rise and fall of the machine

[AntonioLao]

Here, the word ‘machine’ is used to signify the device invented by scientists for accelerating stable charged particles (mainly electrons and protons) to unimaginable velocity, approaching the speed of light. Inverting prologue with epilogue, this monologue begins with the fall of accelerator hoping for some dialogue to follow.

This fall is marked by the abandonment of the teraproject called Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) in Texas. This was a great disappointment for many who hope to see the day when the Higgs boson and the supersymmetric partners of all elementary particles appeared in the detector vacuum chambers.

Two reasons contributed to this unfortunate debacle (or maybe it is really just a blessing in disguise). First, is the question of cost in term of materials and human resources? Second, is the question of energy gap between what was achievable and the almost infinite Planck energy? On this same account, standard model of elementary particle physics predicted no interesting events happening within this barren, deserted, ghost-town energy gap. So, why waste time, money, and human efforts just for the fun of shifting and sieving sand in this obviously matter emptied vacuum desert?

This realization suggested how difficult it is to extract something out of anything or even out of nothing if the temperature-pressure is not just at the right amount as very well attested by anyone who can cook regardless of how modernized and well equipped the kitchen appears and for geologists and metallurgists the difficulty of creating synthetic diamonds regardless of impurities. But made only for industrial quality not gem quality (a perfect flawless stone is a dream).

Temperature thresholds and the correct distance between these thresholds are really the keys to understanding. The inner temperature of the machine is at the Planck limit while the outer one is at the superconducting limit near absolute zero. These are separated only by the thickness of the vacuum chamber (this thickness is really an illusion since it is really the magnetic field penetrating the wall). The analogy is the same as closing the gap between zero and infinity at both distance of zero and time zero, again by religious allegory, same as connecting Heaven and Hell. Now, history does repeat itself but not exactly in the same given conditions. For those who have forgotten, the Tower of Babel described in the Book of Genesis 11:1-9 was constructed for the purpose of uniting Heaven and Earth glorifying the intellectual and physical invincibility of man. This gargantuan project stopped when the engineers started speaking different languages (math and science). Were they suffering from heat shock? That is shock from zero touching infinity. Is this the ultimate requirement or conditional (borrowing Guille’s definition) for TOE? Where good and evil come face-to-face for a final showdown. Who will win this decisive finale, I might ask? Would it be the kinetic infinity at this corner? Or would it be the potential zero at that corner? But wait! This confrontation has been going on for 15 billions years. What is the chance that it will end tomorrow? Or be decided by mortals as a stalemate? Absolutely nobody in this epoch will be around to watch the eventual outcome who reaches first the finish line.

[baudrunner]

Absolutely nobody in this epoch will be around to watch the eventual outcome who reaches first the finish line.

Therein lies the problem. I don't want to get political but it was G.W. who pulled the plug on that project, and I have to say that I am in total agreement with him. It turns out that the expertise had already migrated to CERN and they were involved in something far more momentous over there. The issue was dollars, and when the habituary cost overruns were factored in everybody pretty much said, let the Europeans take care of it,

• We live in an era of international information exchange diplomacy
• Stanford and Fermilab are already world leaders in particle physics
• the Super Collider project is redundant, because we can always invent another reason to build another collider to study yet another of the many events predicted by QT and it can get dangerously out of hand, not to mention expensive.

Face it, America is a nation where eighteen percent of its people live in trailer parks. There is a sub culture of homeless people whose kids will never go to school because they live around clapboard shelters huddled around oil drums filled with burning waste. There are soup kitchens in every city. The giga bucks spent on another project most people have not the least bit of understanding about would bode ill for many a future politician, and it wouldn't be the first time a project was started and giga bucks wasted because it did not see completion in one administration only to be halted and abandoned by the next, for such is America, land of dreams.

[baudrunner]

Now, history does repeat itself but not exactly in the same given conditions. For those who have forgotten, the Tower of Babel described in the Book of Genesis 11:1-9 was constructed for the purpose of uniting Heaven and Earth glorifying the intellectual and physical invincibility of man. This gargantuan project stopped when the engineers started speaking different languages (math and science).

We must have come a long way. CERN might be the modern day equivalent of Babel. Surely we all speak the same language now.

[AntonioLao]

I don't want to get political...

Politics is concerned with the clashing free wills of individual personalities. My concern is strictly the mathematics and physics.

[AntonioLao]

Surely we all speak the same language now.

If we are humble then we all speak the same language, which also mean willingness to see the other side's point of view and to admit when we are wrong or mistaken or just plain ignorant of the fact.

[Guille]

Politics is concerned with the clashing free wills of individual personalities. My concern is strictly the mathematics and physics.

But there is not such a big difference: some mathematical physics is concerned with the clashing free wills (non-deterministic) of individual quantums (ex: if the probability of a photon to emerge from an electron which has taken in a photon of the same size there is a time t defined by which the photon will be sure to leave, but if the photon's probability is lower and lower, then both probabilities are inverselly proportional and there is no photon released, so the electron releases heat and kinetic energy, so it gains magnetism)

[baudrunner]

Yes, politicians are we not. (Yoda?)

He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career. (George Bernard Shaw)

[AntonioLao]

But there is not such a big difference:

Politics is free will without logic or math while physics is free will with logic and math.

[Guille]

Politics is free will without logic or math while physics is free will with logic and math.

Just by the fact that there is free will involved, or indetermination, then automatically the logic or math is irrelevant. But I'm talking now of theoretic politics, just as theoretic physics. The practical world was never atractive for me.

[AntonioLao]

But I'm talking now of theoretic politics

Let me know if you think of a politcian who is also a physicist well verse in math. In fact, give me more than just one.
Along this line, Einstein was offered to become the 1st president of the state of Israel but of course he refused, maybe because he was a pacifist.