Wednesday, September 10, 2008

The LHC is Super Duper Fly!

The party's in Cern, where they gave the Large Hadron Collider a test drive for the first time today.



3 comments:

Steven LaRose said...

I heard on NPR that the science in that rap is essentially correct. Which makes it even more cool.

ps
thanks for being my first follower

Marc Snyder said...

and thanks right back!

I love the rap, but they left out the earth-devouring black holes that are an inevitable consequence of this infernal machine. . .

and the holes in the atmosphere created by the rockets. . .

Anonymous said...

I understand that the eventual goal is to collide these particles in a manner similar to what cosmic rays do currently (yesterday was just shooting a beam in one direction - sort of like one hand clapping).

Yet I keep having the same nagging worry. One of the weirdest things about our understanding of the universe is that we haven't seen any indication of alien intelligent life. With billions of stars (yes, I hear Sagan's voice when I read that too) in this galaxy, there should be huge stellar empires strewn every which way, countless self-reproducing robots whizzing around, quasars set to flash in time with cosmic Top 40 hits (all it takes is ONE hip race). Yet there is nothing (so far).

Combine this absence of evidence with the assumption that all technologically evolving species will most likely take certain similar steps: experiments with the common elements of the universe, including sub-atomic particles and the forces that control them.

It seriously makes me wonder if there isn't a natural booby-trap somewhere up the scientific ladder. Every race, when it gets to some certain point, performs an experiment that seems innocuous, but results in extinction. If this is true, then the booby-trap would have to be on a relatively low rung on the ladder, else the species would have expanded beyond local space and could learn from it's mistake ("Hey, remember that experiment they were going to kick off on Earth yesterday? Well, Earth is gone. Let's not do that here".