Sunday 21 September 2008

Pic of the day: I have this vague idea that CERN is staffed entirely with people who kept this attitude when they grew up. Not that I don't understand them, but still...

LHC delayed

Allahu akbar! The Large Hadron Collider, which started with much fanfare this month, is being shut down for two months due to a gas leak. After that, it will be shut down for the winter (as Europe does not have that much power to spare during the cold season). So, we get some more months before they begin drilling the Bore again.

The extremely long-time reader will know what I feel about this project. As of today, the scientific community does not know what gravity is. I say this not because I am in a position to tell them, I just mention this fact because making microscopic black holes is the unholy grail of the whole project, along with discovering Higg's boson, blasphemically named "the God particle" by many scientists. Its actual function is supposed to be to give mass to all the other particles. So far it has eluded science, though. And so far the huge detectors set up to measure gravity waves have also utterly failed to give any response, even though the current theories predict such waves. Add the recent discovery that the universe seems to be expanding faster and faster for no known reason ("dark energy" is utterly hypothetical and simply inserted in the theories to explain observations, because we all agree there is no action without energy). Furthermore, the strength of gravity at very small distances is markedly different from the three other fundamental forces of the universe, of which gravity was supposed to be the fourth (or rather first).

So we don't know exactly what gravity is, and we specifically don't know how it acts on very small scales. We are not sure how things have mass in the first place, we only have theories about what happens inside black holes, and we have never observed the process by which black holes dissipate, if they do. So the obvious solution is to try to make them on the only known life-bearing planet in the universe.

In all fairness, there is very strong reason to believe that Earth is exposed to more energetic collisions than this from time to time by cosmic rays. These collisions take place high up in the atmosphere, and there is no warning before them, nor do they come from any particular direction, so studying them is not really an alternative.

But in any case, the Power that Be has granted us a few more months without black holes. I for one have no problem waiting.