A spot of LHC bashing
The recently commissioned Large Hadron Collider has been temporarily shut down due to a technical problem.
Some of the magnets used to direct beams of particles around the collider have over-heated, just over a week after the facility was switched on with a great fanfare.
One hopes this thing, which cost $10 billion, isn’t going to turn into the most expensive lemon of all time.
But aside from any qualms one might have about the LHC’s technical reliability, there are deeper philosophical considerations we should be examining.
The machine is intended to recreate, on albeit a far smaller scale, the conditions that obtained within a few nanoseconds of the Big Bang.
But what then? Will humanity then clamour for even Bigger and Better Bangs for their megabucks? Where will it all end?
UPDATE
Doomsday machine malfunction opens fairly largish beer window
The end of the world has been set back further, because the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider “will be down for two months as a section will have to be repaired because of a fault.”
Bummer! So, what will you do with this reprieve-time, eh?
Labels: cosmology, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it, science
posted by Jacob A. Stam at 9/20/2008 02:55:00 PM
3 Comments:
Another schooner of black please.
If you search Google News for "Knut" you will realise that the heroic German man who cared for Knut, the little polar bear, has been found dead in his Berlin apartment. You will recall that Knut is the baby bear that the left wanted dead. Berlin police have not yet been able to establish a connection between the death of the keeper and the hatred the left had toward the baby. "Natural causes" is all that is being released in curiously short reports.
1. The LHC falls down.
2. Thomas Doerflein dies mysteriously.
I agree, it's all too much of a coincidence.
As for Knut, word is that he has grown up to become a "publicity-addicted psycho bear".
So the Left was Right all along, he should have just been allowed to die.
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