Speed

From the Sunday Times, a glimpse into a future where the Internet is obsolete, replaced by the superfast "grid." It's all a byproduct of CERN"s Large Hadron Collider.

Of course, there's also the pessimistic scenario in which the Large Hadron Collider wipes out the Earth, rendering the whole issue of the Internet irrelevant.

HT: Drudge.

Comments

Ah, the LHC. The thing that scares everyone who knows nothing about physics. The chance of that time damaging the Earth at all is around 10-^63, I believe.

Anyways, such a grid would be quite nice.

[Ross W]

Well, I might not know enough about physics, but I'm glad the LHC is not being built in England. This is because it's designed to seek out the elusive Higgs boson particle, which has the intriguing anagram "anglophobic tigress".
Phew!

Uh, in my last post I managed to type 10-^63, but I am almost positive I typed 10^-63. How strange.

Your point being..?
"I'm hardly ever wrong"
"Spooky! I have unconsciously sensed that the world will indeed end!"
"This Blog senses that the world is going to end and changes my text accordingly"
"I wouldn't want everyone to think I don't understand carats or powers because I'm really good at math and physics"
"We need some more comments on this thread"
"Where is Hope?"

[Leo MacDonald]

It seems that drinking lots of water is not that good for you according to this

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89323934

I can see how that would be true my mother drinks lots of water and her skin is better.

[Michael H]

Hey Ross, do you have an anagram program, or are you just trying to find stuff to occupy you while we all wait for the world to end? :-)

As as Anglo, I think the specter of an anglophobic tigress being unleashed upon the world should be more than enough to halt construction of the LHC until we can form an international commission to determine the wisdom of proceeding.

Damn the odds! That's scary!

[Ross W]

Scary, yes Michael H, but is it as scary as this?
"Michael Prescott"
: anagram...
"I retch ectoplasm".

Aaaargghhh! Now we know why he likes all those seances!

[MarkL]

"The Large Hadron Collider is ready. Push the button! Why do you delay?"
"Strangely, I was thinking of the Fermi paradox. Other technological civilizations must have been at this point in their development; why have they not gone on to communicate with us?"
"You do not believe that silliness about the creation of a strangelet destroying the world? Do you believe that absurd idea that all other civilizations at this point in their history build an LHC and destroy themselves?"
"Of course not? Total nonsense!"
"Push the button, Zxyxx."
I reached out with my middle tentacle and pushed the button...

[Michael H]

I can't get R.E.M. out of my head . . .

"It's the end of the world as we know it . . . and I feel fine!"

[Michael Prescott]

Nice little short story, MarkL.

The LCH does scare me just a bit. I know all these physicists say there's no danger - or more exactly, an infinitesimally small danger - but then I think of how the ancient Greeks warned us against hubris ...

"I retch ectoplasm". Cool.

[Hope Rivers]

Prophets in the bible saw it coming 1000s of years ago.

[Hope Rivers]

Lets hope their wrong eh :-)

[Hope Rivers]

the funny thing is if it does happen where do the reincarnaters reincarnate? ;-)

[Hope Rivers]

Hey Ross just downloaded an anagram software, interesting results.

Hope Rivers - Hero's Viper

and here's MPs;

Michael Prescott - A Complete Christ.

[Hope Rivers]

another one for me:

"Her VIP Rose"

http://www.anagramgenius.com/agfree_download.php

[Ross W]

There are loads of anagrams for Michael Prescott, but I reckon Hope’s found the best with “A Complete Christ”. Brilliant!

Would Michael prefer that to “Atmospheric celt” or “Macho Celt Priest”?
Or perhaps, bearing in mind his writing, he’d like “cop stealth crime” or “Stop Chalet crime”. Or perhaps “Cost price Hamlet”. I bet he’s good at “Celtic metaphors” and can turn a “smart poet cliché”.

But I don’t suppose he’d identify with “Pam the Sclerotic”, “sceptical mother”, “prosthetic camel”, “camphor testicle”, “sclerotic empath” or “short melt icecap”.

Does he ever go in for “chemical protest”? Does he investigate “alchemic potters”?

When he’s lying in bed, he could say “me pectorals itch” or “me practice sloth”.

Never mind. When he gets into trouble, he knows that “Alec protects him” (or “Lace protects him”).

By the way: Large Hadron Collider = “Hard Genocidal Roller”!

[Hope Rivers]

But I don’t suppose he’d identify with “Pam the Sclerotic”, “sceptical mother”, “prosthetic camel”, “camphor testicle”, “sclerotic empath” or “short melt icecap”.

Maybe if he used his imagination he could see relationships to these anagrams with his personal life experiences and people who have crossed his path.

Hey anythings possible ;-)

[Hope Rivers]

You can have fun looking into these anagrams, by the way in Australia "camel" can be a term used for something other than the animal with the hump(s).

;-) Okay the monkeys unleashed!.......

[Hope Rivers]

"Lace protects him"

Well if he ever astral travels or meditates that would be the silver chord (lace) that keeps him attached to his body.

[Hope Rivers]

Camphor is used for itching......ok enough said :-)

[Hope Rivers]

Lace; ornamental cord or braid, esp. of gold or silver, used to decorate uniforms, hats, etc.

www.dictionary.com :-) Ok I'm bored.....

Michael, I can understand why the collider would scare you, but think of it this way:

The chance of this thing sucking up the world is about the same chance of this sequence of events happening:

1) You find a 50 million dollar lottery ticket just discarded on the ground.
2) On the way home, you're struck by lightning. Twice. On a totally clear day.
3) The ambulance, on the way to pick you up, has a spontaneous gas leak which sparks and catches on fire.
4) The next ambulance that comes to get you is destroyed by a meteorite.
5) The hospital finally gets you and treats you and you're fine. Upon release, you find another multi-million dollar lottery ticket discarded on the ground.

I'll stop there, but I'm not entirely sure if THAT is even less likely to occur than the collider causing a global extinction event. It really is that implausible. Most of the things that would enable an extinction event aren't even considered possible by most physicists, and even the ability of micro black holes being able to form is debated (the consensus is "no") AND even if they can form, the chance of Hawking radiation, which has not been experimentally observed (but some effects that coincide with it HAVE been) being false is extremely low. Then, as we go on, even if for some bizarre reason that Hawking radiation is false, any black hole generated would be too small to eat any more than one proton every couple of centuries, and that's IF it isn't gravitationally spit out of the planet's atmosphere!

So, as you can see, it really isn't plausible at all. Strangelets, even less so because of the same reasons I posted above AND the fact that almost no one believes they actually can exist, because of the nature of the universe being in this form of matter that isn't "strange," it makes very little sense. If strangelets were that easy to form and they did have this catastrophic matter conversion ability, then after a couple billion years, it's hard to see the universe NOT being all strange matter.

Besides, if you buy in to the "fine tuning" argument, it's clear that the universe is much more robust than anything we can do it. ;)

[Michael H]

. . . any black hole generated would be too small to eat any more than one proton every couple of centuries, and that's IF it isn't gravitationally spit out of the planet's atmosphere!

Another Aussie troublemaker has claimed that black holes do not exist, either. Stephen Crothers has compiled an http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/index.html>impressive assortment of academic papers that have routinely been ignored and suppressed by the physics community over the past century, and has made some impressive contributions to the argument himself. The page linked above begins as follows:

There has been a deliberate suppression of important scientific papers by the community of physicists and astronomers concerning the black hole, beginning with the original paper by Karl Schwarzschild of 1916, evidently for vainglory, money and self-aggrandisement. I bring you free access to those papers, and others of relevance, in the hope that this fraud can be exposed and physics restored to a rational search for knowledge. The black hole has no foundation in theory whatsoever. Neither Newton's theory nor Einstein's theory predict it. In fact, both theories preclude it, contrary to what the orthodox relativists claim.

I'm not a physicist or a mathematician, so the mathematical proofs contained in the papers listed at Crothers' site are well over my head. What interests me, as always, is the implication that the physics community may be blinded by their own paradigm. Crothers has been published in the peer-reviewed http://www.ptep-online.com/>Progress in Physics, Volume 1, 2008. I also find his http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/PhD.html>account of his "experiences in academia for challenging 'conventional wisdom'" more than a little intriguing.

My healthy skepticism for the Big Bang has been discussed before, and that skepticism extends to black holes (which seem to attain new powers each time astronomers come across anomalous observations) and string theory. Given that, imagine the credence I'll give to 'strangelets'!

But who knows? Maybe Cat's Cradle was a prophetic novel. We just need to remember that if the planet succumbs to Ice-nine, the consciousness at the core of existence will continue to manifest anyway. So we'd might as well relax.

[Ross W]

Nice work, Michael H. One wonders how Physics is going to redeem itself, seeing as it’s now looking at things it can never really test: tiny curled up dimensions or minimally interactive particles it can hardly ever hope to observe; and massive anomalies scarcely part of our universe, like black holes, dark matter and dark energy. We do seem to be approaching the limits of the current paradigm where reality is always seen as “objective” and “out there” or “in there”, never “here”. I believe it will only really get “anywhere” new when it brings in the idea of the Consciousness, as Michael H says. Still, we’ll give it one last go with the LHC - though such a project swallows up huge resources – since the spin-off of the fast internet looks useful.

Cat’s Cradle was by Kurt Vonnegut, wasn’t it? I’m sure I read it about 30 years ago, but I’m sad to say that my 54 year old brain has totally forgotten it! Can you summarise?

[Michael H]

Ross, I barely remember Cat's Cradle myself - something about Bokononism (the preferred religion?) and Ice-nine as a catalyst for a doomsday scenario. I remember enjoying the book, but also that I liked Billy Pilgrims's adventures (Slaughterhouse Five) better.

Every death in the latter (and there were plenty of them!) was accompanied by the cryptic and ubiquitous, "So it goes". Now that's relaxed! :-)

Anyway, Cat's Cradle and Ice-nine were mentioned in the discussion of strangelets in the Wiki article Michael linked. Every time I read about wild speculation such as that, I become more convinced that the real 'strangelets' are the damn physicists themselves.

If you try to point that out though, they'll talk about how 'elegant' the math is, then ask for more funding. So it goes.

Michael, to be fair, strangelets are a goofy thing that almost no physicist accepts, so they're not exactly crazy people on the whole, just a few of them.

[Michael H]

. . . so they're not exactly crazy people on the whole, just a few of them.

And what of the astronomers and cosmologists? Are we funding http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/55839?&print=yes#55867>science or folktales?

[william]

"the funny thing is if it does happen where do the reincarnaters reincarnate? ;-)"

oh maybe something called other planets that most so called experts said did not exist for many years and now we are finding new ones almost daily.

I suspect the universe is teeming with life some more advanced than us and some not as advanced.

[william]

“I believe it will only really get “anywhere” new when it brings in the idea of the Consciousness,”

That will be a paradigm shift of the highest order for most scientists to perceive consciousness as the prevailing underlying reality of the universe. Please note particles get smaller and smaller until of course they no longer find particles but a vitality that cannot be defined and is of all things intelligent.

[Michael Prescott]

>The chance of this thing sucking up the world is about the same chance of this sequence of events happening

Thanks for the reassurance! I can sleep easy now.

It will be interesting to see what the LHC produces in terms of data. Unlike Michael H, I'm inclined to take the cosmologists' word on the reality of the Big Bang, and the LHC will apparently duplicate the conditions of that event, in a small way.

[Ross W]

"I'm inclined to take the cosmologists' word on the reality of the Big Bang"

But if they don't find the Higgs Boson, I wonder if Fred Hoyle's "Steady State" theory might make a comeback...what with this mysterious "dark energy" needed to push spacetime apart...sounds akin to Fred's idea of continuous creation from the void.

[Ross W]

Remember "The Black Cloud", Michael H?

[Paul]

Higgs really needs to start looking after those bosons properly - they must be tired of looking for them.

[Michael H]

I never read The Black Cloud, Ross, although the plot sounds fascinating. Another one to add to my list.

The article I linked above, along with several other tidbits I've discovered, does make me wonder if our current favorite cosmological theory is is nothing but an ad-hoc'd fantasy that will one day be viewed with the same amusement that we view the geocentric cosmology of the Middle Ages.

I've outlined those arguments elsewhere, but I think that there's something to plasma cosmology, and the idea that electricity plays a larger role in organizing the universe than is currently accepted by the mainstream. If true, the argument could be made that the entire observable universe is a sort of giant 'organism', which wouldn't surprise me a bit. If consciousness is primary, which I believe it is, then it would make sense to me that there are much higher levels of organization to the cosmos than just silly people like us who think we can figure everything out. Or worse, think we already have. (What did the Greeks say about hubris, Michael?)

There's plenty of particle physicists who suspect that there's some sort of organizing principle (consciousness anyone?) operating on the level of elementary particles, yet there's not a single physicist alive who can begin to explain the mechanism of quantum mechanics. They can tell us what will happen with perfect accuracy. As far as how or why it happens? No one has a clue.

Maybe the LHC will help towards that end. Or maybe not. Fire it up! What's the worst that can happen?

[Hope Rivers]

Back to playing with anagrams... ;-)

"Alec protects him"

Alec = Herring
Alec = Simpleton = Ignorance.

Well herring is a great omega 3 source, which we need suffiecent off it we want to avoid arthritis, keep healthy eye sight, avoid dementia, it protects our brain,

There's now solid evidence it balances behaviours and attention in adults and children. So there you have it...Take your Fish oil people's or start eating more fish if you want to live long lives with all your faculties in good working order. Look to the medditeraneans and the Japanese and Eskimos, they have the longest life spans due to their "fish diet".

Ignorance can protect one also. If we admit we aint experts in every subject besides it being humbling but it diffuses aggression in "others" and protects us from EGO overload.

Another way of looking at it is the famous words from our dear William,

Ignorance = Innocence :-)

A Return to Innocence is the ultimate protection and meaning to our existence.

Matthew 18:1-4
At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, “Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven"

Now does this mean no one enters heaven until he has returned to innocence? or does it mean the "greatest in the kingdom of heaven" is the most highest sphere in the kingdom?

:-)

[Hope Rivers]

See, who said anagrams are silly? If you keeping digging you may find Gold.

[Hope Rivers]

Ok some typos.......this is what I meant.

"The Greatest in the kingdom of heaven"
goes to the most highest sphere in the kingdom.

[Hope Rivers]

Just to confuse this further, Christ at the ressurection assured the thief who was being crucified also they would both enter paradise together, after the thief asked him for forgiveness.

[Hope Rivers]

sorry not Ressurection ......Crucifiction!!!

[Ross W]

Hope, you should become an astrologer. You could interpret anything! Have you tried tea leaves?

[Hope Rivers]

Yes Ross apparently I have in a past life, somewhere between the nun and the courtesan I was a witch apparently ;-).

As far as astrologer........don't get me started!!

[Hope Rivers]

I got two apparently's in one sentence, apparently. lol

[Hope Rivers]

twice!

[Hope Rivers]

Hey Ross you may be taking me way too seriously!!!