Party Like It's September 9th!

 

This is me. Today on September 9th 2008. If tomorrow comes today and human kind is erased from time…I guess we can all say (after the fact?). It was fun while it lasted.

One of the greatest science experiments ever built is set to switch on at around 3:30 AM (EDT)tomorrow.

After 14 years and $8 billion, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) plans to inject the first beam of protons fully around the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The purpose of the LHC is to help researchers answer some big questions about the universe: why particles have mass, what dark matter may be made of, and why matter survived its brush with antimatter when the universe was young. In a nut shell, trying to recreate the moments just after the “Big Bang”.

Will they find the "God particle", the Higgs boson that represents mass, and therefore inertia in all matter? I suppose its just abstract knowledge, since we won't be able to actually manipulate such forces for a LONG time to come. It’s like the answer to a question that has not yet been asked. Or even thought of.

To me there are three ways of looking at this…

One…It reminds me of a bit of “Galapagos“ (Vonnegut) where there are some people stranded on an island and all their water comes from a natural basin with a little hole which supplies a perfect continuous stream of all the fresh water they need. But people being people, one of them can't help but fiddle with it, trying to control and direct the flow, until the whole thing breaks and they end up with no water at all. And…if we do get swallowed by a black hole it would happen so fast that no one would be aware of it anyway. No hiding under desks or on tab tops when the rogue mini-black holes make there way to the center of the planet and feed on the core. How can you have a black hole without the mass of an enormous star anyway?

Two…LHC is at the leading edge of theoretical physics and is therefore as far as an idea can be from actual use without not existing in the first place. Who knows what the LHC will give us in the long term... anti-matter fuel, faster than light travel, micro-black hole pets?

Three…Maybe we should accept that there are some forces that neither Religion or Science should attempt to comprehend.

Peace-DAG!