Quote: SlagA @ September 5 2008, 11:49 AM BST
As to the experiment creating events to which we're none the wiser (calving black holes ino parallel universes), it strikes me as a pretty poorly designed experiment when it culminates in a lot of perplexed shrugging gestures at the end of it. However, it sounds a typically European ending.
I think they do half the things they do because they can
. They probably have a meeting after the experiment has been organised to vote on a reason for it.
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I hope we never get off this planet as the rest of the universe doesn't deserve to have us inflicted on it.
LOL
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Re: Matter and the 'missing' matter. The fact that everything carries mass unexplained by the actual amount of matter we can see. I read one analogy to describe the huge gulfs within an atom: if you remove the interactive forces, people could walk through walls without a single atom (electrons and nuclei) of the wall or the person colliding. Some particles (is it Hadrons, someone?) can pass through the planet without collision with anything solid. We are in a way insubstantial ghosts living in a ghostlike universe where consciousness seems incredibly important in deciding outcome.
I thought it was muons passing through us, but I forget too.
Interesting to see just how much of an atom is empty space. I think someone said that if the nucleas was the size of a pea you'd have to walk half a mile down the road to get to the nearest electron. That's a LOT of empty space - ghostlike indeed! And yeah, electomagnetism is amazing, like so much in the universe.
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It's like inhabitants within an oil painting trying to explain and understand air pressure from outside rippling the canvass. They live in a 2D world so they're incapable of understanding a gust of wind that originates from the 3D world. They're incapable of fully comprehending the room the painting hangs in, let alone the nature of gas, and the physics of the third (and higher) dimensions. In a 2-D world they would experience gravity between objects within the painting but they couldn't explain the much more massive gravity that the Earth would exert on every object within the painting. There would be a hidden mass that they can't explain.
I really like that analogy, really nice! Is it your own?
Quote: Afinkawan @ September 5 2008, 12:49 PM BST
If a black hole is created, it will most likely be microscopic and evaporate almost instantly (look up Hawking radiation).
I don't think anyone is listening/wants to listen.
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SlagA - you might be right with your multidimensional theory. One of the theories about why gravity is so weak is that it acts across all of the 11 or so theoretical spatial dimensions. It is weak in the three we experience because they have spread out. The other 8 dimensions are supposed to be all curled up tight so we can't see them, in which case gravity would work more strongly there. The Higgs Boson may well come from one of these other dimensions if String/Superstring/M- theories are correct. what the LHC will detect will be the string/membrane's extrusion into the three normal spatial dimensions.
I really hope they find at least some evidence to support string theory - even a vanishing graviton would be a huge boost.
I find membranes a bit scary though, it makes you think where the hell does it all stop? But then universes with their very own physical laws, there would be some real, incomprehensible wonders out there.
"especially considering that the guy was apparently going to get me lube." - Robyn, BSG.
