Particle Accelerators and Parallel Universes
Tristan Gulliford
The Times online reported recently that a data communications grid built to transfer data from the world's largest particle accelerator may be able to function as an alternate Internet, with speeds about 10,000 times faster than an average broadband connection. This network - referred to in the article simply as “the grid” - was built with modern fiber optic technology and currently has 55,000 servers connecting the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland with eleven locations internationally. The grid was built to house the data coming from CERN's newest project: the world's largest particle accelerator. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is designed to study the inner workings of matter and perhaps even discover the elusive Higgs Boson particle. Internet history buffs may recall that Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while researching at CERN.
Although this new, cutting edge grid will most likely not be available for public use, it may eventually be tapped into by telecom corporations and government agencies. Currently the grid is being used for academic research, and according to the Times article, it has already been used to calculate potential chemicals for a malaria drug, analyzing 140 million compounds -- a data computing task that would have taken 420 years using standard Internet-linked computers. Potential benefits of an accelerated communications network of this magnitude might include more widely accessible video conferencing (and some are speculating holographic conferencing as well), online games with hundreds of thousands of players connected together simultaneously, and the ability to download a full length movie file in less than three seconds.
While these possibilities of rapid information exchange and scientific discovery are no doubt astounding, and could radically change the world we live in, there are possible dangers as well. In March, former nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner and another critic, Luis Sancho, filed a suit against the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation, and CERN in an effort to stall the LHC project (currently scheduled to be activated by the end of summer) to allow for more research about safety concerns. The suit also asks for a full environmental review of the project by the U.S. Government, particularly in regards to certain doomsday scenarios which Wagner and other critics claim are possible. According to critics of the CERN project, possible scenarios involving the impact of the Large Hadron Collider on the natural environment might be immensely catastrophic and extremely bizarre, and could potentially even alter the very fabric of our reality.
One of their concerns is that the mini-black holes generated by this machine could eventually coalesce into a larger black hole that would then begin absorbing matter. Another possibility is that new combinations of quarks could come into existence, creating a stable, negatively-charged strangelet which could turn everything it touches into strangelets as well – plunging us into a parallel universe of stable, negatively-charged strangelets. Yet another theory is that high-energy collisions in the LHC could result in massive particles that only have one magnetic pole, rather than the typical north-south pole magnetism with which we are familiar. Critics worry that such particles could start a huge chain reaction, converting atoms into different forms of matter.
Even contemplating the possibility of such occurrences is a bizarre undertaking. While scientists have claimed that the CERN particle accelerator project is safe, no one is able to guarantee the results of sub-atomic particle experiments that have never been performed. A 2003 CERN report called “Study of Potentially Dangerous Events During Heavy-Ion Collisions at the LHC” assessed some of these dangers and found no basis for a threat. Yet Wagner contends that more research is required before the project should move forward.
While these hypothetical fears may seem laughable, this is nonetheless a somber situation that we face: living in a world with technologies now so advanced that they may be capable of erasing our reality in the blink of an eye. Such man-made doomsday scenarios are not limited to concerns about the LHC project either. Similar grim concerns have been voiced in recent years about the potential catastrophes of out of control nanotech, and the ominous specter of nuclear winter which still lingers from the days of the Cold war. While it seems that such world-devastation scenarios are becoming increasingly plausible, perhaps one of the most pressing questions facing the 21st century scientist, and the public at large, is: Even though we know we can... should we?
Tristan Gulliford is a writer, dreamer, and aspiring myth-keeper who makes electronic music under the name "Dreamcode". He is currently attending the University of Colorado at Boulder.
"The Large Hadron Collider" image by Image Editor on Flickr used courtesy of a Creative Commons license.
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The Most Complex Bear Trap Ever Made
...and they have to use it. Its like a machine gun - you have to pull the trigger, it urges you to. Just a little squeeze.
I had no idea the CERN project could potentially hit delete on our reality though. That's amazing...I sort of hope something crazy happens. What a can of worms! Of course I also hope nothing crazy happens, and Higgs Boson is revealed to be a boring old man in a grey cardigan worried about Peak Oil. One of the ego contra self paradoxes of the end times, I guess.
The trouble I see with our technologies at present is that they are based on a mentalised way of interacting with the universe that has been past its sell by date since those sexy machine guns murdered the human form divine in the slaughterhouse of WW1.
So, should we flick the LHC on? No. Should we allow scientists to play with anything that could fundamentally alter our being to an unknown and irrevocable degree. No. Not until science feels itself to be growing from both Eros and Logos. Otherwise they risk submitting to a cavalier or even grudging narcissitic nihilism that negates a future already sprouted whose ethos is "will to power" or, in other words, health: the one shared universal value.
PS Any poets at RS might enjoy this interview with erotic scientist Peter Redgrove: http://www.poetryandscience.co.uk/essay_show.php?title=THE%20SCIENCE%20O...
activate grid
i say go for it
i am pretty sure we will be ready for the LHC when it hits
its MAD MAD MAD
Unfounded Paranoia.
Not wanting to flip the "on" switch on the LHC for fear of drastically altering the fabric of Earthen reality is the same thing as not wanting to go outside for fear of getting struck by lightning. Sure, its possible that the LHC could toss us all into some parareality or worse, but the odds of that as Sir Martin Rees has explained are about one in fifty million.
The LHC is a research project with great potential for physical research, and while I agree with some of the comments that we have ventured to far from Eros, the operation of the LHC is not the same thing as experimentation with the newest purposefully destructive scientific toy.
I've read a great deal of these pieces railing against the operation of the LHC, and I must say, I believe they are profoundly misleading, unintelligible, or some combination of both. The LHC will only help physical scientists understand more about the physical universe.
Is it a problem that the scientific establishment refuses to include the necessity of the self, love, and unity in their model of the cosmos? Yes, it is. However, it is also problematic when unfounded paranoia stops the progress of good science.
good science...... good
Faster faster bang bang
connecting hundreds of gamers and faster downloads.
Holographic conferencing sounds ultra neato, but discovering other dimensions and learning more about dark matter/dark energy gets me more enthused.
I want to know less about super fast computing to develop more drugs and more about how it could allow us a deeper understanding of the fundamental laws of nature and what that truly means.
Remember Vonnegut...
All this talk of "strangelets" and slaughterhouses reminds of the finale to Cat's Cradle... a world frozen by the sub-atomic Midas touch of "ice-9"
As for CERN, I looked into this years ago. (2008 sounded pretty far away then.) Regardless of the astronomical odds posed for the LHC to implode the earth, it is a monumental project like none that has been attempted before. Something amazing will come of it, one way or the other.
The difference is.....
Blocking the sun?
Nice
Aha, and here I was thinking our future was looking more and more like "Harrison Bergeron"!
I might be off-course, but I thought I heard somewhere that particle acceleraton technology might provide new understandings about zero-point energy. Is this correct?
there is something funny
about this, let me see, it has a particle accelerator. but where does the particle and the accelerator, one to do the thing, and the other to be flung through some huge device, to find out if some theoretical particle, exists? and so what if it does? Will that stop greed and wars, and hunger? What is the genetic code? a GOD particle?
or is this really another stargate experiment, that now has no need of a person or persons to push the next quantum N-velope, but don't all the other theories about DNA also connect with this, if the ultimate particle is what, the answer to all our prayers? or the infinite chance that the particle dosen't exist? Or we will be gulpt by a mini-me dark matter hole oh, its all about communication.
SO if the ultamite particle exists, we will communicate ourselves to the cosmos.But it seems that we are still acting like people that just crawled out of a cave, and civilization is nothing more then an excuse to say you are either/or.
oh this is all so strange, if we are intelligent evolved beings, and we have miles and miles of technology of the most advanced type, and still we don't know to tie our quantum shoe strings.
makes me want to fling my chalk at the chalk board.I can draw an infinity sign, but i can't tell the particle from the infinity.
as nassim haramein says
omega point
It all sounds suspiciously like Teilhard de Chardin's notion of the Omega Point -
'Teilhard imagines a critical threshold, Omega Point, in which mankind will have reached its highest point of complexification (socialization) and thus its highest point of consciousness. At this point consciousness will rupture through time and space and assert itself on a higher plane of existence from which it can not come back' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Complexity/Consciousness
It's also interesting that Mckenna said -
'The Eschaton is conceived of as a boundaryless and causeless chaotic attractor that is drawing all space and time deeper into states of novel connection and complexity.'
Could this 'chaotic attractor' take the form of a black hole?
the singularity is near,
About the black hole issue
its not just about a blackhole
Mutual Exclusivity.
You can be pro-science, and pro-spirituality. These two things are not mutually exclusive.
The stunning lack of support for the progress of science in this thread is really disturbing to me.
There is no evidence to suggest that the LHC at CERN is going to cause any of these far-fetched disaster scenarios.
I agree that we are all fractal patterns in the infinite fractal that is this universe, and while I'm sure that the scientists at the LHC don't agree with that, it should not be the precept on which we insist they cease their scientific experimentation.
I am not here to deny that science has caused its share of extremely serious problems, but it has also offered us valuable technological progress. Religion can, and has, acted in similar ways. Yes, I do realize that religion and spirituality are very different things, but much blood has been shed in the name of the whatever one true religion was popular at the time.
Its the same with anything we do as humans, there is a give and a take. And while it certainly may seem at times that the science has been taking much more than it has been giving - I would say it only seems that way because we choose to focus so much on the negatives in these trying times.
The research at the LHC at CERN is important, and I, it seems only for one, would hate to see it stopped by some overly worried sudden armchair theoretical physicists.
i donno
the force
get off the pot
who is on the pot?
m hmmmm, you need to brush up on your science, dood!
Einstein, had some great thoughts, but even with that, he believed matter made energy.
the science that make bombs, nuclear reactors, and Monster-santo, and all that SCI- FI
meanwhile, the scientists that got short shrift by the scientific establishment, are quietly going about the work of energy that comes from the source, free like.
Humans are the Universe's Reset button
I offer the 1998 Addendum to my essay "Why Nature Grew Humans" - http://www.raysender.com/maybenature.html
Having given some further thought to the question of why nature grew humans, I’ve decided that we may have been evolved as the reset-button-pushers for the universe – or at least for our solar system. One way that Great10 Grandpa Lem could make sure that the universe would not run away with itself forever or grow cold and dim was to create an ever-more-curious critter that always wondered, “Now what if I put these two things together and turned on the – OH SHI – !” As physicists investigate the Big Bang instant more and more closely, attempting to recreate the forces unleashed in that first micro-micro second, they build devices that duplicate that first spark ever hotter and hotter. Perhaps some day one of them will be able to reach the amazing temperatures required and – WHOOM!!! – the whole darn city-continent-planet-solar system – galaxy? – will explode into a mega-supernova that absorbs all of space/time into itself in a faster-than-light twenty-seven-dimensional unbelievable cataclysm. We are Great10 Grandpa Lem’s reset button! It may be so!