(noon. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
Each presidential candidate may think that he is a bigger man than the other.
Well, it matters little what either of them may think, because there are powers greater than either of them and greater than any the President of the United States will ever command.
Unlimited powers that can vaporize whole planets, whole universes in fact, and the world just might end before either of them becomes president.
It turns out that there are much bigger and much smaller events taking place that affect us, all of us, no matter our gender, race, or political leanings, and make the presidential elections pale into insignificance.
When you look around you at all the objects, including yourself and other people, that make up the world, they appear to be of different sizes. What is it that determines what size an object is?
All objects you see are collections of molecules that are in turn collections of atoms that are in turn collections of hadrons; protons and neutrons, orbited by electrons. An atoms size is measured by the size of the orbits of the electrons.
If the mass of electrons were larger or smaller than is observed in nature, atoms would be larger or smaller, and consequently molecules and objects you see around you would be larger or smaller. So it is the mass of electrons that determines the size of everything you see, including the size of the man or woman that occupies the Oval Office.
John McCain may turn out to be a very small man after all. Possibly smaller a man than even George W. Bush.
This all leads to a very interesting question. What is mass?
What is mass? It’s not simply a hard question. It’s one of the central so far unanswered questions of physics.
Roger Cashmore of the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford explains that there is one potential solution to this problem:
…a solution first proposed by Peter Higgs. He proposed that the whole of space is permeated by a field, similar in some ways to the electromagnetic field. As particles move through space they travel through this field, and if they interact with it they acquire what appears to be mass. This is similar to the action of viscous forces felt by particles moving through any thick liquid. the larger the interaction of the particles with the field, the more mass they appear to have. Thus the existence of this field is essential in Higg’s hypothesis for the production of the mass of particles.
We know from quantum theory that fields have particles associated with them, the particle for the electromagnetic field being the photon. So there must be a particle associated with the Higg’s field, and this is the Higgs boson. Finding the Higgs boson is thus the key to discovering whether the Higgs field does exist and whether our best hypothesis for the origin of mass is indeed correct.
How do we find a Higgs Boson, you ask? Well, this coming Wednesday, September 10, scientists will send a proton beam flying through a 27 kilometer long underground circular tunnel toward an oncoming proton beam. They expect it will take them between four and eight weeks to adjust the beams to produce particle collisions, and they hope to observe the first collisions between October 8 and November 5.
When the beams collide there is apparently a possibility that they will not only produce a shower of subatomic particles in which the scientists may finally find the elusive Higgs Boson, there is a possibility that the collision will produce not just a smaller observable version of the conditions that existed at the time of the big bang that created our universe, but may create another big bang as equally powerful as the one that did create our universe.
In which case our universe will cease to exist. Faster than a politician can flip flop, everything, you, me, and everything else will vanish as a new universe is created.
You won’t even have time to even think about bending over and kissing your ass goodbye. Your ass would be gone before you could even purse your lips.
It would most definitely be a change you can believe in. If you were still around to believe in it.
Gulp.
World’s largest experiment to test particle physics theory underway
Saturday, 06 September, 2008
A machine that took 20 years to build could either shake the foundations of particle physics or entrench it more firmly, besides addressing some of the most fundamental questions facing science now.
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a historic multi-billion dollar project involving over 8,000 scientists from 85 countries. CERN is the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, located in Geneva, Switzerland.
Large Hadron Collider could spell doomsday for Earth!
Monday, 01 September, 2008
Some scientists are trying to stop the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) from going into operation in nine days, saying that it might create black holes which could destroy the world.
The LHC, located 300 ft underground near the French-Swiss border, is a machine that is 17 miles long and cost 4.4 billion pounds to create.
When its switch is pulled on September 10, this atom-smasher will become a virtual time machine, revealing what happened when the universe came into existence 14 billion years ago.
New particles of matter are expected to be discovered, new dimensions found beyond the four known, as scientists re-create conditions in the first billionths of a second after the Big Bang.
But, some scientists fear that the massive machine will destroy our planet.
Experts even predict that millions of tiny black holes will be produced – baby brothers of the monsters gobbling up dust and stars at the heart of the galaxies.
That is why some scientists are now trying to stop the project with a last-ditch challenge in the courts.
They fear the LHC experimenters are tinkering with the unknown and putting mankind – and our whole planet – at risk.
Though the group responsible for the experiment, the European Nuclear Research Centre (CERN), has said that these mini black holes will vanish as quickly as they are created, the anti-CERN brigade accuse the scientists of playing God, warning that no one can guarantee that the black holes will not survive, rapidly growing in size to suck the Earth out of existence in an instant.
But CERN, which includes several UK scientists, have said that their work is vital to unlock the secrets of matter that forms everything known in the universe.
In the experiment, atomic particles will be fired in opposite directions along the 17-mile long underground ring – the length of the Circle Line on the London Underground.
They will travel so fast that they make 11,245 trips around the tunnel every second.
From the collisions, scientists expect to discover a fundamental bit of the atom, called the Higgs boson, that is expected to exist but which has never been seen.
Professor Otto Rossler, from the Eberhard Karls University of Tubingen in Germany, is one of the scientists mounting the legal challenge at the European Court of Human Rights against 20 countries that are funding the project.
According to him, “It is quite plausible that these little black holes will survive and will grow and eat the planet from the inside out.”
“It will not be producing anything that does not already happen routinely in nature,” said a CERN spokesman.
Not anything that does not already happen routinely in nature?
Heh! These guys really know how to play an audience, don’t they? Maybe one of them could run for President?
56 comments
Skip to comment form
Author
Kind of puts little things like who might win an election back into perspective, wouldn’t you say?
about the LHC, one physicist laying out three possibilities.
(1) The LHC will find what they are predicting — the Higgs Boson.
(2) The LHC will find absolutely nothing.
(3) The LHC will find something no one expected.
Very interestingly, the physicist seemed most eager to see (3) and most distraught over the possibility of (1). Because of this:
If (1) — We were right, and we’re not really sure what to do now. Our idea was right as far as it went but it doesn’t lead to any deeper mysteries in any obvious way. Bleh.
If (2) — Then we are probably wrong about something, somewhere, and figuring it out might lead to new ideas and theories, which we love.
If (3) — Woo-hoo! This gives us lots to explore and new things to find out. Everyone wins.
I found that to be a very interesting glimpse into what makes scientists tick. Science is the exact opposite of dogma. The best possible thing is to find out you were wrong, and there is much more to learn beyond the horizon.
Sorta solves all our problems at once, and maybe the new universe will be better than this one.
I was really bummed when SSC was canceled, it would have been larger and capable of generating more energy than LHC.
Oh, and the End of the World comes December 21, 2012, don’t you know. So no worries about some black hole LHC may create.
states a couple of the reasons why to do this “To shed light on..dark energy and dark matter” Now tell me, how is this possible??
I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep, now I have to stay up and wonder how will I spend my last month or so in the world of light. I will appreciate matter and color and chaos. It seems futile to seek pleasure because that is a legacy pursuit. Is it wise to get philosophical at 4 am? Will it hurt to become anti-matter? We are curious creatures dying to find out what’s on the other side of a black hole. nothing will stand in the way of progress. Wheee!
Author
DD is probably the only media in the world where the end of the world would be front page news. All the other media would be screaming “Go Shopping!!!” in enormous fonts. 😉
hiding under the bed won’t work?
Fuck it! We’ll do it live!
wandered in here and the essay is about SCIENCE!
=:-0
kj screams, runs into the street, waits for the sky to fall
… does that mean my student loans will finally be canceled?
Who’s writing this script? Is this the only way we can free ourselves of the clutches of insanity?
This kind of reminds me of an ULOTD back in the late 60s. It seems this chick was a coke head and she walked into her boyfriend’s pad. There was a gram of white powder on his coffee table. She got pissed and thought he was using her blow so she snorted the whole thing in two lines. Except is was pure LSD. You can make up your own story-line from there…
Oh well. Probably about the same ending. In that last femto-second try to remember why you cared so much about who the next president was going to be.
Bosons come riding up on a quasar… ;-);-);-)
Shanti.
by my son, who is a great observer of what’s going on in the world.