process of protein folding are both subjects of such distributed computing projects.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14488797
 
Higgs boson signals fade at Large Hadron Collider
Cern scientist says he sees 'no striking evidence of anything that could resemble a discovery' in hunt for Higgs boson
Ian Sample guardian.co.uk, Monday 22 August 2011 07.30 BST

Ripples of excitement swept through the physics community last month when Cern scientists reported what looked like glimpses of the long-sought Higgs boson. But the hopes have been dashed as it was revealed that the tantalising hints had all but faded away.

Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva noticed intriguing signals in their data in July that they thought might be caused by the elusive sub-atomic particle. But the latest analyses, based on nearly twice as much data, saw those signals weaken considerably. The news was broken at the Lepton-Photon conference in Mumbai.
"We see no striking evidence of anything that could resemble a discovery," Guido Tonelli, spokesman for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector group at Cern, told the Guardian.

One of the main objectives of the collider is to discover what gives mass to elementary particles, something many physicists credit to the Higgs boson. The LHC has two large, multipurpose detectors, Atlas and CMS, and last month both teams independently reported signals that suggested the Higgs boson might weigh between 120 and 140 GeV (gigaelectronvolts), the units of mass used in particle physics. One GeV is roughly equivalent to the mass of a proton, a subatomic particle found in atomic nuclei.

But in Mumbai both teams said the signals had faded, although it was too early to completely rule out a Higgs particle in that mass range. In particle colliders, it is common for signals to come and go because of statistical blips or fluctuations.

"We might be very close to a depressing moment in which we conclude those fluctuations were statistical jokes, but there is also the possibility of seeing them grow with more data. The exciting part is that after 20 years of preparation and work, I would say this will be decided by Christmas," Tonelli said.

etc...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/ ... gnals-fade
 
If in doubt, they will do what they always do and build a bigger collider.
The proof of a theory that has cost millions depends on a willingness to throw more millions at it. When the millions become astronomical, everyone thinks it must be worthwhile and they spend more money.
Simple.
No one ever asks about the emperor's new clothes because they will appear to be ignorant. :lol:
 
Poor ol' Susy not up to the job?

LHC results put supersymmetry theory 'on the spot'
By Pallab Ghosh, Science correspondent, BBC News

Results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have all but killed the simplest version of an enticing theory of sub-atomic physics.
Researchers failed to find evidence of so-called "supersymmetric" particles, which many physicists had hoped would plug holes in the current theory.
Theorists working in the field have told BBC News that they may have to come up with a completely new idea.

Data were presented at the Lepton Photon science meeting in Mumbai.
They come from the LHC Beauty (LHCb) experiment, one of the four main detectors situated around the collider ring at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) on the Swiss-French border.
According to Dr Tara Shears of Liverpool Liverpool University, a spokesman for the LHCb experiment: "It does rather put supersymmetry on the spot".

The experiment looked at the decay of particles called "B-mesons" in hitherto unprecedented detail.
If supersymmetric particles exist, B-mesons ought to decay far more often than if they do not exist.
There also ought to be a greater difference in the way matter and antimatter versions of these particles decay.

The results had been eagerly awaited following hints from earlier results, most notably from the Tevatron particle accelerator in the US, that the decay of B-mesons was influenced by supersymmetric particles.
LHCb's more detailed analysis however has failed to find this effect.

This failure to find indirect evidence of supersymmetry, coupled with the fact that two of the collider's other main experiments have not yet detected supersymmetic particles, means that the simplest version of the theory has in effect bitten the dust.

The theory of supersymmetry in its simplest form is that as well as the subatomic particles we know about, there are "super-particles" that are similar, but have slightly different characteristics.
The theory, which was developed 20 years ago, can help to explain why there is more material in the Universe than we can detect - so-called "dark matter".

According to Professor Jordan Nash of Imperial College London, who is working on one of the LHC's experiments, researchers could have seen some evidence of supersymmetry by now.
"The fact that we haven't seen any evidence of it tells us that either our understanding of it is incomplete, or it's a little different to what we thought - or maybe it doesn't exist at all," he said.

The timing of the announcement could not be worse for advocates of supersymmetry, who begin their annual international meeting at Fermilab, near Chicago, this weekend.
Dr Joseph Lykken of Fermilab, who is among the conference organisers, says he and others working in the field are "disappointed" by the results - or rather, the lack of them.
"There's a certain amount of worry that's creeping into our discussions," he told BBC News.
The worry is that the basic idea of supersymmetry might be wrong.

"It's a beautiful idea. It explains dark matter, it explains the Higgs boson, it explains some aspects of cosmology; but that doesn't mean it's right.
"It could be that this whole framework has some fundamental flaws and we have to start over again and figure out a new direction," he said.

Experimental physicists working at the LHC, such as Professor Nash, say the results are forcing their theoretical colleagues to think again.
"For the last 20 years or so, theorists have been a step ahead in that they've had ideas and said 'now you need to go and look for it'.
"Now we've done that, and they need to go scratch their heads," he said.

That is not to say that it is all over for supersymmetry. There are many other, albeit more complex, versions of the theory that have not been ruled out by the LHC results.
These more complex versions suggest that super-particles might be harder to find and could take years to detect.

Some old ideas that emerged around the same time as supersymmetry are being resurrected now there is a prospect that supersymmetry may be on the wane.
One has the whimsical name of "Technicolor".

According to Dr Lykken, some younger theoretical physicists are beginning to develop completely novel ideas because they believe supersymmetry to be "old hat" .
"Young theorists especially would love to see supersymmetry go down the drain, because it means that the real thing is something they could invent - not something that was invented by the older generation," he said.

And the new generation has the backing of an old hand - Professor George Smoot, Nobel prizewinner for his work on the cosmic microwave background and one of the world's most respected physicists.
"Supersymmetry is an extremely beautiful model," he said.
"It's got symmetry, its super and its been taught in Europe for decades as the correct model because it is so beautiful; but there's no experimental data to say that it is correct."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14680570
 
LHC reveals hints of 'new physics' in particle decays
By Jason Palmer, Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Large Hadron Collider researchers have shown off what may be the facility's first "new physics" outside our current understanding of the Universe.
Particles called D-mesons seem to decay slightly differently from their antiparticles, LHCb physicist Matthew Charles told the HCP 2011 meeting on Monday.
The result may help explain why we see so much more matter than antimatter.
The team stresses that further analysis will be needed to shore up the result.

At the moment, they are claiming a statistical certainty of "3.5 sigma" - suggesting that there is less than a 0.05% chance that the result they see is down to chance.
The team has nearly double the amount of data that they have analysed so far, so time will tell whether the result reaches the "five-sigma" level that qualifies it for a formal discovery.

The LHCb detector was designed to examine particles containing so-called beauty quarks, watching them decay through time after high-energy collisions of other fundamental particles.
The LHCb Collaboration was looking at decays of particles called D-mesons, which contain what are known as charmed-quarks, which can in turn decay into kaons and pions.

LHCb, one of the six separate experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, is particularly suited for examining what is called "charge-parity violation" - slight differences in behaviour if a given particle is swapped for its antimatter counterpart (changing its charge) and turned around one of its axes (changing its parity).

Our best understanding of physics so far, called the Standard Model, suggests that the complicated cascades of decay of D-mesons into other particles should be very nearly the same - within less than 0.1% - as a similar chain of antimatter decays.
Other experiments, notably at the Fermi National Accelerator facility in the US, have not definitively found a notable difference between the two kinds of decay of D-mesons.

But the LHCb team is reporting a difference of about 0.8% - a significant difference that, if true, could herald the first "new physics" to be found at the LHC.
"Our result is more significant because our precision is improved - somewhat more precise than all of the previous results put together," Dr Charles told BBC News.

Spotting such a difference in the behaviour of matter and antimatter particles may also finally help explain why our Universe is overwhelmingly made of matter.
"Certainly this kind of effect, a new source of CP violation, could be a manifestation of the physics which drives the matter - antimatter asymmetry," Dr Charles explained.

However, he stressed there are "many steps in the chain" between confirming the collaboration's experimental result, and resolving the theory to accommodate it.
"This result is a hint of something interesting and if it bears out, it will mean that, at a minimum, our current theoretical understanding needs improving," Dr Charles said.
"It's exactly the sort of thing for which the LHC was originally built." 8)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15734668
 
I'm glad to say, for myself, that sub-atomic physics is way beyond anything I could even start to criticise. Even I have my limits. :D

Although I've always liked the (seemingly totally impossible) idea that we are an atom (or maybe a molecule) inside a larger universe and each atom is its own universe, and so on - now that really is infinity!
 
rynner2 said:
"Certainly this kind of effect, a new source of CP violation, could be a manifestation of the physics which drives the matter - antimatter asymmetry," Dr Charles explained.

However, he stressed there are "many steps in the chain" between confirming the collaboration's experimental result, and resolving the theory to accommodate it.
"This result is a hint of something interesting and if it bears out, it will mean that, at a minimum, our current theoretical understanding needs improving," Dr Charles said.
"It's exactly the sort of thing for which the LHC was originally built." 8)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15734668
It's the "could be's" and the "if's" that fascinate me. Without them, the science journalists would have nothing to write about.
They always remind me of Hume's Guillotine, the is-ought problem and how these days all of science is run on a jam-tomorrow basis that is a substitute for real final results.
Science has become an endless speculation.
 
I wonder if you say his name 3 times while looking in a mirror, he manifests before you?
 
Ghostisfort said:
It's the "could be's" and the "if's" that fascinate me. Without them, the science journalists would have nothing to write about.
They always remind me of Hume's Guillotine, the is-ought problem and how these days all of science is run on a jam-tomorrow basis that is a substitute for real final results.
Science has become an endless speculation.

So you'd rather that there was no scientific exploration of possibilities...?
 
Jerry_B said:
Ghostisfort said:
It's the "could be's" and the "if's" that fascinate me. Without them, the science journalists would have nothing to write about.
They always remind me of Hume's Guillotine, the is-ought problem and how these days all of science is run on a jam-tomorrow basis that is a substitute for real final results.
Science has become an endless speculation.

So you'd rather that there was no scientific exploration of possibilities...?
Theory based on hardware seems to work in a fashion, whereas hardware based on theory seems not to work. Read some science history written by a non scientist.
 
So, again, you'd rather people didn't bother... so much for questioning the universe around us then...
 
But, just think of the enormous advances that might be made, if the same sort of money, being wasted on the Large Hadron Collider, was invested in aetheric scalar wave energy medallions and radionic bracelets instead, JerryB.

Free energy and a cure for rheumatics, for all! :lol:
 
Is the Higgs boson real?
Rumours abound that Cern scientists have finally glimpsed the long-sought Higgs boson. We asked physicists to share their thoughts on the elusive entity

Soon after Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general at Cern, emailed staff about next Tuesday's seminar on the most sought-after particle in modern times, rumours hit the physics blogs that the lab might finally have caught sight of the Higgs boson.

I wrote last week that the heads of the two groups that work on the Atlas and CMS detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will give the talks. That in itself is telling – usually more junior researchers present updates on the search for the missing particle.

Last month, scientists at the lab said that if the particle exists, it was most likely to have a mass somewhere between 114 and 141GeV (gigaelectronvolts), where one GeV is roughly equivalent to the mass of a proton, a subatomic particle found in atomic nuclei.

A couple of blogs, including viXra and Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong, have now posted rumours that the Atlas and CMS teams see Higgs-like signals around 125GeV, though they say the evidence is not robust enough to claim an official discovery.

If the rumours are right and precede a discovery, it means the Higgs boson weighs as much as two copper atoms. That fits quite well with a theory called supersymmetry, which gives physicists a way to unify the four known forces of nature, a feat that frustrated Einstein to the grave.

But enough of the rumours. When the seminar was announced – and before the rumours surfaced – I asked some physicists to share, in a couple of simple sentences, their hunches on what gives mass to fundamental particles. Is it the simplest version of the Higgs mechanism, which gives us what is called the Standard Model Higgs boson? Is it a more complex kind of Higgs field? Or something else entirely? I hoped the replies would give a flavour of the range of views they hold.

Most got back to me. A few kept their replies to a couple of sentences. Some included technical language, and perhaps that was inevitable. One Nobel prizewinner said the Higgs boson doesn't exist. Another responded with a limerick.

Before I list the replies, here is some background. The Higgs mechanism describes an invisible field that, it is argued, split one force into two soon after the birth of the universe. Specifically, it divided an ancient "electroweak" force into the electromagnetic and weak forces we see at work today. The latter is seen in some radioactive decay processes, and is involved in creating sunshine.

The Higgs field splits the electroweak force by giving mass to the particles that carry the weak force (the W & Z bosons) and leaving the particle that carries the electromagnetic force (the photon) massless. The Higgs boson is the quantum particle associated with the Higgs field.

The simplest version of the Higgs boson is described by the Standard Model, a group of equations that explain how known particles interact with each other. There are plenty more complex versions though. Some of these could take ten years to rule out, according to Matt Strassler, a physicist at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

One more point. The Higgs field, if real, is responsible for only a tiny proportion of mass. Around 98% of mass of everyday objects comes from the energy stored up in the particles that make atomic nuclei, i.e. quarks that are bound together by gluons inside protons and neutrons. The Higgs field is thought to give mass to quarks and electrons, but that makes up only one or two percent of an object's mass. Let's say I weigh 80kg. That means less than a kilo comes from the Higgs field.

Here are the physicists' responses, in no particular order:

etc...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/ ... boson-real
 
This is why I avoid sub-atomic physics - I barely understand a word of that :nonplus:

Fortunately for most purposes we can just treat an atom as a fundamental unit and move on 8)
 
Ok, so if the HB is proven to exist, how further forward does it put us in our understanding of how the universe works ?
 
Cochise said:
This is why I avoid sub-atomic physics - I barely understand a word of that :nonplus:

Fortunately for most purposes we can just treat an atom as a fundamental unit and move on 8)
Move on to where? ;)

It could be argued that, in our modern world, tiny constituents of atoms, electrons, are as important as atoms themselves. With atoms, you can send a message via a messenger with a cleft stick - but with electronics you can send it much further and faster! 8)

And then there's computing, which helps with sending messages (you're reading this message on a computer), but which also do much, much more.
 
Oh, I'm not denigrating the work of investigating the atom, I'm just glad it isn't me. I don't need to know how electricity works to understand a computer, any more than I need to understand why water flows downhill(although as it happens I do). After all we were using electricity for at least 50 years before we had the faintest idea how (atomically) it worked.

Don't get me wrong, I believe, for example, that computer science lessons should start by teaching how computers actually work, logic gates and all that, because it is important to understand both the capabilities and the limitations of the technology (the current technology, that is).

But for most of us ther comes a point where - for some area or another - we just have to accept what we are told by specialists because we don't have the time or maybe the raw brain power to understand what is going on. For me, sub-atomic physics is one of those areas where I simply cant conceptualise what folk are talking about. I could cope when we had electrons protons and neutrons, but its gone way, way beyond that.
 
Cochise said:
For me, sub-atomic physics is one of those areas where I simply cant conceptualise what folk are talking about.
Don't worry! The human brain isn't programmed to conceptualise this stuff. Not even the experts can do that. But they can follow the maths, and make up little parables, little mental pictures, to give us lesser folk an idea of what's happening.
 
Guardian Science podcast - Cern's special seminar to discuss the latest results from the Large Hadron Collider

Our very own Snailet of Physics will be there. He tells me that it starts at 2pm Geneva time but is filling up already! He has a place though.

Seminar page, webcast, chatroom

Merry Higgsmas, everybody!

The Night Before Higgsmas

‘Twas the night before Higgsmas, when all through the lab,
not a student was stirring—except some undergrad.
The data were analyzed with lots of great care
in hopes that the Higgs boson soon would be there.

The press corps were nestled all snug in their beds,
while visions of exclusion plots danced in their heads.
And theorists in the US, Asia, and Europe
dug up the models that they were so sure of.

When out from Geneve there arose such a clatter,
We sprung from our desks to see what was the matter.
Away to the webcast—I must install Flash,
Reloaded the webpage, I hope it didn’t crash.

The introduction recapped the latest CERN run,
and gave the impression of more fun to come.
When, what to my wondering eyes should I see,
but a miniature bump… in Higgs to ZZ?

And with all of the press and media bigwigs
I knew in a moment that it must be the Higgs.
From ATLAS and CMS the results were the same,
and we whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:

Now Higgs! Now Englert! Now Guralnik and Hagen!
On Kibble! On Brout! On, Goldstone and Anderson!
To Stockholm in December, the Nobel prize,
But a prize that only three could realize.

We wondered about the “look elsewhere effect,”
But somewhere, someone just won their Higgs bet.
Not so fast, of course, it was only three sigma.
That’s okay—it could be a ‘discovery’ by summer.

Not so fine tuned, in fact still quite natural,
in spite of electroweak precision observables,
at least in the supersymmetric Standard Model.
There’s room for new physics, we can be hopeful!

The Higgs mass? A hint? A whisper, a whim?
Theory papers will fill arXiv up to its brim.
And with a white Santa-like beard, who is this?
Oh my, straight from CERN-TH—it’s really John Ellis!

His eyes — how they twinkled! His dimples—how merry!
He spoke many great things about supersymmetry.
I tried to refrain myself from asking if he knew
That he was still off by a factor of two.

But I really shouldn’t write that here on this blog
For soon I’ll be applying to be a postdoc.
I digress. The matter we should focus on
is what’s next in the search for the Higgs boson.

It is now up to ATLAS and CMS
To combine their data in a way that makes sense.
In maybe a month, maybe early next year,
We will have new significances to hear.

We gave up our breaks and went straight to our work,
Life as a grad student! But it sure has its perks.
What’s more exciting than the science frontier?
And by reading this blog, you can also be there!

We sprang to our desks, we downed our espressos,
All in the search for what new physics might show.
And John Ellis exclaimed, to the OPERA banditos,
“Happy Higgsmas to all, and forget those neutrinos”.

by Flip Tanedo (during a long post-dinner research break)
 
The BBC's Horizon was a special on the hunt for the Higgs Boson last night - it's on iPlayer.

Our Snailet can be seen as the camera pans past his office, earnestly plotting data. Or checking Facebook. :roll:
 
Just had a thought about the boson.

What if it was possible to inhibit objects interacting with the Higgs field?
Wouldn't that mean they would no longer have mass?

I'm quite sure it would be handy lol

Ok i don't know how to inhibit the field but if they can identify what a boson is (if it exists)would't it be within the realms of poissiblity?
 
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