Happy Sept 11!

Well, it appears that nobody slipped into another dimension yet.

For the unenlightened the fired up the LHC last night.  Actually it’ll be a while before they start colliding things.  Basically the LHC is a giant ring and they’re going to use magnets to accelerate a couple streams of photons.  These streams of photons travel around the ring in opposing directions.  When they reach the proper energy level they adjust the orbit a little so they smash into each other.  Then the scientists all hold their breath and see what they created.

To get an idea of scale, the ring is about 27km in diameter, it’d take about 20 minutes to drive from one side to the other.  That of course assuming customs doesn’t hold you up, because it crosses the border of France and Switzerland.  The photons, not concerned with things like borders, can lap the ring in about 90 microseconds.  (Now if only we can figure out how to attach illegal immigrants and drugs to photons)

So how about a word problem?  If photon X leaves France heading towards Switzerland at the speed of light, and another photon Y leaves Switzerland at the speed of light heading towards France.  What will happen when they collide?

They’re hoping to find Higgs Boson (Steven Hawking has a $100 bet against it).  So far the Higgs Boson has remained elusive and the LHC is designed specifically to bring it out of hiding.  Some other possible creations have been hypothesised.  It could create black holes, though scientists are reasonably certain they’ll be small and evaporate before they have a chance to swallow the planet.  It could create a repeat of the big bang.  Which could be cool having a new universe on Earth, aside from that whole issue of universes stereotypically being kind of large.  It could also open a portal to a new dimension.  It could be fun, can you imagine we could just hop over to a parallel universe and steal all their resources, then put some boards up over the gate way.  The whole fighting off giant monsters from another dimension could put a damper on that.

There is only a small chance of catastrophe of course.  Normally when a mad scientist tries to blow up the earth the British send a secret agent after them and chronicle the ordeal in video documentaries.

Anyway, on a less catastrophic scale.  Dialup really sucks.  What’s worse than dialup is youtube playing  nasty with my bandwidth.  ytimg.com apparently loads a pile of stuff in the background.  One minute your browser will be doing nothing, next minute it’ll still be doing nothing but your bandwidth will be maxed.  Very poor manners.  I guess youtube doesn’t work without it.  Not a concern if you have bandwidth to spare, but if you’re on dialup it’s a problem.