Impending Doom

On my way to work today the often funny but sometimes obnoxiously repetitive morning guy I listen to kept playing two things. I will explain the hilarity of each and delve into related topics in this blog.

[In science they tell me it's good to prime my audience with a brief description of what I will be telling them. Clearly this tactic is far to blunt to be considered literary 'foreshadowing', and since scientists are fairly boring people we call it an 'outline'. How very technical of us.]

The first clip was a radio ad by Metallica promoting their upcoming tour. Of particular note was the fact that the commercial was supposedly James and Larz conversationally discussing the upcoming tour, esp. how rocking the Chicago tour dates are going to be. Problem was, the commercial is stitched together worse than Pat Summerall's announcing in the old Madden games, where there was a distinct change of pitch and tone every time the announcer used fill-in-the-blank information. e.g. to the ear it always came off something like "That's a TEN yard run by NUMBER FIFTEEN." In the case of this ad, however, the fill-in-the-blank voice wasn't even that of Larz or James, it was Stock Excited Radio Voice. I cannot describe how bad this commercial really was. I hope you hear it, but at the same time, I hope you are spared.

The second was a clip of Matt Lauer saying "Some scientists believe the world may soon come to an end." I found it particularly entertaining that they used this very short edit of the clip, because of the extreme gravity of the situation without any specification of why in the hell the world might end. I can see plenty of further uses of this clip down the road. In fact I may very well use the sound bit as my own proclamation when my Official Masterwork, The Genome Troll (r), goes off the grid and threatens to ruin humanity.

Of note, however, is what I presume to be the true reason for the potential end times just around the corner. A lot of people (by which I mean actually very few but a majority of my immediate sphere of influence) are getting revved up about some Big Time Science that's about to start in Europe. Namely, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland is about to start blasting some protons. I will not even pretend that I know exactly what it's doing, but the jist of it is that it's going to send protons (one of the basic components of an atom) flying around a big ring at just below the speed of light, and then ultimately collide them to look for the even smaller particles called bosons that actually make up protons. According to people who think about really, really small things a lot, these wee particles may be what give everything mass, a.k.a. (roughly) weight. Some of the preceding few statements may be technically inaccurate, but you get the picture.

The reason Matt Lauer gets to talk about the end of the world, then, is that some overeducated whack jobs believe that the massive energy involved in the collisions at the LHC will create a black hole which will then destroy the world. Yippee! I'm personally not terribly concerned because if the world disappears in a black hole, well, that's pretty much it for everything. Sure I get reduced to nothing but so does all the money I owe in student loans and on my stupid college credit card. That'd be the end of my family and friends too, but I'd never have to see Rene Zellweger ever again either. Effectively being black holed becomes a wash. It would be nice to see how Lost ends though...

One scientific reason put forth to not be concerned is that apparently if a black hole is created in the process of bosonometry, well the black hole will just be really small anyway and we'll all be ok. Wait, wait, wait, wait wait one damn minute here. Now perhaps it is only an elementary understanding, but the impression I get about matter so incredibly dense that it sucks anything into it is that it wouldn't be particularly relevant how big this particular unit is. All of a sudden we have a threshold for how big really dense matter needs to be before it consumes the world? Not buying it. And anyway, this black hole would be created in the middle of a really really giant and heavy magento-ring apparatus, so wouldn't the thing just Tamagatchi itself over the threshold pretty quick anyhow? I mean, I'd hope not because I really want to see how Lost ends, but still. I'm not buying the "A Black Hole Too Small" explanation.

Anyhow, just wanted to pass on some of the wonderful things I've found lately that either explain or make light of the LHC.
Here and here are very useful resources for tracking research progress.
Wikipedia article
The first of a five-part PhD comics series on the LHC, a very nice description
The wonderful XKCD's take (if you haven't read this comic you probably should)