Our planet is not at risk from the world’s most powerful particle physics experiment, a report has concluded.
The document addresses fears that the Large Hadron Collider is so energetic, it could have unforeseen consequences.
Critics are worried that mini-black holes made at the soon-to-open facility on the French-Swiss border might threaten the Earth’s very existence.
But the report, issued the European Organization for Nuclear Research, says there is “no conceivable danger”.
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Cold fusion, the act of producing a nuclear reaction at room temperature, has long been relegated to science fiction after researchers were unable to recreate the experiment that first “discovered” the phenomenon. But a Japanese scientist was supposedly able to start a cold fusion reaction earlier this week, which-if the results are real-could revolutionise the way we gather energy.
Yoshiaki Arata, a highly respected physicist in Japan, demonstrated a low-energy nuclear reaction at Osaka University on Thursday. In front of a live audience, including reporters from six major newspapers and two tv studios, Arata and a co-professor Yue-Chang Zhang, produced excess heat and helium atoms from deuterium gas.
Although the bulk of his work involves deriving equations, Cowan’s findings mesh well with laboratory data generated on the cerebral cortex and electroencephalograms. His latest findings show that the same mathematical tools physicists use to describe the behavior of subatomic particles and the dynamics of liquids and solids can now be applied to understanding how the brain generates its various rhythms.
These include the delta waves generated during sleep, the alpha waves of the visual brain, and the gamma waves, discovered during the last decade, which seem related to information processing. “The resting state of brain activity seems to have a statistical structure that’s characteristic of a certain kind of phase transition,” Cowan said. “The brain likes to sit there because that’s the place where information processing is optimized.”
At this stage of his research, Cowan said it would be premature and speculative for him to try to relate how phase transitions in the brain might relate to neurological conditions or states of human consciousness. “That’s for the future,” he said.
(Thanks Jasper!)
See also:
“The builders of the world’s biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.
Representatives at Fermilab in Illinois and at Europe’s CERN laboratory, two of the defendants in the case, say there’s no chance that the Large Hadron Collider would cause such cosmic catastrophes. Nevertheless, they’re bracing to defend themselves in the courtroom as well as the court of public opinion.
The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is due for startup later this year at CERN’s headquarters on the French-Swiss border. It’s expected to tackle some of the deepest questions in science: Is the foundation of modern physics right or wrong? What existed during the very first moment of the universe’s existence? Why do some particles have mass while others don’t? What is the nature of dark matter? Are there extra dimensions of space out there that we haven’t yet detected?
Some folks outside the scientific mainstream have asked darker questions as well: Could the collider create mini-black holes that last long enough and get big enough to turn into a matter-sucking maelstrom? Could exotic particles known as magnetic monopoles throw atomic nuclei out of whack? Could quarks recombine into “strangelets” that would turn the whole Earth into one big lump of exotic matter?”
(via Cosmic Log- MSNBC)
(Related: Virtual tour of LHC via Popular Science Blog)
A new study is challenging the long-standing notion that the whole solar system formed from the same raw materials.
Until now most scientists had believed that the inner solar system bodies-Mercury, Venus, Earth, its moon, and Mars-had the same composition as primitive meteorites called chondrites.
But, problematically, Earth’s chemistry doesn’t quite match.
Now, French researcher Guillaume Caro, from Centre de Recherches P?trographiques et G?ochimiques in France, and his colleagues say that the makeup of Mars and the moon don’t correspond either.
It turns out the three bodies may be more similar to each other than the chondrite-rich asteroids located between Mars and Jupiter.
“It sounds like a headline from the spoof newspaper The Onion, but for physicists, this is actually an achievement: Two teams have stored nothing in a puff of gas and then retrieved it a split second later. Storing a strange form of vacuum builds on previous efforts in which researchers stopped light in its tracks (ScienceNOW, 22 January 2001) and may mark a significant step toward new quantum information and telecommunication technologies.
To stop light, researchers first shine an intense and continuous beam of laser light into a gas of atoms. That “control beam” tickles the atoms to allow a pulse of laser light of another wavelength to enter the gas. To trap the pulse, researchers turn off the control beam, which causes the pulse to imprint itself on the atoms. To release it again, they turn on the control laser.
So storing a vacuum might sound ridiculously simple: Follow the same procedure but leave out the pulse, and you store nothing. However, Alexander Lvovsky of the University of Calgary in Canada and his colleagues and Mikio Kozuma of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan and his group have stored a very peculiar type of nothingness called a “squeezed vacuum.”
(via Science Now)
More from TED, but considerably less grim:
Wired: Your entire career has been focused, in essence, on your rejection of string theory. What do you have against strings and extra dimensions?
Garrett Lisi: It’s more accurate to say my career (or, often, lack of one) has been focused on doing what I wanted. There are a lot of good things about string theory, and it’s great that some people want to work on it. But, to me, it seemed too disconnected from real particle physics and gravitation. It seemed unlikely that many of these string constructions could ever be experimentally tested, or connected up with the real world. So I set off to follow my own interests.
I got this email from my good friend Jason this morning regarding a series of literary fantasy novels I posted about a short time ago, The Prince of Nothing, by R. Scott Bakker:
You got read this on the Three Seas Forum, this cat Deadshade, is a phd physicist with a specialty in QM, his synopsis/interpretation is eloquent, elaborate, and utterly breathtaking. it essentially toches ground on alot of our dicussions on the subject/s, but his training and education enables him to elucidate in a way we were not!! check it out homes, if the link doesnt work just go to the forum and look for the topic “Inchoroi motivations & Quantum Mechanics”. I got so excited after reading it i had to print it off….
For fans of the books, the post on the Three Seas forum will be of interest.
PS — SPOILER. While it doesn’t ruin the overall story, it’s a spoiler nonetheless.
“Dr HongSheng Zhao, of the University’s School of Physics and Astronomy, has shown that the puzzling dark matter and its counterpart dark energy may be more closely linked than was previously thought. Only 4% of the universe is made of known material – the other 96% is traditionally labelled into two sectors, dark matter and dark energy. A British astrophysicist and Advanced Fellow of the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, Dr Zhao points out, ‘Both dark matter and dark energy could be two faces of the same coin.
‘As astronomers gain understanding of the subtle effects of dark energy in galaxies in the future, we will solve the mystery of astronomical dark matter at the same time. Astronomers believe that both the universe and galaxies are held together by the gravitational attraction of a huge amount of unseen material, first noted by the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in 1933, and now commonly referred to as dark matter. Dr Zhao reports that, “Dark energy has already revealed its presence by masking as dark matter 60 years ago if we accept that dark matter and dark energy are linked phenomena that share a common origin.’
(via PhysOrg)
(Related: virtual tour of the Large Hadron Collider via Popular Science Blog)
It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.
If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.
(via Hit and Run, who point out the similarities to Hindu cosmology).
If I read this correctly, this theory is seen more as a problem in the same vein as Schrodinger’s Cat – ie, not a “proof” that this is the way the universe is, but as evidence that current theories are insufficient. None the less, I’m sure it, like Schrodinger’s Cat, will be used “scientific evidence” of all sorts of nonsense.
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