Posted on 12/06/2009 9:08:01 PM PST by Duke C.
After 20 years in the making, the first physics results have come out of CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Physicists from the University of Birmingham played a key role in analyzing these collisions and producing the first results from the 27 km circular atom smasher near Geneva.
(Excerpt) Read more at spacedaily.com ...
Hung up on a "Point Thing" tonight are we ;^)
I’m just hacked off because I was eager to see the RESULTS (”CERN: LHC Produces First Physics Results”) and all I got was a black hole.
I just have a twisted mind.
(x;^ )
A decade or so ago we were going to build the Superconducting Supercollider in Texas, but the project was cancelled prematurely by congress.
A lot of US physicists with no other job prospects became number-crunchers on Wall Street. They used the expertise they gained in tracking the collisions of millions of particles to track the millions of trades that happen in the world economy.
Some of the models they developed eventually morphed into the sophisticated financial products (MBS's, CDS's, CDO's, etc.) that amplified the effects of the real estate bubble.
If we had spent a few billion more dollars to complete the Superconducting Supercollider those physicists would have remained employed in hunting for bosons rather than hunting for bozos to buy their companys' bogus products.
Maybe Europe is not hurting quite so bad because they still have physicists doing physics well ... and not economics poorly.
“To me, it’s more big science for an elite group of physicists to research a kind of micro-cosmology: something so impractically small and so high energy that it has essentially nothing to do with human experience.”
On the flip side, What is learned from high speed collisions could very well change our understanding of Quantum Mechanics, gravity, multiple dimensions, a whole host of interesting stuff.
Don’t bet on it.
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