Super-Technology.
Physics at its finest.
One of the biggest, most expensive science experiments of all time.
“Building a contraption like the LHC to find the Higgs is a bit like embarking on a career as a stand-up comic with the hope that at some point in your career you’ll happen to blurt out a joke that’s not only side-splittingly funny but also a palindrome.”
I heard about the LHC in the office for the first time this week. Yes, it’s true — I live in a black hole. Since Comcast is unwilling to supply cable to my house because it is one mile outside of their jurisdiction; and I simply loathe the idea of affixing a plastic bowl-on-a-pedestal to the roof of my house, I do not currently subscribe to television programming.
Furthermore, being relatively new to Dynamic Edge, I find myself doing a lot of on-the-job-learning, and late nights reading about technology and marketing… shameless plug, but I digress.
Needless to say, I knew nothing about the Super Particle Accelerator until Tuesday, when I learned that the world is allegedly going to end sometime in the year 2012; and that it is several people’s opinion that it may be caused by “worm holes” that a particle accelerator created or something like that.
“Nonsense,” I thought to myself. “These guys watch way too much science fiction.” I proceeded to make a bet with Jason, one of our programmers that the world would not end in 2012, the stakes being a $200 glass of brandy at La Dolce Vita in downtown Ann Arbor. Knowing that if the world actually did end in 2012 (losing me the bet), I would most certainly be dead — and therefore, not obliged to pay up — I took the odds, whatever they were.
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And then, in my quest for learning, I started reading about the LHC. I found an outstanding article on National Geographic’s website that put the project in layman’s terms. So that if any of you, like me, need things rather carefully explained: click here. My favorite part of this article on particles is that, for non-scientific minds (like mine) the coined phrased “God Particle” makes the concept of the Higgs boson make a lot more sense.
In essence, they’re building the world’s largest and most expensive particle accelerator to smash protons together in hopes of finding a trace of the God Particle’s existence (or as the Joel Achenbach puts it “the detritus of the disintegrating Higgs.”) Achenbach elucidates that the basic princible of the LHC is “simple but ambitious: to crack the code of the physical world; to figure out what the universe is made of; in other words, to get to the very bottom of things.” I highly recommend reading the full article.
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So what do you think? Will I get that $200 glass of brandy or what!?
