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Fritz
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CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe
« on: 2008-03-28 23:12:37 » |
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Sorry I had to post this; since it my provide an out, to another universe from the rather dismal world view in this universe.
Cheers
Fritz
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/28/lhc_cern_hawaiian_botanist_lawsuit/
Botanist sues to stop CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe
Hawaiian in lawsuit against particle billiards rig
By Lewis Page
Published Friday 28th March 2008 14:11 GMT
A lawsuit has been filed in Hawaii in an attempt to hold up the start of operations by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) atom-smasher on the French-Swiss border.
A colourful American botanist, teacher, former biologist and sometime physicist says (in outline) that the LHC may rip a hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum and so destroy the Earth. He wants the US government to act now and delay the LHC's startup while a new safety review is carried out.
Walter L Wagner and his fellow Hawaiian Luis Sancho, according to a report on MSNBC, filed suit in the Hawaii federal court last Friday. The men are worried about one of several planet-busting physicists' nightmares being unleashed in the LHC's bowels deep beneath the Franco-Swiss countryside. (According to Wagner's website, as of publication, the LHC is located "near Generva, Switzerland".)
Firstly Wagner is concerned that careless atom boffins might slip up and create a miniature black hole. This would then suck in surrounding mass, gaining unstoppably in size and power in a runaway process until it had engulfed the entire Earth and packed it down inside its swelling, unescapable event horizon.
Some physicists have theorised that black holes might act as spacewarp wormhole portals into alternate universes, or something. Summarising, it appears that the boffins at the LHC - should one of them clumsily spill his tea on the controls, for instance - could easily catapult the entire world through a rift in the very fabric of space-time, into another universe which could be entirely hostile to life as we know it. (Eg, essential processes such as fermentation of alcohol, TV, pizza delivery, gravity etc might simply not work; or there could be a parallel Earth ruled by an evil victorious Nazi empire with space battlecruisers and so forth.)
That would be bad: but even if the LHC guys manage to avoid it, there are other ways in which their meddling might destroy the world.
A particularly violent game of proton billiards, for instance, of the very sort the LHC's superpowered seven trillion electron-volt atomic cues are designed to play, might lead to all sorts of trouble. Quarks might get mixed up into "negatively-charged strangelets" which would turn everything else they touched into strangelets as well. The Earth, and then perhaps the entire universe, could be turned into a fearful strangelet soup; or perhaps custard.
A related worry is that overly vigorous particle-punishing tomfoolery at the LHC could produce "magnetic monopoles", which are dicey freaks of nature. Monopoles could trigger a runaway reaction not unlike the quark-strangelet scenario, in which everything gets changed into something else. This could lead to a turn-up for the books, in which the Moon remained made of moon but the Earth was abruptly converted into cheese.
Curiously, Wagner has claimed in the past that he has already personally discovered a magnetic monopole, though in that case it didn't destroy the Earth. Appearing last year on paranormal-matters talkshow Coast to Coast ("America's most fascinating overnight radio program") alongside a time-machine professor, Wagner gave a potted bio in which he says he "discovered a novel particle in a balloon-borne cosmic ray detector, initially identified as a magnetic monopole".
Wagner is, in fact, an expert in many fields. In his first degree at Berkeley he majored in biology and minored in physics. He then attended law school for three years, and later worked in nuclear medicine and health physics before becoming a grade-school teacher. He also founded the World Botanical Gardens in Umauma, Hawaii, and is now embroiled in a bitter legal battle with the Gardens board. According to the Hawaii Tribune-Herald (free registration required), he and his wife were indicted last month by a grand jury on counts of identity theft and attempted theft relating to an alleged attempt to obtain $340,000 from the gardens company.
Wagner contends that the couple were owed the cash, having worked for free at the gardens for years. Having been let go, they then sued the company for back pay.
But the company says the pair failed to notify the directors of the action, with Wagner instead serving the papers on his wife as company treasurer - even though she no longer was. The board says that Wagner then appeared in court as a company officer. He was thus able to gain a default judgement in his own lawsuit's favour, all without the knowledge of the Gardens board. It is also alleged that phony promissory notes were drawn up in an attempt to obtain cash from the company.
Wagner told the Tribune-Herald: "The records show we were in fact owed this money. That case is still in civil court. I also have four sworn affidavits that the promissory notes were not phony."
As for his worries regarding the LHC, it all seems fair enough to us. The LHC is to be run by CERN, the Euro nuclear-physics outfit famous for letting its boffins meddle with things best left alone. Tim Berners-Lee, for instance, invented the web while he was supposed to be playing particle pool at CERN. God knows what other horrors could be unleashed now that those crazy boffins have an even more powerful proton-bothering rig at their disposal.
The boffinry community, however, pooh-pooh Wagner's fears. They say that teeny black holes might be created but would vanish right away. They also say that the strangelet-custard conversion and monopole transmutation threats, if they were viable, should have occurred already due to cosmic-ray impacts in the upper atmosphere.
Wagner pooh-poohs the cosmic-ray pooh-pooh, though. On his site, he says "the existing 'cosmic ray argument' has been proven falacious... no existing proof of safety is currently available".
You simply can't argue with that. ®
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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Hermit
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Re:CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe
« Reply #1 on: 2008-09-10 00:43:48 » |
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The next 24 hours are something rather special as the Super Hadron collider will be fired up in earnest for the first time. Nice to know that not all of Earth has abandoned particle physics in favor of faith based initiatives.
I will take bets at any odds that we are still all here in 24 hours time unless Bush chooses this moment to attack Iran or Russia. Isn't it nice making bets on which you know you don't have to pay out.
Kindest Regards
Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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Re:CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe
« Reply #2 on: 2008-09-10 04:47:32 » |
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[Blunderov]We've been watching the BBC coverage of the switch on. Apparently they will not be attempting a collision for about a month; at the moment they are just fine tuning the beam paths. So every body has about a month to achieve all of those uncompleted projects....
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Fritz
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Re:CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe
« Reply #3 on: 2008-09-10 18:21:44 » |
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[Fritz]I wonder what particles would result from colliding politicians  Would they be odorous ?
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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Walter Watts
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Re:CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe
« Reply #4 on: 2008-09-10 19:17:45 » |
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Quote from: Fritz on 2008-09-10 18:21:44
[Fritz]I wonder what particles would result from colliding politicians Would they be odorous ?
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Politicians have no mass.
Would they just pass through one another in some ghostly fashion?
Would they cause spooky action at a distance?
Would they linger together at some event-horizon from hell?
Walter
PS-I don't believe they would be odorous however, as odor requires complex, organic molecules and politicians are simple, inorganic chemicals.
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Walter Watts
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Fritz
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Re:CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe
« Reply #5 on: 2008-09-10 21:52:18 » |
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Quote from: Walter Watts on 2008-09-10 19:17:45 Politicians have no mass.
Would they just pass through one another in some ghostly fashion?
Would they cause spooky action at a distance?
Would they linger together at some event-horizon from hell?
Walter
PS-I don't believe they would be odorous however, as odor requires complex, organic molecules and politicians are simple, inorganic chemicals.
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LOL nice ....
Cheers
Fritz
PS:now this makes even more sense .... thx to [BL]
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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Blunderov
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Re:CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe
« Reply #6 on: 2008-09-11 04:22:25 » |
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[Blunderov] This site has much to offer not only about the LHC but also in regard to physics in general. RSS feed too. Mmm.
http://cosmicvariance.com/
Best Regards.
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Re:CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe
« Reply #8 on: 2008-09-12 01:56:37 » |
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Quote from: DJ_dAndroid on 2008-09-11 22:01:09
[Blunderov] "Nope"? Well, I hadda a feeling everything was still OK but you never can be certain 'till you see something published on the net...
That said, maybe there is a tiny black hole quietly feeding and growing. An atom today. A molecule tomorrow. Next week the dust mites will begin to quietly disappear. At first nobody will mind...
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Walter Watts
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Re:CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe
« Reply #10 on: 2008-09-12 16:41:04 » |
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Quote from: Blunderov on 2008-09-12 01:56:37
Quote from: DJ_dAndroid on 2008-09-11 22:01:09
[Blunderov] "Nope"? Well, I hadda a feeling everything was still OK but you never can be certain 'till you see something published on the net...
That said, maybe there is a tiny black hole quietly feeding and growing. An atom today. A molecule tomorrow. Next week the dust mites will begin to quietly disappear. At first nobody will mind...
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I hear Mr. Bill screaming: "Oooooh Nooooo!"
Walter
<Thanks Blunderov. That made my day.>
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Hermit
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Re:CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe
« Reply #11 on: 2008-09-12 20:42:54 » |
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This has always been one of my favorite Clarke short stories.
I know it has been published on the CoV before, but I think it must have been in years that have been taken off-line to save server load/bandwidth as I cannot find it with either an internal or a Google search of the site; but in any case, here, courtesy of http://lucis.net/stuff/clarke/9billion_clarke.html, it is again.
The Nine Billion Names of God
Authors: Arthur Clarke
Dated: 1953
"This is a slightly unusual request," said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. "As far as I know, it’s the first time anyone’s been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with an automatic sequence computer. I don’t wish to be inquisitive, but I should hardly thought that your --ah-- establishment had much use for such a machine. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?"
"Gladly," replied the lama, readjusting his silk robe and carefully putting away the slide rule he had been using for currency conversions. "Your Mark V computer can carry out any routine mathematical operation involving up to ten digits. However, for our work we are interested in letters, not numbers. As we wish you to modify the output circuits, the machine will be printing words, not columns of figures."
"I don’t understand . . ."
"This is a project on which we have been working for the last three centuries -- since the lamasery was founded, in fact. It is somewhat alien to your way of thought, so I hope you will listen with an open mind while I explain it."
"Naturally."
"It is really quite simple. We have been compiling a list which shall contain all the possible names of God."
"I beg your pardon?"
"We have reason to believe," continued the lama imperturbably, "that all such names can be written with not more than nine letters in an alphabet we have devised."
"And you have been doing this for three centuries?"
"Yes. We expected it would take us about fifteen thousand years to complete the task."
"Oh." Dr. Wagner looked a little dazed. "Now I see why you wanted to hire one of our machines. But exactly what is the purpose of this project?"
The lama hesitated for a fraction of a second, and Wagner wondered if he had offended him. If so, there was no trace of annoyance in the reply.
"Call it ritual, if you like, but it’s a fundamental part of our belief. All the many names of the Supreme Being -- God, Jehovah, Allah, and so on -- they are only man-made labels. There is a philosophical problem of some difficulty here, which I do not propose to discuss, but somewhere among all the possible combinations of letters, which can occur, are what one may call the real names of God. By systematic permutation of letters, we have been trying to list them all."
"I see. You’ve been starting at AAAAAAAAA . . . and working up to ZZZZZZZZZ . . ."
"Exactly -- though we use a special alphabet of our own. Modifying the electromatic typewriters to deal with this is, of course, trivial. A rather more interesting problem is that of devising suitable circuits to eliminate ridiculous combinations. For example, no letter must occur more than three times in succession."
"Three? Surely you mean two."
"Three is correct. I am afraid it would take too long to explain why, even if you understood our language."
"I’m sure it would," said Wagner hastily. "Go on."
"Luckily it will be a simple matter to adapt your automatic sequence computer for this work, since once it has been programmed properly it will permute each letter in turn and print the result. What would have taken us fifteen thousand years it will be able to do in a thousand days."
Dr. Wagner was scarcely conscious of the faint sounds from the Manhattan streets far below. He was in a different world, a world of natural, not man-made, mountains. High up in their remote aeries these monks had been patiently at work, generation after generation, compiling their lists of meaningless words. Was there any limit to the follies of mankind? Still, he must give no hint of his inner thoughts. The customer was always right . . .
"There’s no doubt," replied the doctor, "that we can modify the Mark V to print lists of this nature. I’m much more worried about the problem of installation and maintenance. Getting out to Tibet, in these days, is not going to be easy."
"We can arrange that. The components are small enough to travel by air -- that is one reason why we chose your machine. If you can get them to India, we will provide transport from there."
"And you want to hire two of our engineers?"
"Yes, for the three months which the project should occupy."
"I’ve no doubt that Personnel can manage that." Dr. Wagner scribbled a note on his desk pad. "There are just two other points--"
Before he could finish the sentence, the lama had produced a small slip of paper.
"This is my certified credit balance at the Asiatic Bank."
"Thank you. It appears to be--ah--adequate. The second matter is so trivial that I hesitate to mention it -- but it’s surprising how often the obvious gets overlooked. What source of electrical energy have you?"
"A diesel generator providing 50 kilowatts at 110 volts. It was installed about five years ago and is quite reliable. It’s made life at the lamasery much more comfortable, but of course it was really installed to provide power for the motors driving the prayer wheels."
"Of course," echoed Dr. Wagner. "I should have thought of that."
The view from the parapet was vertiginous, but in time one gets used to anything. After three months George Hanley was not impressed by the two-thousand-foot swoop into the abyss or the remote checkerboard of fields in the valley below. He was leaning against the wind-smoothed stones and staring morosely at the distant mountains whose names he had never bothered to discover.
This, thought George, was the craziest thing that had ever happened to him. "Project Shangri-La," some wit at the labs had christened it. For weeks now, Mark V had been churning out acres of sheets covered with gibberish. Patiently, inexorably, the computer had been rearranging letters in all their possible combinations, exhausting each class before going on to the next. As the sheets had emerged from the electromatic typewriters, the monks had carefully cut them up and pasted them into enormous books. In another week, heaven be praised, they would have finished. Just what obscure calculations had convinced the monks that they needn’t bother to go on to words of ten, twenty, or a hundred letters, George didn’t know. One of his recurring nightmares was that there would be some change of plan and that the High Lama (whom they’d naturally called Sam Jaffe, though he didn’t look a bit like him) would suddenly announce that the project would be extended to approximately 2060 A.D. They were quite capable of it.
George heard the heavy wooden door slam in the wind as Chuck came out onto the parapet beside him. As usual, Chuck was smoking one of the cigars that made him so popular with the monks -- who, it seemed, were quite willing to embrace all the minor and most of the major pleasures of life. That was one thing in their favor: they might be crazy, but they weren’t bluenoses. Those frequent trips they took down to the village, for instance . . ." "Listen, George," said Chuck urgently. "I’ve learned something that means trouble."
"What’s wrong? Isn’t the machine behaving?" That was the worst contingency George could imagine. It might delay his return, than which nothing could be more horrible. The way he felt now, even the sight of a TV commercial would seem like manna from heaven. At least it would be some link from home.
"No -- it’s nothing like that." Chuck settled himself on the parapet, which was unusual, because normally he was scared of the drop.
"I’ve just found out what all this is about."
"What d’ya mean -- I thought we knew."
"Sure -- we know what the monks are trying to do. But we didn’t know why. It’s the craziest thing --"
"Tell me something new," growled George.
" . . . but old Sam’s just come clean with me. You know the way he drops in every afternoon to watch the sheets roll out. Well, this time he seemed rather excited, or at least as near as he’ll ever get to it. When I told him we were on the last cycle he asked me, in that cute English accent of his, if I’d ever wondered what they were trying to do. I said, ‘Sure’ -- and he told me."
"Go on, I’ll buy it."
"Well, they believe that when they have listed all His names -- and they reckon that there are about nine billion of them -- God’s purpose will have been achieved. The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won’t be any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy."
"Then what do they expect us to do? Commit suicide?"
"There’s no need for that. When the list’s completed, God steps in and simply winds things up . . . bingo!"
"Oh, I get it. When we finish our job, it will be the end of the world."
Chuck gave a nervous little laugh.
"That’s just what I said to Sam. And do you know what happened? He looked at me in a very queer way, like I’d been stupid in class, and said, ‘It’s nothing as trivial as that’."
George thought this over for a moment.
"That’s what I call taking the Wide View," he said presently.
"But what d’ya suppose we should do about it? I don’t see that it makes the slightest difference to us. After all, we already knew that they were crazy."
"Yes -- but don’t you see what may happen? When the list’s complete and the Last Trump doesn’t blow -- or whatever it is that they expect -- we may get the blame. It’s our machine they’ve been using. I don’t like the situation one little bit."
"I see," said George slowly. "You’ve got a point there. But this sort of thing’s happened here before, you know. When I was a kid down in Louisiana we had a crackpot preacher who said the world was going to end next Sunday. Hundreds of people believed him-- even sold their homes. Yet nothing happened; they didn’t turn nasty, as you’d expect. They just decided that he’d made a mistake in his calculations and went right on believing. I guess some of them still do."
"Well, this isn’t Louisiana, in case you hadn’t noticed. There are just two of us and hundreds of these monks. I like them, and I’ll be sorry for old Sam when his lifework backfires on him. But all the same, I wish I was somewhere else."
"I’ve been wishing that for weeks. But there’s nothing we can do until the contract’s finished and the transport arrives to fly us out."
"Of course," said Chuck thoughtfully, "we could always try a bit of sabotage."
"Like hell we could! That would make things worse."
"Not the way I meant. Look at it like this. The machine will finish its run four days from now, on the present twenty-hours-a-day basis. The transport calls in a week. O.K., then all we need to do is to find something that wants replacing during one of the overhaul periods -- something that will hold up the works for a couple of days. We’ll fix it, of course, but not too quickly. If we time matters properly, we can be down at the airfield when the last name pops out of the register. They won’t be able to catch us then."
"I don’t like it," said George. "It will be the first time I ever walked out on a job. Besides, it would make them suspicious. No, I’ll sit tight and take what comes."
"I still don’t like it," he said seven days later, as the tough little mountain ponies carried them down the winding road. "And don’t you think I’m running away because I’m afraid. I’m just sorry for those poor old guys up there, and I don’t want to be around when they find what suckers they’ve been. Wonder how Sam will take
it?"
"It’s funny," replied Chuck, "but when I said goodbye I got the idea he knew we were walking out on him -- and that he didn’t care because he knew the machine was running smoothly and that the job would soon be finished. After that -- well, of course, for him there just isn’t any After That . . ."
George turned in his saddle and stared back up the mountain road. This was the last place from which one could get a clear view of the lamasery. The squat, angular buildings were silhouetted against the afterglow of the sunset; here and there lights gleamed like portholes in the sides of an ocean liner. Electric lights, of course, sharing the same circuit as the Mark V. How much longer would they share it? wondered George. Would the monks smash up the computer in their rage and disappointment? Or would they just sit down quietly and begin their calculations all over again?
He knew exactly what was happening up on the mountain at this very moment. The High Lama and his assistants would be sitting in their silk robes, inspecting the sheets as the junior monks carried them away from the typewriters and pasted them into the great volumes. No one would be saying anything. The only sound would be the incessant patter, the never-ending rainstorm, of the keys hitting the paper, for the Mark V itself was utterly silent as it flashed through its thousands of calculations a second. Three months of this, thought George, was enough to start anyone climbing up the wall.
"There she is!" called Chuck, pointing down into the valley. "Ain’t she beautiful!"
She certainly was, thought George. The battered old DC-3 lay at the end of the runway like a tiny silver cross. In two hours she would be bearing them away to freedom and sanity. It was a thought worth savoring like a fine liqueur. George let it roll around in his mind as the pony trudged patiently down the slope.
The swift night of the high Himalayas was now almost upon them. Fortunately the road was very good, as roads went in this region, and they were both carrying torches. There was not the slightest danger, only a certain discomfort from the bitter cold. The sky overhead was perfectly clear and ablaze with the familiar, friendly stars. At least there would be no risk, thought George, of the pilot being unable to take off because of weather conditions. That had been his only remaining worry.
He began to sing but gave it up after a while. This vast arena of mountains, gleaming like whitely hooded ghosts on every side, did not encourage such ebullience. Presently George glanced at his watch.
"Should be there in an hour," he called back over his shoulder to Chuck. Then he added, in an afterthought, "Wonder if the computer’s finished its run? It was due about now."
Chuck didn’t reply, so George swung round in his saddle. He could just see Chuck’s face, a white oval turned toward the sky.
"Look," whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.)
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Walter Watts
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Re:CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe
« Reply #12 on: 2008-09-12 22:11:04 » |
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Thanks Hermit....
Outstanding. I had never seen that one.
Take care.
Walter
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Walter Watts
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DJ dAndroid
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Ballet Mechanique
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Re:CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe
« Reply #13 on: 2008-09-12 22:51:03 » |
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Yes thank-you Hermit. That was new to me as well I enjoyed it very much. In it's way it brought to mind for me:
THE LAST QUESTION by Isaac Asimov.
It's short, read it online here.
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Shouldn't robots have the same right as humans to have gender and express their sexuality?
_Clayton Bailey_
http://www.claytonbailey.com/monrobot.htm
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DJ dAndroid
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Re:CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe
« Reply #14 on: 2008-09-13 21:14:52 » |
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Source: XKCD web-comic.
When are they turning it on anyway? I may just have to throw a party! 
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Shouldn't robots have the same right as humans to have gender and express their sexuality?
_Clayton Bailey_
http://www.claytonbailey.com/monrobot.htm
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