I get so exasperated with the level of education -- worse, the level of gullibility -- in this country that sometimes I want to scream. Others, I want to whimper. This country, the richest in the world, is full of people who know nothing about a subject, admit it, and still won't believe what the experts tell them. They'd rather listen to some shaman, or some pundit on late-night radio. Nowhere does this sort of thing come out more obviously than in the realm of science, and nowhere more egregiously than the current brouhaha about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Switzerland and France.
For those who have managed to remain on the far side of the moon for the past week or so, the LHC is a souped-up atom smasher. Using powerful electromagnets, it accelerates protons through a 17-mile tunnel in opposite directions until they reach nearly the speed of light (roughly 186,350 miles per second). Then they collide with each other, busting into tiny little pieces. Just what kind of tiny pieces will tell us a great deal that we don't yet understand about the way matter is put together, along with other things like how the universe may have looked an infinitesimal period of time after its beginning, and other cool stuff.
[The US was well on the way to having one of these babies of its own, only bigger, when the Pubs got control of Congress and killed the project. Now we get to suck hind tit and hope that the 60-odd nations who collaborated on the LHC will share the new things they learn with American scientists. Sweet.]
Anyway, one of the things that might be created is a little bitty black hole. Now black holes (properly called singularities) are noted for sucking up stuff in large quantities and tearing it apart into sub-atomic particles by means of their incredible gravity, then depositing it...someplace else. Really elsewhere. In fact, there are only theories about where "elsewhere" might be, but it's a pretty sure thing that we wouldn't want to go there -- although after having been torn into sub-atomic particles we might not care.
And there's the problem. Unaware of the (mathematical) fact that teensy-tiny little black holes collapse into themselves and disappear, some folks seem to have gotten sort of excited about the possibility of having one in the neighborhood. Their concern is that it might eat up the Large Hadron Collider, Europe, the Earth, and then start on the solar system.
Now, before you get excited about that (mathematical) fact, and say that it's just a theory and it could be wrong, let me remind you that black holes themselves are just a "theory." No one has ever seen one, and no one ever will because their (theoretical) gravity is so great that they pull the surrounding light inside so that there's nothing to see. We know they're there because the matter being torn apart releases a lot of radiation. So, we have the interesting situation of people believing one "theory," but not believing a corollary that is just as well-proven (baby black holes can't survive) and getting all excited about it.
Sometimes you want to scream, and then you realize that it's not their fault. Education in this country has been dumbed down over the years, for whatever reasons. It couldn't have happened by accident. Instead of worrying about quantum physics, folks need to be worrying about the ignorance of people who have the power of thermonuclear bombs at their fingertips, can't pronounce "nuclear," and still think the Earth was created in six days.
I have a headache now.
View the Large Hadron Collider WebCam
For those who have managed to remain on the far side of the moon for the past week or so, the LHC is a souped-up atom smasher. Using powerful electromagnets, it accelerates protons through a 17-mile tunnel in opposite directions until they reach nearly the speed of light (roughly 186,350 miles per second). Then they collide with each other, busting into tiny little pieces. Just what kind of tiny pieces will tell us a great deal that we don't yet understand about the way matter is put together, along with other things like how the universe may have looked an infinitesimal period of time after its beginning, and other cool stuff.
[The US was well on the way to having one of these babies of its own, only bigger, when the Pubs got control of Congress and killed the project. Now we get to suck hind tit and hope that the 60-odd nations who collaborated on the LHC will share the new things they learn with American scientists. Sweet.]
Anyway, one of the things that might be created is a little bitty black hole. Now black holes (properly called singularities) are noted for sucking up stuff in large quantities and tearing it apart into sub-atomic particles by means of their incredible gravity, then depositing it...someplace else. Really elsewhere. In fact, there are only theories about where "elsewhere" might be, but it's a pretty sure thing that we wouldn't want to go there -- although after having been torn into sub-atomic particles we might not care.
And there's the problem. Unaware of the (mathematical) fact that teensy-tiny little black holes collapse into themselves and disappear, some folks seem to have gotten sort of excited about the possibility of having one in the neighborhood. Their concern is that it might eat up the Large Hadron Collider, Europe, the Earth, and then start on the solar system.
Now, before you get excited about that (mathematical) fact, and say that it's just a theory and it could be wrong, let me remind you that black holes themselves are just a "theory." No one has ever seen one, and no one ever will because their (theoretical) gravity is so great that they pull the surrounding light inside so that there's nothing to see. We know they're there because the matter being torn apart releases a lot of radiation. So, we have the interesting situation of people believing one "theory," but not believing a corollary that is just as well-proven (baby black holes can't survive) and getting all excited about it.
Sometimes you want to scream, and then you realize that it's not their fault. Education in this country has been dumbed down over the years, for whatever reasons. It couldn't have happened by accident. Instead of worrying about quantum physics, folks need to be worrying about the ignorance of people who have the power of thermonuclear bombs at their fingertips, can't pronounce "nuclear," and still think the Earth was created in six days.
I have a headache now.
View the Large Hadron Collider WebCam
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