Great photos and an article in Nat Geo about the Large Hadron Collider being built and tested at CERN in Switzerland to search for the so called ‘God particle,’ the massive Higgs boson which is believed to exist, but no one has seen one yet. I like this description from the article about the difficulty in finding it:
Building a contraption like the LHC to find the Higgs is a bit like embarking on a career as a stand-up comic with the hope that at some point in your career you’ll happen to blurt out a joke that’s not only side-splittingly funny but also a palindrome.
What was that quote from Hitchikers guide to the galaxy where the guy talks to God, proves he exists because of the babelfish, and then makes God non exist because it was proved and doesn’t need faith about God?
Yeah insert that quote here.
#30 – bobbo,
WRT black holes, the mass is all-important. It’s not that “that they consume everything within their gravitational pull”. It’s that they consume everything within their event horizon. The subtle difference is that gravitational effects diminish with distance, but theoretically are infinite in reach.
The event horizon is the distance from a black hole where if light crosses the line, even the light will be consumed by the black hole. The important bit about a black hole that may form in a collider is that its event horizon would be extremely close to itself because the black hole would have so little mass.
So, though it would suck, it would not suck big time. There really is no risk to humans from such a black hole.
#32 – the answer,
Good idea. Here it is. ( pasted from http://tinyurl.com/2ssfjb )
Now it is such a bizarrely improbably coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful [the Babel fish] could have evolved by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
“But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED”
“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (book one of the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series), p 50
Scott–these things are almost impossible to find by google==so tell me, of what significance is it that xrays escape from Black Holes. What does THAT indicate/mean/reveal?
I say only that xrays can escape whereas light cannot. Limited physics here–xrays have more energy and therefor more power?
If you are a fan of the Canadian Sci-Fi show “LEXX”, you know that the Higgs-Boson particle is responsible for the destruction of most inhabited worlds, as eventually any alien species becomes technologically astute enough to create one, which at that point the Higgs-Boson particle destroys the planet and shrinks it down to the size of a pea.
I love that show!
BTW if you ever want to see what happens when a Higgs-Boson particle is created, look for the german TV science show called “Das Ende” (The End). One of the scenarios is a particle collider creates a mini-black hole which destroys the earth in minutes. Cool CGI fx. The one where Berlin gets hit by a meteor is also very cool.