The Large Hadron Collider — Followup

Paul Halpern‘s talk on The Large Hadron Collider at Philcon on 11/21/2009 came off well.  I’ve since had a chance to read his Collider: The Search for the World’s Smallest Particles since.  The talk was basically the book light or, if you prefer, the book is the talk heavy.   Good jobs either way.

Paul had  a lot of fun with the idea that someone (from the future) is maliciously trying to keep us pitiful humans from building a high energy collider; first the money difficulties the Superconducting Super-Collider had in Texas and then the explosion at the Large Hadron Collider.  But now that the LHC is in fact colliding (if not yet at full strength), perhaps the little blue men have given all this up as a bad job.

In any case the book does a nice job of covering the history leading up to the collider, the physics, people, and problems, and the sort of things we are looking for with this:  “the secret key ingredients of cold dark matter [as] neutralinos, charginos, gluinos, photinos, squarks, and sleptons”, diluted gravity & large extra dimensions perhaps seen as “Kaluza-Klein excitations revealed as shadows in our brane of particles traveling through the bulk”, microscopic black holes, strangelets, magnetic monopoles, or even traversable wormholes offering an evanescent bridge between past and future.

And they say romance is dead!

Sat 7:00 PM in Crystal Ballroom Two—The Large Hadron Collider (167)
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful accelerator in history, has been in the news because of fears that it could produce mini-black holes that might grow and threaten the Earth. In this presentation, Paul Halpern, author of Collider: The Search for the World’s Smallest Particles, will show how there is nothing to fear from the LHC, but rather much to hope for–including the prospect of solving some of the deepest dilemmas of physics such as the mystery of dark matter.
Paul Halpern (mod)

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categories Book review, CERN, Time Machines | | datetime December 2, 2009 11:36 am

  • By MikeT, December 3, 2009 @ 3:11 pm

    Einstein was right about the shortcomings of Quantum Mechanics and so therefore String Theory is also the incorrect approach. As an alternative to Quantum Theory there is a new theory that describes and explains the mysteries of physical reality. While not disrespecting the value of Quantum Mechanics as a tool to explain the role of quanta in our universe. This theory states that there is also a classical explanation for the paradoxes such as EPR and the Wave-Particle Duality. The Theory is called the Theory of Super Relativity. This theory is a philosophical attempt to reconnect the physical universe to realism and deterministic concepts. It explains the mysterious.

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  1. Time and Quantum Mechanics» Blog Archive » The Large Hadron Collider – Talk Tomorrow — December 2, 2009 @ 4:27 pm

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