The New York Times today provides an interesting “history-in-a-nutshell” perspective on the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC):

Particle colliders get their magic from Einstein’s equation of mass and energy. The more energy that these machines can pack into their little fireballs, in effect the farther back in time they can go, and the smaller and smaller things they can see. The first modern accelerator, the cyclotron built by Ernest Lawrence at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1932, was a foot in diameter and boosted protons to just 1.25 million electron volts. CERN, a 20-nation consortium, grew from the ashes of World War II and has provided a template for other pan-European organizations like the European Space Agency and the European Southern Observatory. With a budget and dues set by treaty, CERN enjoys a long-term stability that is the envy of American labs. . . . The [CERN] collider was designed to investigate what happens at energies and temperatures so high that the reigning theory of particle physics called the Standard Model breaks down. In effect, the new machine’s job is to “break” the Standard Model and give physicists a glimpse of something deeper and more profound.

Something deeper and more profound? Okay. And what if it doesn’t find anything?:

The future of particle physics depends on whether the Large Hadron Collider finds anything. If it yields nothing, in the words of CERN physicist, John Ellis, it would mean that theorists have been talking rubbish for the last 35 years. Actually, he used a stronger word.

Gooey prickles and prickly goo?

By Bunker Pundit Wilhelm Blitzkrieg

Recently I was on Andrew Sulligan’s website The Daily Dish. After navigating through all the bear on twink porn, I got to an article proclaiming that Palin is lying about providing Trig’s birth certificate. Mr. Sulligan, maybe you need to make sure that your blog is fit for American audiences before you go into your leftist frenzy. Oh, I know, you’re one of those “new” conservatives. Those kinds of new conservatives that like to wipe their ass with the Constitution! Mr. Sulligan, you and David Frum should go join the Taliban, where you guys really belong.

Look, unlike some of those crackpot conspiracy theorists out there, I am pretty satisfied as to President Obama’s citizenship. I wasn’t at first, of course, and only after I had inspected the original document myself and captured/tortured/interrogated at least 3 witnesses to this supposed birth did I finally become convinced.

Now what I am worried about, and what Obama can and must address, is the grassroots concern that he is in fact a clone from a parallel dimension intent on leading an invasion through the portal to his foul universe.

Check out this compelling video evidence:

For all we know, everything is opposite where he comes from. That’s why we are so opposed to health care, folks. Universal Healthcare must mean Universal Illness Distribution. I also think this explains how he talks when he doesn’t have a teleprompter. It’s all stammering and discombobulated, not unlike Bizarro Superman.

And by the way Mr. Sulligan, Trig is actually more Palin’s kid than her other children. He was actually the product of a virgin birth (I asked Todd) and therefore is not merely half Sarah Palin but rather 100% Sarah Palin. That kind of punches a hole in your argument right there, doesn’t it?

Update: My (Liberal) Lymphnode Wallace “Che” Crandall posted this response in his blog Che’s Corner. I think you’ll find it to be offensive filth.

These ‘Pan-dimensionalers’ Are a Bunch of Wingnut Idiots

By Wallace ‘Che’ Crandall

First of all, there’s not any evidence that Obama is from this supposed portal in the New Mexico desert. I know it looks like there are people emerging from the blindingly bright portal according to satelite photos. But the fact remains that it is simply alarmist to say that just because you aren’t smart enough to understand President Obama’s brilliant plans, he must therefore be some kind of pan-dimensional traveller.

Credit to thechestertonreview.blogspot.com/ for this recent photo of the President!

I have to say, I am disappointed that Daily Kos and Moveon.org haven’t taken these Pan-dimensionalers to task yet. Maybe Kos has been replaced by a pan-dimensional double and he just doesn’t want to draw attention to himself.

But really, would it be so bad if they were? I mean, there’s no problems associated with opening up our borders to everyone so why not open up our fabric of space-time to foreigners too? If you are against parallel duplicates coming into our universe via some kind of singularity, then you sir are a racist.

And as to Trig, you are being way too dismissive about this controversy. There have been at least three women that I’ve talked to that claim that they are Trig’s birth mother and that Sarah Palin forcibly chopped up their wombs to remove Trig and dash off into the woods. This is a pretty traumatic story. People wouldn’t just lie about that.

the Fermilab Remote Operations Center

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is no stranger to controversy: first came the media storm over its potential for worldwide destruction, then there was the six tonne helium leak in September of 2008 which put the entire experiment on ice, and of course there are the claims of time traveling particles that are sabotaging the LHC in order to save the universe from destruction. In addition, the price tag on the LHC has been seen as exorbitant by some, and a criminal waste of money by others, there’s no denying that the 4.6 billion franc price tag makes it the most expensive scientific experiment to date, which is why it’s important that people are informed about the benefits of investing so much money in something that may very well produce no results.

The chief goal of the LHC is the discovery of the Higgs Boson, a fundamental particle predicted to exist by the standard model of particle physics which is the study of matter and radiation and how the two interact. The major point of interest in the Higgs Boson is that it is, theoretically, the fundamental particle which interacts with protons, neutrons and electrons to give them mass, a phenomenon which is not yet fully understood by physicists. Peter Higgs, in answer to this question, proposed that all the particles making up the universe are traveling through a field (much like a magnetic field) the field interacts with every particle which is moving through it and this interaction manifests itself in the form of mass.

This is similar to the way a bullet would travel through very thick gelatin, what is observed is not the actual force of resistance on the bullet but rather the result of that resistance as the bullet slows down and eventually stops, and if the size of the bullet is increased then it will slow down more rapidly: the interaction between bullet and gelatin is much greater. In actuality Higgs Bosons constitute the gelatin and protons, neutrons and electrons are bullets, however, instead of slowing down particles this interaction yields mass which gives rise to inertia, the resistance to change in motion. Electrons, the small bullets interact weakly with this field and protons, the big bullets interact more strongly, this is why electrons have less mass than protons and consequently do not carry as much momentum.

Like most other things scientific, this is absolutely fascinating to physicists but considered completely irrelevant by the rest of the population, however, the discovery of the Higgs Boson has the potential to be one of the most important scientific advances in human history. The discovery of fundamental particles has quite often led to extraordinary advances in technology even giving rise to entirely new technologies as engineers and physicists determine how best to manipulate these particles. Were it not for the discovery of the electron it is doubtful that electricity would ever have become such a major foundation of human society, similarly nuclear power, radiometric dating and the myriad of other technologies which utilize radioactive decay would not exist if the atom had never been discovered.

The discovery of the Higgs Boson, could enable engineers and scientists to manipulate the interactions between particles and the Higgs field, this is highly significant because the ability to change the mass of particles could realize light speed travel, space elevators, advanced robotics and a plethora of other technologies. Reducing the mass of a fully loaded plane would improve efficiency, near massless satellites could be launched into orbit for a minute fraction of the current cost, in fact, the manipulation of mass could even lead to the manipulation of the physical size of molecules and objects, turning Kleiner’s Fantastic Voyage into a viable medical reality.

It is apparent then that the discovery of the Higgs Boson could very well herald the greatest revolution in human technology since the advent of electricity, as long as the Large Hadron Collider doesn’t destroy the world first.

Try it today.

Think of something you believe and consider, “What if I’m wrong about it?”

You might not think you are…but think of what an exciting breakthrough you could have if you were!

For those that do not know on November 23 2009 the Large Hadron Collidor at CERN, recorded its first collision in the decade since initial construction first started. In the early afternoon, the ATLAS detector equipment recorded the first particle collisions, later in the evening the collider was retuned for the ALICE detection equipment to take a crack at the data recorded. This marks the first large scale particle collision for the collider, which was originally built to study high-energy particle physics and most notably research for the theorized Higgs-Boson particle that many physicists have nicknamed “The God” particle, due to the possible unifying properties.

Geneva, 20 November 2009. Particle beams are once again circulating in the worlds most powerful particle accelerator, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This news comes after the machine was handed over for operation on Wednesday morning. A clockwise circulating beam was established at ten o’clock this evening. This is an important milestone on the road towards first physics at the LHC, expected in 2010.

Earths beyond Earth
In about three years we’ll know the percentage of stars in our part of the Milky Way that hold earth-size or larger planets in the “habitable zone.” The habitable zone is a region where temperatures are likely to enable liquid water. The knowledge arrives thanks to NASA’s Kepler mission. Of course, we all know that liquid water could also exist outside the habitable zone, in places like Europa, but the hab zone is good place to start looking. Then we can search these planets for oxygen in the atmospheres, then drill down to finer levels of detail until we have located the best pizza in the quadrant.

Higgs boson
In a few years we should know if the Higgs Boson particle exists, thanks to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). I confess that I don’t know exactly what that means, but I do know that the Higgs boson is the only particle of matter predicted by the Standard Model of physics that has never been detected. I guess if we don’t find it, we have devise and demonstrate much more intriguing theories. Steven Hawking bet $100 that we won’t find it. Last year on Talk Like a Pirate Day (9/19)  there was a malfunction at the LHC and a few metric tons of liquid helium leaked out and evaporated.  The last time I spilled that much liquid helium it was a mess. It’s about -450 degrees Fahrenheit. The cats and I were frozen solid for a very long time, and thawing out was painful.

The large collider is up and running and with it a further step towards understanding the building blocks of the universe, you know, the yellow Lego ones that toddlers get stuck up their noses.

Good news is that the world didn’t end.

Bad news is that the world didn’t end.

If it had we’d at least have seen a result that we unlettered public would understand, even get excited about. Earth sucked into an artificially made black hole; crappy headline, but proof that we’re getting what we pay for in scientific funding. Damn you science, where are our jetpacks, flying cars, robot love slaves, and shark with frikkin laser beams? Huh? HUH?

What we do know from the smashing together of sub-atomic particles is that no mini-black holes were created, at least not for a measurable length of time. Sadly this means that the five-dimensional construct of space and time (the Randall-Sundrum Model) has suffered another setback. Too many more of these and it might go the way of the dodo.

There have been teething problems, or in this case, conception, gestation, and development problems, with just a dash of toilet training thrown in. Of course the setbacks have a malevolent awareness lurking behind them, possibly the Higgs Boson itself according to Matt Ford.

Not that our lack of self-destruction in science is slowing down our ability to annihilate our own species, in 2008 alone over 2 million died from AIDS. You recall AIDS don’t you? The horrific plague that haunted those growing up in the eighties, inflaming hate crimes, branding the homosexual community. The incurable and ultimately fatal disease that was largely forgotten by the 90’s? 

In Africa there is the horrific idea that sleeping with a virgin can cure AIDS, while in xenophobic parts of Asia it’s believed that only visiting English teachers have the disease. We’ve got missing nukes AWOL from the former soviet socialist republic, an increase in anti-biotic resistant bacteria, and a return of 70’s fashion. The horsemen are coming, and they’re wearing leg warmers and lime green.

Famine (Fashionable Horsewoman of the Apocalypse)

Exciting news today in the world of science!

First, the Large Hadron Collider underwent several tests last week in which beams of protons were successfully circulated around the massive 17-mile installation. Those tests all pointed to a “go” for the first actual collisions, which happened yesterday. These collisions were still only tests, and nowhere near the full power needed to look for the elusive Higgs Boson. But with this first collision, the LHC is now officially the world’s biggest functioning particle colider. There’s still a lot of testing and preparation to do before they start doing the “real” experiments, but this is still very exciting. (Via Discovery News)

Secondly, yesterday also marked the kickoff of a new science education campaign by the Obama Administration. I can’t even describe how happy I am to know this is happening. It’s the best government-related news I’ve heard in a loooong time… probably since Obama won the election. I will echo Dr. Phil Plait’s sentiments that the following quote from Obama’s speech is a symphony to my ears: “We’re going to show young people how cool science can be.”

WIN. EPIC WIN. There may yet be hope for humanity.

The reason for the abnormality in spelling of said collider, is that the largest thing built ever, the Large Hadron Collider has been tested and is deemed working, and the science community is practically jizzing themselves just talking about it. Everyone from the BBC to the New York Times to Al-Jazeera to Scumbag Style have reported on this thing, which is meant to recreate the Big Bang and definitively prove the existence of the elusive Higgs-boson.

Said Professor Peter Higgs, the scientist whom the theoretical particle is named after, in regards to the costly delays when the LHC was fired up fourteen months ago, to the Irish Times:

“I am relieved . . . It has really been delayed,” and in stating the obvious even further, “I know they are going to be very cautious to avoid any problems so I am keeping my fingers crossed that there isn’t going to be any more accidents.”

The delays were caused by an electrical fault that dumped liquid helium into the tunnel only nine days after the system first went online in September of last year. Now the problems have been fixed, new equipment and software has been installed, and the system was fired up on Friday, to much celebration from the staff who worked over-time getting the system ready.

Now, the Large Hadron Collider might be involved with finding the Higgs boson and Strange Matter, but according to The Register that’s not all they’re looking for. At least Director for Research and Scientific Computing at CERN, Sergio Bertolucci, seems to think that the collision might open an extra-dimensional portal, which from “Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it.” Talk about a geek hard-on; this is the stuff of science fiction, man!

Granted, the portal would only be open for “a very tiny lapse of time, 10 (to the -26 power) seconds, [but] during that infinitesimal amount of time we would be able to peer into this open door, either by getting something out of it or sending something into it.” What could possibly be lurking for us beyond the scope of space and time? What could perchance make the leap into our dimension? Probably something from our deepest, darkest fears, which lurks in the pits of despair.

Yep...Probably Something Just Like That.

If time travel from the future is possible, then visitors from the future might start materialising in Geneva one day very soon. Barring that, the Higgs Boson will be found. Or not. And likely some miniature black holes.

Yes, after a frustrating 14 months of delays, the Large Hadron Collider is powering up again at at CERN in Geneva (where the World Wide Web was invented) . Subatomic particles are zapping in both directions round the 27-kilometre circular tunnel beneath the city.

Soon, if all continues to work well, the scientists in charge of what is the most expensive scientific experiment in history will aim those particle beams at each other to smash them, endeavouring to recreate in miniature what the universe was like a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

The Collider will do something essentially very simple: record what happens when protons are smashed together. Protons are a tiny part of atoms, for example they are the nucleus of the hydrogen atom. They were discovered by our very own Ernest Rutherford in 1918. Hadron is the technical name of the class of sub-atomic particles to which protons belong.

The huge magnets in the Collider will accelerate bursts of protons at each other in a vacuum colder than space at speeds just under that of light, to see what happens when they collide.

Many physicists hope to see the elusive “Higgs Boson,” which sounds a bit like the Patronus charm Harry Potter creates to ward off the Dementors but is theorised to be an elementary particle of matter, even smaller than a proton, that could bind together the various theories of physics.

The CERN scientists also hope to find other things not before seen but theorised upon, including micro black holes and “strangelets,” a form of quark, which could help to explain the “dark matter” believed to help hold the universe together, but never seen.

Dark matter and dark energy are believed to make up 96 per cent of the volume of the universe, but they are incredibly difficult to detect and study, other than through the gravitational forces they exert.

But time travel? Yes. Time travel into the future is perfectly possible under Einstein relativity. As is, in theory, time travel from our future to points in the past, but with a Big But.

Physicists who have studied the issue argue that somebody from our future could only travel backwards (possibly via a wormhole in the fabric of spacetime) to the moment of the creation of the first time machine, which the Collider theoretically is.

The fact that travellers from the future have not materialised among us has long been held as evidence that time travel from the future to the past is not in practice possible, but it is equally possible that they have not yet materialised because the primary condition for their arrival has not yet occurred. The operation of the Collider could fulfil the necessary conditions.

I discussed this subject in detail in a post last year that continues to attract many hits a day many days.

Should the Collider show time travel is a scientific reality, it will raise other issues, most importantly the paradox posed by what would happen if a visitor from the future comes to the present time and kills, say, the father of his as-yet unborn father. Some physicists believe the existence of many parallel universes, each with slightly different histories, would solve that paradox.

When the Collider broke down soon after its initial start in September last year, some physicists seriously considered whether people in our future had used time travel to sabotage it, perhaps to prevent some unintended consequence – maybe that Black Hole some doomsayers fear will swallow the Earth.

Meanwhile, make certain you go to the wonderful Large Hadron Rap by CERN publicist Katherine McAlpine (Alpine Kat).

Her You Tube hit explains the Collider in accurate but colloquial terms and has so far had more than 5.4 million hits. It’s great fun and the beat is catchy.

(Boston.com) – The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) says it expects to restart the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) by this weekend after more than a year of repairs. …

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/11/large_hadron_collider_ready_to.html

This time, it’s for real, folks!  The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is up and running (again), and has started circulating a beam.

For those who may not know, the LHC is only the biggest, baddest, and most powerful particle accelerator the world has seen to date, boasting a 27km circumference which crosses the border between France and Switzerland. Once the LHC is eventually ramped up to full power sometime after 2010, it will smash beams of electrons into each other at near light-speed to extend the limits of our understanding of the universe’s physics. Researchers are hoping to gain more insight into the Big Bang, discover new particles associated with supersymmetry, and possibly even discover the theoretical Higgs boson, which names the origin of mass in the universe.  Some researchers even liken it to ‘The Force’ from Star Wars (nerds can dream too).  The LHC is a collaboration between over 100 countries.

Various groups have criticized the LHC  with claims that it will destroy the planet by creating microscopic black holes or theoretical particles known as ’strangelets’. Two CERN-sponsored safety reviews, endorsed by the American Physical Society, were conducted and state there is no cause for concern. I, for one, am flipping excited to see what the research uncovers.

The tweets from CERN about the Large Hadron Colider on Twitter today have been so exciting. As the largest physics experiment ever comes back online in its hunt for the Higgs Boson.

Their Tweets such as:
@ CERN Beam 1 has made more than 500 turns of the LHC. The beam orbit is improving fast

@CERN Teams are working to improve beam quality before injecting in the anticlockwise direction. Beam 1 has made several turns around the LHC.

…have been getting the physics juices flowing this evening, it must be an amazing feeling for those working a CERN

The Higgs Boson is the last particle missing from the Standard Model yet to be observed, as proposed by physicists Peter Higgs, Francois Englert and Robert Brout in 1964.

To me physics is the most beautiful discipline of academia and is never ending, it questions more than it qualifies, and covers the most amazing subjects, the wonderful matter of the phases of matter, exotic matter, antimatter, dark matter, strange matter.

There is so much to learn accross the field, the Theory of Everything, String Theory, Chaos.

There is so much still to discover, what is dark matter? Are there addistional dimensions? The proton spin crisis.

Aiming to understand the behaviour of everything with the thrill of catastrophe’s, forces, currents, collisions, constants, law’s and paradoxes in the architecture of space

The subject is complex and tantalizing, pushing rationality to the realms of reality where you can embrace and probe the laws of the universe, to question the fundamentals of your world.

If you haven’t yet visited www.paleisthenewtan.com, then you owe it to yourself to do so. I’ll wait.

Watched the trailer for Legion. There’s a scare in the first 10 seconds or so that made me jump out of my pants. (Which can be embarrassing, but I was alone.)  Check it out. Movie looks kick-ass, like a filmed version of Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim in some ways. Features Paul Bettany as an angel with wicked fashion sense, and disaster movie veteran Dennis Quaid. (Link to the apple version of the trailer is here, but I viewed on my TV via XboxLive, in the dark, and suggest you do the same.)

Got in some more hours playing Dragon Age last night. Still loving it, still occasionally getting annoyed at the uneven difficulty curve. Was in a forest. In said forest, there are three tombstones. When you touch each tombstone, a powerful undead creature spawns, called a Revenant. It spawns with 4-5 skeletons defending it. I cleared out the first two tombstones without breaking a sweat. For the third, my party wiped (game over in Dragon Age parlance) 10 times before I just gave up on that encounter. There’s no discernible difference between the three encounters. Heck, the third one appears to have the weakest collection of opponents overall. And yet we wipe. Repeatedly. I moved on, entered a ruin, killed a dragon, and felt much better.

The CERN facility is now online and expects to begin injecting the first particle streams tonight. Very cool, as we could know within days whether they discover a Higgs boson, thus proving the Standard Model. In Brian Cox’s book, he suggested that if they don’t find the boson, it will be because it doesn’t exist – fatally undermining the Standard Model. But recently, some have suggested that maybe the boson will time-travel to avoid discovery. So there you go. All I have to say is that the Time Traveling Bosons would make for a great band name.

Edit: update – per @CERN, “A clockwise beam has just gone half way round the LHC.”

The LHC is working very smoothly so far, and beams are now circulating the mammoth circle, ready to find the ‘GOD Particle’…the latest from the LHC page is:..

The LHC operations teams are preparing the machine for circulating beams and things are going very smoothly. ALICE and LHCb are getting used to observing particle tracks coming from the LHC beams. During the weekend of 7-8 November, CMS also  saw its first signals from beams dumped just upstream of  the experiment cavern….

Here’s looking out for the Higgs-Boson…the one that may describe the ‘field’ to all things...well not maybe everything!?

I am thinking of how I can compose something to it with Electronic sounds!!!!????

Cheers to the team!

Paul

After over a year of repairs the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has announced that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is expected to restart this weekend.  The restart has been delayed several times.  The last delay was due to problems with the LHC’s magnets.  The Large Hadron Collider was built by CERN with the intention of testing a variety of predictions within physics.  Such predictions include the existence of the hypothesized Higgs boson.

This week the failure of the scientific world has suffered another setback. No I’m not talking about Twilight (talk about experiment gone wrong) but about the LHC; The Large Hadron Collider. For those of you who don’t know what the LHC is (again I’m talking to you Twilight fans), it’s a particle accelerator located underground in Geneva, Switzerland. The purpose of this machine is to accelerate particles really fast and then crash them into each other simulating a ‘big bang’. Using magic (science) they will be able to detect the traces of the Higgs Boson after it has decayed (it is very unstable). When it was about to come online for the first time almost a year ago the whole world was watching as it suffered its first of many failures. A helium leak that made the machine go offline for a long, long time.

This week a bird was flying by and dropped a bit of a baguette onto a piece of machinery somehow damaging it. The fault in the machine was obsereved by members of the public from the data published online. They noticed a rise in temperature and alerted the local media. Repairs are going on at the moment.

Douche.

There are several theories  as to why the LHC is such a massive, massive, failure. The most interesting, however, is that the Higgs Boson is so abhorrent to nature that it is actually TRAVELING BACK IN TIME to stop itself from being created. Yes, the particle is coming back in time to sabotage the machine. It sounds oddly like the making of a new Terminator Film.

The Baguette Incident (source: foxypar4/flickr, via PopSci)

Pity the poor Large Hadron Collider, the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world, built to find the Higgs Boson– the “God Particle.”  It just can’t seem to find its feet.

First, a coolant leak destroyed some of the magnets that guide the energy beam. Then LHC officials postponed the restart of the machine to add additional safety features. Now, a piece of bread droped by a bird on a section of the accelerator has, according to the Register, shut down the whole operation.

The bird dropped some bread on an outdoor section of the gigantic device, eventually leading to significant over heating in parts of the accelerator. The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident, but the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic fail-safes would have shut it down.

Was the baguette an accident?  Two scientists have theorized that the LHC is sabotaging itself from the future, to prevent mankind discovering the elusive Higgs Boson particle (link to paper at arXiv.org here); others have sued to shut down the LHC “before it destroys the world.”

More, at PopSci.com.

As we spin the arrow of time, we might recall that first Flying Trapeze act was performed in Paris on this date in 1859 by Jules Leotard (who also designed the garment that bears his name).

Jules Leotard

The link missing in yesterday’s post– to the physics paper suggesting that the Large Hadron Collider may be sabotaging itself from the future– is restored.  Apologies.

In reading my most recent dead tree edition of Skeptic magazine, I noticed that there were two articles on the Large Hadron Collider and the potential catastrophic effects that could come from bringing it up to full power (black holes eating the Earth etc.). I’ve raised my own nervy questions about this here, but I was expecting Skeptic to set my nerves to rest, and to offer, well, a skeptical deconstruction of the very idea that there was any danger at all to bringing the Large Hadron Collider to full throttle up. Like ghosts and UFOs, I fully expected Skeptic to conclude, in no uncertain terms, that catastrophe concerns surrounding the Large Hadron Collider are born of pseudoscientific hysteria and conspiratorial bullshit.

But that’s not what the lead article argued. In fact, it went over the issue with a good deal of thoroughness and concluded that maybe this whole subject should be discussed more, and in public. There was a short one page rebuttal to the cautionary article, and it was offered by a physicist who is highly respected in both the atheist and scientific communities (Lawrence Krauss). I read Krauss’s rebuttal carefully, as well as the lead cautionary article a second time, and I must confess that the cautionary article struck me as, frankly, more thoughtful. And Krauss’s rebuttal struck me as rather prickly, snarky, and contemptuous (as opposed to thorough and substantive). There was an underlying impatience in Krauss’s response, as if to say, “Trust me on this. I’m an expert and I’m very smart.” In response I was thinking, “Well, I agree you’re very smart, but at least refute the previous article point by point.” But Krauss, apparently, couldn’t be bothered.

After reading the dead tree edition, I thought I’d see if the two articles are online, and they are. The link is here. Read them carefully. If nothing else, they are both exercises in critical thinking from two very different vantage points. And if the first article is anything like near correct, then we could all be in real peril a month or two from now (when the Large Hadron Collider is scheduled to go with full throttle up).

So funny!!!

Scientists are trying to create God, and He shuts down the LHC, so they can’t.

This reminds me of the Tower of Babel.  God shut that down too.

Click here for more

LARGE HADRON COLLIDER PRODUCES FIRST PROTON COLLISIONS IN BIG BANG MISSION

I can’t explain why, but this news makes me extraordinarily excited, proud, humble, thrilled, wonderstruck, optimistic…  [insert further relevant emotions here].

Our Universe is a miraculous event.
Won’t it be fun to try and find out just what makes it so?

{ image from Boston Big Picture [I strongly recommend you click-thru  for yet another must-see LHC collection]. This particular portrait features a “Compact Muon Solenoid”, a particle detector much like ALICE and ATLAS. I love lyrical jargon and acronyms the meanings of which fly stratospherically — nay, sub-orbitally — far above my head. }

DEFINITELY RELATED:

The language of deep space

LHC too cool/broken for its own good; helium-based hilarity ensues

Star-maker Machinery

Earth still here?… Yup!

To Hell in  Hadron Collider?

Large Hadron Collider in process of restarting

Scientists are in the process of restarting a giant particle collider built to reproduce the conditions of the big bang, Europe’s CERN physics research center said Friday.

After a year’s delay, the scientists hope to have beams of protons circulating all the way through the Large Hadron Collider’s 17-mile-wide (27-kilometer-wide) underground ring in both directions by early Saturday, and then accelerate them this weekend, CERN spokesman James Gillies said.

“At the moment they’re putting beams down in the Large Hadron Collider, and as the night goes on they’ll take the beams through and start circulating them,” he told Reuters. CERN reported that beams were fully circulating in the clockwise direction, and that preparations were being made to send beams counterclockwise as well.

The experiment will not be properly under way until January when the LHC is operating at a higher level, Gillies said.

Technical problems forced CERN to shut down the $10 billion collider just nine days after it was started for the first time in September 2008.

The problem was a faulty splice in the super-conducting cable connecting two cooling magnets in the underground ring, which smashes particles at a temperature of just above absolute zero to re-create conditions believed to exist at the start of the universe 13.7 billion years ago.

As the particles smash into each other at nearly the speed of light — once the collider is operating at full throttle, which will take several weeks — they will explode in a burst of energy which scientists will monitor for new or previously unseen particles which they predict could help explain the nature of mass and the origins of the universe.

CERN said last year’s accident never posed any danger. The Geneva-based institution has had to rebuff suggestions that the experiment would create millions of black holes that would suck in the Earth.

See also:
Large Hadron Collider fully armed and operational
Large Hadron Collider fires up after $40M repairs
Proton Beams Are on Track at Collider
Large Hadron Collider restarts after 14 months of repairs
Beam sent around Large Hadron Collider
In pictures: Cern Large Hadron Collider restarts
Large Hadron Collider ready to restart
Science: Large Hadron Collider ready to restart
The Large Hadron Collider
Large Hadron Collider
Higgs boson
Saw This In a Movie Once, Pretty Sure It’ll Work

Okay, so the object of this exercise is to produce a particle collision with enough energy to produce previously theoretical sub-particles, most notably the infamous Higgs boson. Now, my question is, if these sub-particles are, by definition, smaller than anything currently known to man, capable of moving through mass unimpeded, what’s going to contain them as they fly off at the speed of light?

/pardon me if I don’t volunteer to stand next to this thing while it’s operating