By Antonio C. Abaya
September 11, 2008
If this essay manages to see print on September 11, it means that the world has not come to an end, as some have feared, on September 10.
On this day, European and American physicists working at the CERN – Conseil Europeenne pour la Recherche Nucleaire or European Council for Nuclear Research – will turn on something called the Large Hadron Collider, a ring-shaped underground particle accelerator, 27 kms in circumference, located near Geneva, Switzerland.
What in the world is a particle accelerator, and why would anyone want to accelerate particles anyway?
Particle accelerators, known earlier as atom smashers, have been a standard tool of nuclear physicists long before the development of the nuclear or atomic bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In their early versions, atom smashers accelerated particles, like positively-charged protons, to high speeds in order
to smash the nucleus of a heavy atom like, say, uranium.
The debris that resulted from the controlled smash-up, described by the arc that they blazed in a magnetic field, told physicists what lighter atoms resulted from the break-up of the heavy uranium atom, as well as the energy, if any, that was released in the process.
Without atom smashers or particle accelerators, there would have been no atomic or nuclear bombs, and there would have been no nuclear reactors that peacefully generate electricity.
And just in case anyone will draw a cautionary tale from this and wag his or her finger at the Americans for having atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it should be pointed out that one of the prominent pioneers in nuclear research then was a Japanese physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in, I believe, 1936. And of course there were other Nobel Prize winners among the physicists in Nazi Germany, many of them Jewish who managed to escape, mostly to the US, before they could be rounded up for the gas chambers.,.
The implication is that if the Japanese militarists or the Nazi Germans had developed the nuclear bomb ahead of the Americans and the British in the Manhattan Project, they would have atom-bombed New York, London, and/or Los Angeles just as readily as the Americans did Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But I digress. In the next few weeks or months, the scientists at CERN want to accelerate protons to speeds up to 99.9999 percent of the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), using the Large Hadron Collider. One stream of protons will travel clockwise, another stream of protons will travel counter-clockwise. They are theorizing that the collision of protons will shed some light on some unanswered questions in theoretical physics.
Critics warn that the collision, which will last for a mere fraction of a second, may create tiny “black holes” which could eventually grow to the point of swallowing up Planet Earth. Black holes are phenomena in space in which entire galaxies are swallowed up by dying stars. They are called black holes because their gravitation pull is so strong that not even light can escape from their vortices.
The scientists at CERN also hope to find a sub-atomic particle that has only been theorized by physicist Peter Higgs of Scotland, called the Higgs boson, also known as the God Particle. Higgs’ boson is supposed to explain what gives mass to matter. By replicating what they think were the conditions in the cosmos at the time of the Big Bang, scientists hope to uncover the secrets and early processes of the universe..
I do not claim to understand quantum mechanics or the String Theory, but some four decades ago I developed my own cosmology.
In my cosmology, there is no beginning and there is no end. Four decades ago, astronomers and physicists were divided between the Big Bang theory and the Steady State theory as the most logical explanation of the cosmos. In time, the Big Bang theory won out, and the CERN experiment seeks to find out what happened during the first billionths of a second after the Big Bang, from which the rest of the cosmos is said to have evolved..
But even if they were to find that out, it would still leave unanswered the next logical question of what happened, or what was there, before the Big Bang. In my cosmology, this question is not the final riddle because there is no beginning and there is no end.
In classical physics, it was believed that matter and energy were separate entities that could not be created or destroyed, one into or from the other. But in relativistic physics, it is accepted that matter – or more correctly, mass – and energy are two aspects of the same reality, expressed in Einstein’s famous equation E=MC2..(Sorry, but I do not know how to click exponents on the computer.) The energy of a quantity of matter is equal to its mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light.
In my cosmology, there is no beginning and there is no end because mass is constantly being transformed into energy, as in black holes; and energy is constantly being transformed into mass, as in Big Bangs. It is a process that happens and has happened all through time all throughout the universe, of which we know only a fraction, even with the most powerful optical and radio telescopes.
But even with this limited empirical knowledge, I find it hard to imagine space where there is nothing, not even light from distant galaxies. Where there is nothing, there is also no time, time attaining a reality only from the movement of celestial bodies relative to each other.
The CERN scientists believe that the collision of high-speed protons may reveal not only the God Particle, but also the existence of as many as11 dimensions, seven more than what we are aware of : length, width, depth and space-time. And the key may be, in my cosmology, the presence, origin and behavior of anti-matter.
The matter that we know in our daily lives is made up of atoms with nuclei of positively charged protons and neutral neutrons, around which orbit negatively charged electrons. But scientists know from their experiments that there is also such a thing as anti-matter, which is made up of the mirror opposites of matter: negatively charged protons and positively charged electrons (called positrons). Scientists also know that when matter and anti-matter collide, they annihilate each other, producing pure energy.
In my cosmology, there are both matter and anti-matter in the cosmos, and when they collide –as they possibly do more often than we are at present aware of – they annihilate each other and produce pure energy which scientists have not yet fully learned how to track.. There is no beginning and there is no end.
While we are waiting for our matter to collide with anti-matter, we can while away the time by reading Dan Brown’s other novel, Angels and Demons, which he wrote before The Da Vinci Code. In this other novel, which has the same hero, Robert Langdon, scientists at CERN – the same CERN which is now preparing to end the world, according to their critics – have created a quarter of a gram of anti-matter which they have stored inside a special magnetic canister. (See my earlier article Angels and Terrorists, April 06, 2005.)
A rogue scientist steals the canister and brings it to the Vatican where the College of Cardinals is being convened to elect a new Pope. Here the real villain threatens to release the anti-matter (and blow up the entire Vatican) if his evil scheme were not given play.
Instead of the Priory of Sion, this novel has another secret society called the Illuminati. And instead of an albino monk from the Opus Dei, it has a malevolent papal chamberlain or camerlengo. And instead of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci in the Louvre, it has statues by the 17th century sculptor Gian Carlo Bernini located in various places around Rome, where clues are cleverly hidden and deduced by the hero…
Angels and Demons is scheduled to be released as a movie sometime in the spring of 2009. That is assuming the scientists in the real CERN do not inadvertently feed Planet Earth into a Black Hole soon. *****
Reactions to tonyabaya@gmail.com. Other articles in acabaya.blogspot.com. Tony on YouTube in www.tapatt.org.
September 11, 2008
If this essay manages to see print on September 11, it means that the world has not come to an end, as some have feared, on September 10.
On this day, European and American physicists working at the CERN – Conseil Europeenne pour la Recherche Nucleaire or European Council for Nuclear Research – will turn on something called the Large Hadron Collider, a ring-shaped underground particle accelerator, 27 kms in circumference, located near Geneva, Switzerland.
What in the world is a particle accelerator, and why would anyone want to accelerate particles anyway?
Particle accelerators, known earlier as atom smashers, have been a standard tool of nuclear physicists long before the development of the nuclear or atomic bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In their early versions, atom smashers accelerated particles, like positively-charged protons, to high speeds in order
to smash the nucleus of a heavy atom like, say, uranium.
The debris that resulted from the controlled smash-up, described by the arc that they blazed in a magnetic field, told physicists what lighter atoms resulted from the break-up of the heavy uranium atom, as well as the energy, if any, that was released in the process.
Without atom smashers or particle accelerators, there would have been no atomic or nuclear bombs, and there would have been no nuclear reactors that peacefully generate electricity.
And just in case anyone will draw a cautionary tale from this and wag his or her finger at the Americans for having atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it should be pointed out that one of the prominent pioneers in nuclear research then was a Japanese physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in, I believe, 1936. And of course there were other Nobel Prize winners among the physicists in Nazi Germany, many of them Jewish who managed to escape, mostly to the US, before they could be rounded up for the gas chambers.,.
The implication is that if the Japanese militarists or the Nazi Germans had developed the nuclear bomb ahead of the Americans and the British in the Manhattan Project, they would have atom-bombed New York, London, and/or Los Angeles just as readily as the Americans did Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But I digress. In the next few weeks or months, the scientists at CERN want to accelerate protons to speeds up to 99.9999 percent of the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), using the Large Hadron Collider. One stream of protons will travel clockwise, another stream of protons will travel counter-clockwise. They are theorizing that the collision of protons will shed some light on some unanswered questions in theoretical physics.
Critics warn that the collision, which will last for a mere fraction of a second, may create tiny “black holes” which could eventually grow to the point of swallowing up Planet Earth. Black holes are phenomena in space in which entire galaxies are swallowed up by dying stars. They are called black holes because their gravitation pull is so strong that not even light can escape from their vortices.
The scientists at CERN also hope to find a sub-atomic particle that has only been theorized by physicist Peter Higgs of Scotland, called the Higgs boson, also known as the God Particle. Higgs’ boson is supposed to explain what gives mass to matter. By replicating what they think were the conditions in the cosmos at the time of the Big Bang, scientists hope to uncover the secrets and early processes of the universe..
I do not claim to understand quantum mechanics or the String Theory, but some four decades ago I developed my own cosmology.
In my cosmology, there is no beginning and there is no end. Four decades ago, astronomers and physicists were divided between the Big Bang theory and the Steady State theory as the most logical explanation of the cosmos. In time, the Big Bang theory won out, and the CERN experiment seeks to find out what happened during the first billionths of a second after the Big Bang, from which the rest of the cosmos is said to have evolved..
But even if they were to find that out, it would still leave unanswered the next logical question of what happened, or what was there, before the Big Bang. In my cosmology, this question is not the final riddle because there is no beginning and there is no end.
In classical physics, it was believed that matter and energy were separate entities that could not be created or destroyed, one into or from the other. But in relativistic physics, it is accepted that matter – or more correctly, mass – and energy are two aspects of the same reality, expressed in Einstein’s famous equation E=MC2..(Sorry, but I do not know how to click exponents on the computer.) The energy of a quantity of matter is equal to its mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light.
In my cosmology, there is no beginning and there is no end because mass is constantly being transformed into energy, as in black holes; and energy is constantly being transformed into mass, as in Big Bangs. It is a process that happens and has happened all through time all throughout the universe, of which we know only a fraction, even with the most powerful optical and radio telescopes.
But even with this limited empirical knowledge, I find it hard to imagine space where there is nothing, not even light from distant galaxies. Where there is nothing, there is also no time, time attaining a reality only from the movement of celestial bodies relative to each other.
The CERN scientists believe that the collision of high-speed protons may reveal not only the God Particle, but also the existence of as many as11 dimensions, seven more than what we are aware of : length, width, depth and space-time. And the key may be, in my cosmology, the presence, origin and behavior of anti-matter.
The matter that we know in our daily lives is made up of atoms with nuclei of positively charged protons and neutral neutrons, around which orbit negatively charged electrons. But scientists know from their experiments that there is also such a thing as anti-matter, which is made up of the mirror opposites of matter: negatively charged protons and positively charged electrons (called positrons). Scientists also know that when matter and anti-matter collide, they annihilate each other, producing pure energy.
In my cosmology, there are both matter and anti-matter in the cosmos, and when they collide –as they possibly do more often than we are at present aware of – they annihilate each other and produce pure energy which scientists have not yet fully learned how to track.. There is no beginning and there is no end.
While we are waiting for our matter to collide with anti-matter, we can while away the time by reading Dan Brown’s other novel, Angels and Demons, which he wrote before The Da Vinci Code. In this other novel, which has the same hero, Robert Langdon, scientists at CERN – the same CERN which is now preparing to end the world, according to their critics – have created a quarter of a gram of anti-matter which they have stored inside a special magnetic canister. (See my earlier article Angels and Terrorists, April 06, 2005.)
A rogue scientist steals the canister and brings it to the Vatican where the College of Cardinals is being convened to elect a new Pope. Here the real villain threatens to release the anti-matter (and blow up the entire Vatican) if his evil scheme were not given play.
Instead of the Priory of Sion, this novel has another secret society called the Illuminati. And instead of an albino monk from the Opus Dei, it has a malevolent papal chamberlain or camerlengo. And instead of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci in the Louvre, it has statues by the 17th century sculptor Gian Carlo Bernini located in various places around Rome, where clues are cleverly hidden and deduced by the hero…
Angels and Demons is scheduled to be released as a movie sometime in the spring of 2009. That is assuming the scientists in the real CERN do not inadvertently feed Planet Earth into a Black Hole soon. *****
Reactions to tonyabaya@gmail.com. Other articles in acabaya.blogspot.com. Tony on YouTube in www.tapatt.org.
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