The search continues

Return of the Mighty Marmite Machine

They've put a new fuse in the Large Hadron Collider and found a few more shillings to run it on off-peak through the coming winter. Ex-D:Ream bandmember and nucular scientist Brian Cox has said "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat".

I've often suspected that those who employ the ad hominem strategy do so because they are on dodgy ground. I'm not a fan of logical proof by abuse, but it has its adherents.

Nevertheless, surely handsome, trendy Cox has heard of the possibility of a "Vacuum metastability event", explained thusly in Wikipedia:

"If our universe is in a very long-lived false vacuum, it is possible that the universe will tunnel into a lower energy state. If this happens, all structures will be destroyed instantaneously, without any forewarning."

How could this happen? A further link in the infallible Wiki universe considers the possibility of cosmic annihilation by particle accelerator:

One scenario is that, rather than quantum tunnelling, a particle accelerator, which produces very high energies in a very small area, could create sufficiently high energy density as to penetrate the barrier and stimulate the decay of the false vacuum to the lower energy vacuum. Hut and Rees,[3] however, have determined that because we have observed cosmic ray collisions at much higher energies than those produced in terrestrial particle accelerators, that these experiments will not, at least for the foreseeable future, pose a threat to our vacuum.

"...at least for the foreseeable future": a phrase to treasure, when set beside the earlier phrase, "...without any forewarning."

Not that I'd mind. After all, we'd know nothing about it. And it'd end the debate about global cooling / global warming / climate change - no guilt, either. And it'd make the Bible a nice bookend for both ends of the history of the universe, starting with "Let there be light" and ending "the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night."

Throw that switch, Twatfinder General.

Vorsprung durch Technik

"Marmite" exists, probably

My brother (why are my wife and family all cleverer than me ?) tells me that "dark matter" is implied in all the modern cosmological models, it's just that no-one knows what it is: "At one point, they thought it was neutrino flux, but that doesn't account for enough energy. Maybe it's The Force." I await further information.

Meanwhile, Professor Brian Cox (billed by the Sunday Express as former drummer for D:ream - keyboards, according to the Mail) did a broadcast last night on the Doomsday Marmite Machine and explained that it's all about trying to find the giant and unstable Higgs particle. Even if successfully created in the device, its existence will only be confirmed by the myriad better-known particles into which it disintegrates - only the intense pressure of the early Universe was capable of sustaining the so-called "God particle."

In the Sunday Express article today, the seemingly perma-upbeat (if only we all had his secret) Cox tells us that there are 12 sub-atomic particles, yet I could have sworn that the TV programme listed 16 in a four-by-four arrangement - Cox struggled to recall the last one, which turned out to be the gluon.

Irrelevantly (perhaps), some shots of the Large Hadron Collider remind me of a wonderfully atmospheric scene in "Alien":