Wednesday, September 10, 2008
The Last Post
With the LHC about to be fired up in the next hour or so I feel I must post in spite of the fact that a night of magic with Nige has left me a little below par. The world might end - you read it here first - a prospect made more alarming by the fact that Kim Jong-il may not be around to see it. Meanwhile, John McCain would have been certain to win because all non-Americans prefer Obama. As Randy Newman so acutely observed, the American 'base' is none too keen on the non-American world. If you really know what the LHC is all about, here is an excellent guide to the physics as opposed to the junk being emitted by the mainstream media. Oh and the world isn't really going to end today because they're only firing the proton beam in one direction - no collisions, therefore. No, wait a minute, a physicist just said, 'Don't worry', the phrase I like to think is inscribed on all airbags and oxygen masks. That's it. We're doomed. I'd just like to say...
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Mind you, it would be nice if they found a neat power source. And you'ld have to giggle if they found a cheap way to fly those using package tours out to New Zealand, thereby annoying the porcelain from well made caps.
ReplyDeletewebcast[dot]cern[dot]ch
ReplyDeleteshould give one a moment or two.
Never forget, as my physics tutor merrily informed me last year when broached on the subject of the LHC, nothing about the laws of nature makes them inherently self-perpetuating. They are inductively observed and as such there is no major reason why they couldn't all simply collapse just for kicks; other than the fact that they haven't done so yet!
ReplyDeleteIf you want to entertain more outlandish theories; it is also conceivable that the millions (if not billions) of civilisations which potentially exists within our universe are all performing similar universe-ending experiments as you read this. Fortunately, as my curiously optimistic tutor informed me, we should probably be grateful really to witness something so bizarre; watching your universe unravel at the seams really has to be one of the more spectacular ways to die.
Personally I try to to think about it!
i wondered if the original start-up date was tomorrow, but they thought the date might be a bit ill-starred for something that may accidentally kill us all.
ReplyDelete“a night of magic with Nige has left me a little below par”
ReplyDeleteThe same goes for Nige, apparently, seeing he hasn’t posted yet!
Feeling below par does rather detract from a convincing night of magic, admittedly. Albeit, that magic and nights do, essentially, have venerable pedigrees, i.e., a fundamental urge to translate our own nocturnal ideas from the realm of magical hypotheses into that of sober and subsequent science. Jesus, accordingly, performed tricks with the loaves and fishes, and had his friends walk on water. Heisenberg, took Bohr's original ideas from the realm of magical hypotheses into that of coherent mathematics and knowledge, such as is now taking roots in CERN...
May I take it that you and Nige took a minicab and ( if it is not an indelicate question) is the driver still with you....?
Woke up this morning - stumpety strum - but only to hear Andrew Marr on the radio saying at that all systems at CERN were go. I was rather hoping for that other, pre-recorded BBC voice which tells you to get under the kitchen table and assume crash position. Oh well.
ReplyDeleteAnother blog has a rather good entry:
"According to Wendy Doniger, in the South Sudan storytellers begin their tales with the following intriguing formula. This, by the way, calls for audience participation, and so the lines in bold are the ones spoken by the storyteller, whilst the italicised lines are those spoken by the audience.
This is a story.
Right!
It is a lie.
Right!
But not everything in it is false.
Right!
"This, more or less, is how stories begin in the South Sudan." And maybe at CERN?
A night of magic with Nige?? Mmmmm. Daring choice of words.
ReplyDeleteHave I got this straight? The modern progressive secular world is terrified a fundamentalist wingnut will be elected President of the U.S. and will start pushing buttons to hasten the Rapture, but thinks it is really cool scientists are trying to replicate the Big Bang?
ReplyDeleteYou never know, God might show up and take a bow.
ReplyDelete"Mock the Week" had a good take on this:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rjJ4T8ViFQ