Some random thoughts on today's big science.

[rhythmaning]

Today has been described everywhere - here, here and here, for instance – as “big bang day”: the day they switch on the large hadron collider.

Of course, it isn’t “big bang day” – that was 13.5 billion years ago, give or take a day or two. It is however the day they switch on the machine – the LHC – which will enable physicists to test their models of – well, not the big bang, but the short time – milliseconds, apparently – after the big bang, when new particles – the new universe, even – were being created from the energy released by the big bang and the universe started its long journey to now.

I do find this very, very exciting: sure, not the actual switching on of the machine, nor the starting of the experiments (due at the weekend, I think); but the thought that, years down the line – when all the data that will be collected has been analysed and tested and hypothesised about, and more experiments done, and analysed – and our understanding of the universe is that little better.

I used to understand (or I believed I understood) all this better than I do now; but it is still exciting. The idea of accelerating a beam of protons as fast as 99.9999999% the speed of light (according to this page on the BBC, although here the BBC says it is only 99.99% of the speed of light, but I am not going to quibble about 1/1000 of a c) is genuinely thrilling; the sight of all that shiny machinery is wonderful; and the whole weirdness of it – the idea of explaining where most of the universe is, for instance – the 96% that we can’t really account for - is wonderful.

There have been some excellent pieces in the media about it all. Radio 4’s Woman’s Hours, for instance, was devoted to women’s role in science, the Independent had a whole series of fascinating articles and BBC4 had two fascinating programmes – one, “Lost Horizons: the Big Bang”, an old episode of Horizon about (you guessed it!) the Big Bang, the other, “the Big Bang Machine, featuring Prof Brian Cox explaining the LHC.

And now I have a quibble: the second of these programmes featured lots of visual effects to support the avid enthusiasm Cox put across. Lots of sequences of things exploding: rocks flying apart, huge fireballs, flames and so on. Now, I don’t know what the big bang looked like – I can imagine (light! lots of light!) – but there weren’t any rocks; there weren’t any flames; and given that the whole universe was minute (the size of an atom? Less?) and there wasn’t anyone there to see it – well, it didn’t look like anything, did it? The radiation probably wasn’t even light – nothing to “see” at all. Or perhaps it looked like everything: pure white light.

And of course we will never know!

But at least we might soon have a better idea of what followed soon after.

And of course the world didn't end! Yet...

Comments

[nimoloth.livejournal.com]

They haven't even whacked stuff together yet anyway.

Have you read the "Have Your Say" section of the BBC site on the topic? It makes you despair at humanity. One of them was along the lines of, "this Big Band theory is all nonsense anyway - there's no air in space so you couldn't have heard a bang."

It amused me for a bit, but then I moved through despairing to annoyed.

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

Believe it or not, I can't see the readers responses on the BBC's Big Bang page. But then I rarely read comments from the population as a whole - there is only so much time I can spend online!

And did you mean to write "Big Band theory" or was it just a lovely typo?

There must be a long post to write on Big Band theory; I'll have to think about that...

[nimoloth.livejournal.com]

That would be a typo *g*. That one happens a lot - must be muscle memory.