What will the collider run into? (Nov. 23)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
You may be relieved to know that the news is good about the Large Hadron Collider. It is running again, after being down for a year. It broke the first time it was started up.
The purpose of the machine, which cost $10 billion or so, and is 17 miles long, is to bash protons together at almost the speed of light.
Physicists think this is very important. Who am I to disagree with them? My own knowledge of physics pretty much ends with the falling apple. You may recall that Isaac Newton, the father of modern physics, came up with the notion of gravity after an apple fell from a tree and he wondered why it hit the ground. He also developed the binomial theorem and the infinitesimal calculus and examined the elements of circular motion. And that was just in his spare time.
Newton did not have access to a Large Hadron Collider, or to a computer, or to a calculator, or even to a ballpoint pen. Like all those who wrote in the 17th century, he used quills.
About 8,000 scientists are either working on the Large Hadron Collider, or plan to conduct experiments with it once it is open for business.
Will they discover anything on the order that physicists such as Newton, Albert Einstein and Max Planck discovered? Like Newton, Einstein and Planck didn’t have computers or calculators, and it makes you wonder whether the physicists really need a Large Hadron Collider in the first place.
It makes a person wonder whether all these scientists are as good as just those three, or whether they are on the verge of discovering something even bigger than the law of gravity, or the theory of relativity or quantum theory.
Maybe it will be called the law of why people love to build ever-bigger and more complicated machines.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
