The Mother of All Supercollisions
by sarabeth at 6:00 am on November 23rd, 2009 in Droppin ScienceCERN’s Large Hadron Collider is up and running again, and physicists are drooling at the prospect of the insights they are poised to gain into the basic mysteries of matter. (And dark matter, and antimatter, too, for that matter.)
Scientists moved Saturday to prepare the world’s largest atom smasher for exploring the depths of matter after successfully restarting the $10 billion machine following more than a year of repairs.
[...]
The next step, possibly later Saturday, was to decide whether to collide beams in the detectors to get necessary measuring data or to try using the machine to accelerate the protons to higher energy than any machine has ever reached, said (CERN spokesman James Gillies).
[...]
The LHC is expected soon to be running with more energy the (sic) world’s current most powerful accelerator, the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago. It is supposed to keep ramping up to seven times the energy of Fermilab in coming years.This will allow the collisions between protons to give insights into dark matter and what gives mass to other particles, and to show what matter was in the microseconds of rapid cooling after the Big Bang that many scientists theorize marked the creation of the universe billions of years ago.
“What matter was in the microseconds of rapid cooling after the Big Bang” sounds really very exciting indeed. It also reminds us that, regardless of how well-established the Big Bang theory is, there is so much we don’t understand about the Big Bang. For example, what exactly was it that went bang?
Without pretending to know the answer, astro-anthropology will eventually reveal that the following creation myth seems to exist in slightly different forms in widely separated galactic cultures in many different universes:
An immensity of time ago, in some incomprehensible other universe or dimension of existence, a scientific culture became very advanced. Advanced enough to start seriously investigating how its universe came into existence. Not just sophisticated enough to speculate on these matters, but technologically advanced enough to seriously investigate. They started to conduct various high-energy experiments. In the fullness of time, they graduated to very high-energy experiments.
It was known — or at least widely believed — that their universe was born in a moment of cataclysmic explosion, followed by rapid expansion. In the attempt to understand the nature of their universe, especially in the nano-moments just after this explosion, they began to collide beams of elementary particles at greater and greater speeds.
And so it came to pass that they built themselves the Mother of All Supercolliders. And in this super-machine, they were able to have mighty beams of protons whizzing along amazingly close to the speed of light. Two beams, whizzing along in opposite directions, amazingly close to the speed of light. Two beams, whizzing along in opposite directions, amazingly close to the speed of light, and then smashing into each other in the Mother of All Supercollisions. A Mother of All Supercollisions that would recreate what matter was like in the nano-seconds just after the Big Bang that they believed had created their universe billions of years ago.
Only, lo and behold, when they created the Mother of All Supercollisions, there was nobody any more to observe the ensuing moment of cataclysmic explosion, followed by rapid expansion.
So know only this: from Supercollisions we came, and to Supercollisions shall we return.
According to physicists, it is entirely possible that there are an infinite number of universes. So why not an infinite series of universes, the annihilation of one giving birth to the next?
Post a Comment