This is research at MIT? :)

Can the Euro LHC top this scientific achievement reported by America's finest news source?

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NY Times or the Onion? Hard to tell :-)

Remember the Large Hadron Collider?  Remember all the hoopla that it would track down the mysterious particles that physicists are looking for?  And how the gigantic collider came to stop almost as soon as it revved up?  How about this for an explanation for what happened?

the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

So, let me get this.  This tiny, tiny, particle whose theoretical existence needs to be validated travelled back in time and threw a spanner in the works, so to say, because it is so abhorrent to nature.  Oh my! 
Guess what?  it is not from the Onion.  It is NY Times science report, which adds:

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.
According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.
“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”
This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

I suppose it is only a very fine line between wisdom from a genius and crap from a nutcase :-)  And, yes, the report addresses that too:

As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

Real news, versus the Onion News Network

My students, and readers of this blog (ed: really? there are readers?) know how much I am a fan of The Onion. But, some times, real news items are so outlandish that they confirm that it is only a very fine line between the Onion's satire and the real world itself. Here is one such example, which one would think that The Onion made it up, but, alas, is a real world news:

A teenage girl agreed to have under-age sex because she wanted to lose her virginity before the Large Hadron Collider caused the end of the world, it has been reported.

I would laugh this off, but for the fact that this is a report in the Telegraph, and it is not an April 1st issue either. How unfortunate that scientific illiteracy results in horrible outcomes!

The Telegraph further notes that:

[Police] in Brisbane, Australia believe that the teenage girl was so scared by the doomsday speculation that she agreed to have under-age sex with a boy in their school lavatories.

Her fears came to light after their sex acts were filmed by another boy at the school, with the footage circulated among pupils via their mobile phones.

Police have launched an investigation under child pornography laws, although The Courier-Mail newspaper reported that they did not expect to bring any charges.

Oh boy!

BTW, if you are curious about the status of the Large Hadron Collider, which came to a halt after a great deal of hype about what the scientific knowledge that it would add:

Unfortunately on 19th September a serious fault developed damaging a number of superconducting magnets. The repair will required a long technical intervention which overlaps with the planned winter shutdown. The LHC beam will, therefore, not see beam again before September 2009.

Given that we are already almost at mid-September, ..... I wonder whether the re-start will not be for a while?

The Large Hadron collider, and SEC college football?

Last week I attended the physics event at the University of Oregon--of course, about the Hadron collider in Europe. One of the questions was, "what is the worst thing that could happen at the LHC?". Jim Brau's response was to the point: if the collider doesn't work, that will be the worst thing.

I wonder if we got a taste of it. Apparently a "30-ton transformer used to power cooling stations for portions of the Large Hadron Collider's (LHC) gigantic superconducting magnets failed last Thursday, just one day after the LHC went online."

So, why the college football piece in the title of the post? Bizarre as it sounds, a headline that I read was "Auburn vs. LSU: SEC's early version of the Hadron Collider". It gets even stranger--the analysis employs more physics stuff:

The “Big Bang” you will hear rumble through the night air around 7:45 EST this Saturday will resonate from the epicenter of Jordan-Hare Stadium, not from Switzerland and France.
I’m not a physicist and I know very little about protons, particles, and kinetic energy but if they’re anything like these Tigers, collision is a very appropriate term to describe these two teams when they meet.

BTW, what is a hadron? Here is the explanation.

And, here is a rappin' explanation of the LHC :-)

Will we be around on September 11th?

These LHC [Large Hadron Collider] opponents fear that the Earth could be destroyed by vacuum bubbles, magnetic monopoles, microscopic black holes, or strangelets produced by the high-energy proton-proton collisions planned by CERN physicists. Vacuum bubbles have been described as a kind of "cosmic cancer." If it turns out that there is a lower energy state into which the universe could settle, then the LHC might produce "bubbles" of such a state which would then expand, ripping apart the Earth and eventually the entire universe. If magnetic monopoles were produced they might induce protons to decay and thus destroy normal matter. Microscopic black holes might grow by gobbling up the Earth. And strangelets are combinations of quarks that theoretically interact with normal matter and transform it into strange matter.

That was Ronald Bailey reporting on the scheduled switching on of the collider on September 10th. Bailey goes on to write, the empirical evidence is that the universe has been running trillions of these high-energy physics "experiments" for billions of years without disastrous results. In fact, Ord's colleagues Nick Bostrom and Max Tegmark from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculate that the empirical evidence suggests a conservative estimate of the annual risk that LHC-like experiments would destroy the earth is 1-in-a-trillion. At the end of his talk, Mangano reminded the Oxford conferees, "Jeopardizing the future of scientific research would be a global catastrophe." Any theory, model, or calculation that suggests otherwise is clearly flawed.

In other words, don't party like it is the end of the world. Interested in understanding how the LHC works? Click here.

The horrible thing is that a few non-scientists (or is that nonsensists?) are so hysterical about the end of the world that, according to the Telegraph, the American Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has even had death threats, said Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University, adding: "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat."
The head of public relations, James Gillies, says he gets tearful phone calls, pleading for the £4.5 billion machine to stop.

BTW, given the significance of September 11th, couldn't the scientists at CERN have picked a different date? At least a week later? Or, is the 10th THE day for the experiment for some cosmological reasons?