Showing posts with label LHC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LHC. Show all posts

Monday, November 9, 2009

Just a bird? or agent from the future?


From The Age today:
"GENEVA : THE $6.5 billion machine designed to recreate the conditions present at the beginning of time had to be switched off after a bird dropped a "bit of baguette" into it, causing it to overheat."
From the CERN webpage entitled "The safety of the LHC":
"The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can achieve an energy that no other particle accelerators have reached before, but Nature routinely produces higher energies in cosmic-ray collisions, and the occasional random bird fly-by with a bit of baguette"
(it's entirely possible I may have added something).

So to recap, the most expensive science experiment ever undertaken that is using and observing energies that existed a few moments after the big bang, got broken due to an errant bird and a piece of bread. Call me naive, but surely the nuclear scientists that designed the LHC would have somehow figured for such an eventuality and not had a critical piece of equipment exposed to the outside ??

Or was the bird an agent of the universe from the future, sent back to sabotage our puny efforts at discovering the mysteries of the cosmos?

UPDATE: fixed picture

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Future present

"I have suggested that supernovae are the industrial accidents of advanced civilisations."
--Arthur C. Clarke, October 2007

lhc21_w.RObHvzy9QHho.jpg

An element of the Large Hadron Collider (picture source)

Question: What happens when you try to create Higgs boson particle?
Answer: The creation of an observable Higgs boson particle is so abhorrent to the Universe that at some point in the future, when walking monkeys on some minuscule planet in an outer-spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy discover how to do it, the Universe reaches back across time and prevents this happening.

At least that’s what two physicists have claimed in a research paper entitled “Search for Effect for Influence from Future in Large Hadron Collider”

The CERN project (of which I had previously written about here) known as the Large Hadron Collider is a machine 27km big that attempts to collide two beams of protons together to observe the resulting explosion and expand our knowledge of the universe or something to that effect. A successful collision would apparently enable physicists to observe the Higgs boson particle.

The Higgs boson particle is a theoretical particle that will ”explain the origin of mass in the universe” (thanks wikipedia). Scientist haven’t seen it (yet), but our current understanding of particle physics predicts it. Particle physics is the research of subatomic particles. Yeah, that explains it.....

The physicist propose an experiment involving a deck of ‘decision cards’ (ie “Run LHC experiment” or “For God’s sake you puny mortals, don’t even attempt this experiment -- yours truly, a future Higgs boson particle”) to model various probabilities whether to run the LHC or not, they suggest that the current difficulties in getting the LHC working, and also what happened to the ill-fated US SSC, may be as a result of future Universe affecting the present.

How can they say this? Well, according to the theory of General Relativity and and the Standard Model of Particles, time travel is theoretically possible:
“Particles and their antiparticles can also be thought of as being the same entity travelling in opposite directions in time.”
In plain english, the physicists are saying that in the future, when a Higgs boson particle is created, the consequence of this is so great that we are feeling the effects of it in the past (ie. now).

Here is a simple diagram I created to show this:

see?!? simple...

Not that I'm suggesting that this experiment could cause a supernova, as the Arthur C. Clarke quote above might imply, although if you happen to be running an experiment that requires so much energy that you have to schedule it around the energy supply of an entire continent, to term a mishap "an industrial accident" may be waaayyy understating it. From the previous article:
"All of this means that when something goes wrong—even something small—there's a very real chance that it will go wrong in a big way."
And a much scarier sentence a little bit further on:
"That's not to say that we have no idea what will happen; rather, there are a range of possibilities, some of which may be out of reach of the energies created by the LHC."
One hopes all the experiments go exactly. to. plan.

Links:

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Don't cross the streams!!

Dr. Egon Spengler: Don’t cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, “bad”?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That’s bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.
--Ghostbusters (1984)
So two things.
  1. I got the time wrong. It the LHC experiment was run at 5pm today.
  2. The world didn't end!!
So apparently they only turned it on. They didn't do any exciting stuff like crossing the streams. Apparently they're going to do that in a couple of months. I don't know how many more 150ft marshmallow men we need, but I'd like to know those "scientists" check, double-check and recheck their calculations.

Here's a picture of some part of this machine. More at the link below....


Links:

End of the world?

Tomorrow morning, around 5am Australian Eastern Time, the propellerheads at the CERN laboratory in Geneva will be activating their Large Hadron Collider


What this means to non-nuclear physicists is that they are essentially turning on a machine that is 27km in diameter, and then "throwing" two particles at each other and watching them go boom. Why? well to "provide new insights into the mysteries of our universe."

There is apparently an infinitesimally small chance they might accidentally create a black hole. In Geneva. But don't worry, the men in the white coats and hard hats assure us that this has been "universally ridiculed by the experts involved in the project"

To commemorate life on earth, I present a YouTube sent in by a reader. Happy Life everyone! and if there's a world around tomorrow, I'll be sure to keep annoying you.