Time in Motion.

Just as I was about to go to bed I spotted this story on yahoo:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/itn/20080909/twl-physicists-ignore-black-hole-theory-41f21e0.html

ITN - Tuesday, September 9 06:12 pm

Leading physicists are set to go ahead with a Big Bang experiment despite warnings it could destroy the universe.
Scientists at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) plan to smash particle beams together at close to the speed of light to create mini-versions of the explosion believed to have triggered the birth of the cosmos.

Cosmologists think an explosion of an object the size of a small coin occurred about 13.7 billion years ago and led to the formation of all matter.

A key aim of the experiment is to find the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle” that some theorists believe give matter its mass.

But the experiment, which will take place inside a 17-mile tunnel deep underneath the Swiss-French border called a Large Hadron Collider (LHC), could shed light on other mysteries like the existence of supersymmetry, dark matter and dark energy.

News of the controlled explosion has led to warnings of potential disaster.

Some critics say the experiment will create “black holes” of intense gravity that could implode the Earth, or that it will open the way for beings from another universe to invade through a “worm hole” in space-time.

A safety review by scientists at CERN and in the US and Russia rejected the prospect of such outcomes.

Robert Aymar, the French physicist who heads the research centre, said: “The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction.”

Professor Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, said: “Collisions at these and greater energies occur millions of times a day in the Earth’s atmosphere, and nothing terrible happens.”

The experiment is set to begin soon after 8am on Wednesday
 

My old secondary science teacher spoke about this 15 years ago! C’mon guys! its taken you long enough to get there!

 It would be interesting to see what happens, if they can find the secret of the origins of the universe. No doubt religous types will get all huffy about it when God/Allah/Buddah/Ik Onkar/Aliens/Flying spghetti monsters (ad infinitum) fails to make an appearance. I do like the idea of a health and safety inspecotr turning up at Cern with a clipboard.

“yes?”

“health and safety inspection. I am here to see your Large Hadron Collider”

” Very good, its this 17 mile tunnel”

“ I see, and has this 17 mile tunnel been PAT tested?”

The experiement is due to take place in approximately 8 hours.

So there is an incredibly remote possibility that in 8 hours a black hole could form and impode the earth, which after the weekend of rain we had here in blighty, would come as something of a relief. Just in case I think i will set my alarm for 8:30

nighty night all. in the meantime heres a quote from the hitchhickers guide to the galaxy which I thought was pretty apt

“there is a theory which states thats if ever anyone ever discovers  exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disapear and be replaced by something even more bizarely inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”