This is ranked number one in my "cool shit" category of life...
After 14 years of preparation, a new scientific wonder of the world opened for business Wednesday with the official startup of Europe's Large Hadron Collider.
The $10 billion particle accelerator is the biggest, most expensive science machine on earth, designed to probe mysteries ranging from dark matter and missing antimatter to the existence of extra, unseen dimensions in space.
Scientists, journalists and dignitaries watched from the control room at Europe's CERN particle-physics center on the French-Swiss border, near Geneva, as beams of protons were sent all the way around the collider's 17-mile (27-kilometer) underground ring of supercooled pipes for the first time.
It's called the Big Bang Machine. That alone should be enough to get you excited.
Put into context here (though I recommend reading all of these articles and you only start to kind of get the picture of what's happening):
"Human history has been shaped by the progressive unraveling of gravity,
electricity and magnetism, and the nuclear force," Kaku said. "Now we are at the
brink of the granddaddy of all such unifications ... the unification of all
forces into a super force. We think the super force is superstring theory, a
super force that drove the big bang, that created the heavens and the earth,
that drives the sun, that makes all the wondrous technologies of the earth
possible."
I get the impression that there are a lot of nerds out there saying "OMG, this is freaking awesome" and there's a lot of people who know exactly what they are looking for with this and what it could possibly do, and just not telling us... yet.
But they didn't tell us about the Manhattan Project and it was, arguably, the most important scientific discovery of the last 100 years.
Oh, but I also kinda feel like there's a duty to the world to say "we're going to create a black hole on this day so that we can all prepare for the worse. Oh yes, children, we now literally have a machine that, at least in theory, can destroy the world in less than 30 seconds.
I think that's kinda cool :-).
3 comments:
Oh it is very, very cool! As a card-carrying nerd myself, the biggest thing this can do is clearly test some of the unification theories currently proposed (superstring, for whatever the blowhard in the article thinks, isn't one of them). With the verification of a grand unification theory, we're looking at a paradigm shift.
Please do keep in mind that this is massively abstract physics with no immediate tangible benefits, in the same way that Einstein's Annus Mirabilis papers (E=MC2) in 1905 did not create the atom bomb. It took forty years of extrapolation and experiments to take the theoretical and tease out just this one strand into something applicable to humanity.
... but when it did come around, boy did it change everything.
I know I geeked out a little too.
Oh dude, I had a fuckin field-day with this story! I, too, am a card-carrying physics geek. I still fail to see why so many people freak-the-fuck-out about the LHC though... The black-holes it can theoretically create will most likely last less than a milisecond, as do most particles created by experiments. Besides, even if it does destroy the Earth, at least we tried! Life would not be worth living if we did not take risks in the name of a quest for new knowledge!
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