Uh -, oh - ; the mad scientists are at it again! In their determination to extract nature's secrets, scientists built a machine so powerful it has raised fears that it might cause the end of the world as we know it.
Enormous sums of money were flowing into this latest project, the so-called "Large Hadron Collider" (LHC) of the international research center CERN. Scientists ask themselves: “What was at the beginning of everything? And how does our universe work?”
They obviously don’t believe that there is a creator. They think that a “Big Bang” created our universe, and are trying to find out what could have happened before the “Big Bang”?
The “Big Bang” is a theory in which the universe supposedly has been expanding for around 13.7 billion years, starting from a tremendously dense and hot state.
So these scientists built a machine to answer that question. CERN's Large Hadron Collider is supposed to determine the nature of subatomic particles that are thought to have last been seen at the big event 10 billion to 15 billion years ago that led to the formation of the universe. They think that the energy of the collision will reproduce conditions that existed a moment after the “Big Bang” created the universe 14 billion years ago. But of course no one can predict what will happen next.
Discarding the Bible, scientists - people with a degree from a university - spent SFr 6 billion ($5.95 billion) to build this accelerator to “unlock the mystery of creation”.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a giant particle accelerator at the Swiss-French border, stretching for 27 km (17 miles) in a circular tunnel, 100 meters underground. This LHC tunnel runs between Lake Geneva and the Jura mountain range and generates temperatures colder than deep space. It has been in construction for 15 years.
The scientists use this collider to explore the make-up of "dark matter" – the invisible mass of energy - that is believed to make up 96% of the universe. Guided by huge magnets, two proton beams spin around the tunnel in opposite directions until they reach a velocity fractionally below the speed of light.
Last week the accelerator smashed particles together at high speeds within that tunnel. Circling the 27 km ring more than 11,000 times a second, they were narrowed to a point less than half the width of a human hair and smashed into each other. A minuscule nut was designed to crack the proton, the heart of the atom. With it, scientists hope to recreate the conditions which existed after the Big Bang theory.
Professor Jos Engelen, CERN's chief scientific officer, admitted that he didn't know what the full impact the results of the experiment will be.
What arrogance of men to question the existence of the Almighty!
Although at the CERN research center experiments have been carried out since the sixties on small particle acceleration with similar atomic crash tests, such a huge big-bang machine has never been implemented before. Firstly, so much energy is set free that tiny black holes could emerge at the collision points. An unsettling vision: in the X-Large-Version in outer space, black holes slurp up everything (even light) in their radius like giant space waste chutes. Will the end of mankind be a self-constructed black mini-hole?
And so today’s mad scientists created an artificial black hole, hunting for that hypothetical particle — the “Higgs boson” — which is sometimes called the "God particle" because it is believed to give mass to all other particles of the dark matter and energy of our universe.
Many of us are stunned to learn that even physicists felt worried enough to mull over the possibility that a new machine might destroy us all!
Even a group of 40 Israeli scientists joined the recreation of the Big Bang in this LHC-machine in Switzerland. They too must think that G-D lied in the Torah when he said that He created the universe.
Of course, there was a Big Bang. There was a BIG BANG when God spoke the universe into its existence!
“Fools say in their hearts, there is no God.” (Psalms 14:1)
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They are still at it - Lilo
Simulation may help solve mystery of dark matter
By Michael Kahn Michael Kahn
Wed Nov 5, 1:03 pm ET
LONDON (Reuters) – A computer simulation showing the formation and evolution of a galaxy like the Milky Way points to where scientists should look to spot dark matter, international researchers reported on Wednesday.
The findings published in the journal Nature move researchers a step closer to unraveling the mystery of the substance that makes up most of the universe, said Carlos Frenk, a cosmologist at Durham University in Britain.
"Discovering what dark matter is, is one of the most fundamental questions scientists can ask," Frenk, who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview.
"Uncovering the identity of the main component of the universe. That is what this is about."
Astronomers believe dark matter -- as opposed to ordinary matter making up the stars, planets and the like -- comprises about 85 percent of the universe's material, but evidence has been difficult to come by because it cannot be directly seen.
It does not reflect light nor normally shine, but astronomers infer its existence in galaxy clusters by observing how its gravity bends the light given off by even more faraway galaxies. They do not know what it is made of, but think it could be a kind of particle.
The international research team looked at a dark matter halo -- structures surrounding galaxies which weigh a trillion times more than the sun.
Their simulations showed how the galaxy's halo grew through a series of violent collisions between much smaller clumps of dark matter that emerged from the Big Bang.
In the densest part of the halo, the dark matter particles collide at high speed to produce a form of radiation called gamma rays. These gamma rays make the halo glow, giving scientists a potential way to detect dark matter.
The findings mean that NASA's Fermi Telescope should search in the part of the galaxy where the researchers predict dark matter should glow in "a smoothly varying and characteristic pattern" where it is easier to see, the researchers said.
That location is near the sun, just off the center of the Milky Way, Frenk said.
"What we have shown through a gigantic simulation is where the gamma rays would come from," he said. "We have given a blueprint for people on where to look and how the signal should appear."
(Reporting by Michael Kahn, Editing by Maggie Fox and Elizabeth Piper)
$8 billion, modern-day Tower of Babel being built?
By Rabbi Avi Shafran
Peering through Maimonides' microscope
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | In its purest form, the human spirit of inquiry is a holy thing. According to the renowned 12th century Jewish thinker Maimonides, nothing less than the Biblical commandment to love G-d is fulfilled when a person investigates nature and, struck by its intricacy and beauty, is filled with awe and gratitude to the Divine.
And so it is exciting to ponder the new aspects of physical reality that might be revealed by the Large Hadron Collider — the 17-mile-circumference particle accelerator that, over 15 years and at a cost of some $8 billion, was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) underneath the French-Swiss border.
Subatomic physics is already a wonderland of strange beauty (not to be confused with "strange" and "beauty" — fanciful names physicists have, at one time or another, given to types of quarks), having revealed that the seemingly mechanistic, clockwork universe we experience in daily life hides astonishing oddities, uncertainties and incomprehensibilities.
Those microcosmic bafflements complement the more readily accessible wonder of the world we experience when we simply look up at the stars, or down into the grass, or at a sunrise, or a newborn baby. The Standard Model — the current theory of how subatomic particles interact — reminds us that not only do the "heavens relate the glory of G-d" (Psalms 19:2) but that "to His wisdom there can be no comprehension" (Isaiah, 40:28).
An ultimate understanding of the universe will likely always evade the mortal mind. But new revelations the LHC might yield — when its gargantuan magnets accelerate streams of particles in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light so that they collide and release their until now unexamined innards — make the mammoth machine a most promising engine of scientific advancement.
Some cheerers-on of that advancement, however, are not exactly motivated by the Maimonidean quest to gain inspiration through a new glimpse of G-d's subtle wisdom. To the contrary, they look to whatever new knowledge the LHC may grant as just further justification for denying the Divine, forklifts with which to pull themselves up onto the pedestal of omniscience. They hope that the LHC will confirm the existence of particles predicted by the latest theories — one such beastie, the Higgs boson, has even been labeled by some the "G-d Particle," for its potential to lead to a grand unified theory of the universe — and thus show that the human mind can fully grasp the totality of creation, and is thus its intellectual master.
And so, while there are many scientists (like astrophysicists Fred Hoyle, Paul Davies and Arno Penzias, to name a few of the most famous) who maintain their human sense of wonder at the world and see purpose in nature, others, like physicist Steven Weinberg, choose to see the cosmos as fascinating but ultimately meaningless. Commenting on the LHC's expected informational yield, he opined that "as science explains more and more, there is less and less need for religious explanations."
Such conceit recalls another technological project, one whose promoters' focus was on the macrocosmic. The builders of the Tower of Babel, the Torah tells us, sought to erect a structure whose top would pierce the heavens, the better to assert their independence from the Divine and "make for ourselves a name." Their plans, of course, were dashed; their arrogance did them in. The LHC was supposed to have already yielded its harvest of new particles by now. On September 10, proton beams were successfully circulated in the main ring of the structure. Nine days later, though, operations were halted, as an electrical fault caused liquid helium to leak into the tunnel, damaging dozens of the LHC's superconducting magnets and contaminating the "collider's ring." Physicists say it will take until next summer to make the necessary repairs.
"Man contemplates, G-d laughs" goes the Yiddish expression (and in that language it nicely rhymes). I don't know if G-d laughed as the glitch rained on the LHC parade. I certainly didn't; I was deeply disappointed. My thoughts, thought, did go back to the builders of Babel, and to how, in monumental projects, success or failure may ultimately hang on intentions.
Will the LHC in fact come to function as planned, and allow us to see deeper into nature? It might just depend on why we're looking in the first place.
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