Apparently with the old collider some wag had stuffed a couple of beer bottles into the beamline as a joke and they didn’t find them until they switched the thing on.

For the next month or so they’ll watch protons go one way round the ring, then the other way, then both ways together. This is neither new, or particularly exciting/dangerous. Nope, we’re all gonna have to wait until October 21st, which is when the first collision is scheduled. At which point we can see if these wild ideas about black holes, that were originally put about and stirred up by Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho, actually turn out to be correct.

Mind you, Wagner and Sancho are a serious pair of kooks. They’ve already tried this scare story a few years back about another collider that was under construction at the time, and were pretty much told by the rest of the Physics community to STFU. It would seem they’ve become more media savvy this time round, hence all the craziness and that poor girl in India who committed suicide (who’s blood is on their hands and the media’s hands IMO).

But here’s the kickers to the story:
1. I’ll bet that there’s nowhere near as much hype in October when they finally do run a collision for the first time.
2. Sancho is so far out there he can barely be classified as a physicist. He’s like a grammar-checker away from being the Time Cube guy. Get this; Sanch believes that stars and galaxies are living organisms that organise themselves into flocks, a bit like sheep. You couldn’t make crazy like that up. The guy is properly loopy. Wagner isn’t much better to be honest.

That said, I’m still going to the pub again on Oct 20th :)

The thing that gets to me about all this theoreticizing about the end of time is that if it is going to happen, then the mere concept of time stopping is so far outside of our experience that it really is impossible to judge what it will be like, no?
And even in the case of the biblical end of times, I can’t help but ask “so what happens after that?”. Well, the chosen are in heaven, sinners get swallowed by that big dog thing… and then?
It’s not like nothing happens. And if humans manage to get wiped out entirely, then how is that different from just you dying? In which case why not worry about that?

There have been a number of cultural markers that have completely revolutionized the way humans react with their environment and with each other. Fire, bronze, guns, the computer… I feel like this looming singularity will just be another in a long line. And each time a “singularity” occurs, the old ways die, and new ones spring up to embrace whatever new abilities or sensibilities have been thrust on humanity. I’d use the word “evolution,” but creationist/eschatologist folks might get all tetchy about it.

http://wolven.livejournal.com/1478687.html

I still think you’re right, but I also think that you’re wrong. I still think that ceaseless building is a kind of stagnation, in itself, and ask what, then, do we do?

Do we look at it as a matter of perspective? Conception? What?

Humans tend to structure events into stories, so we investigate or invent our creation story, but are still left without an ending.

Eschatologists just don’t like cliffhangers.

(also, thanks for another excellent thoughtpiece)

It’s a powerful idea, the end of all things, and I’ve seen it suggested that we cling to it because it fills certain narratives (in the case of the LHC, the narrative that scientists are arrogant and trying to play God, i.e. the “Frankenstein” narrative), and it gives us a certain measure of control. We might die, but we can at least know it, and say “Told ya so”.

I just began to process that . . . it wasn’t coming. Not in the way that my dad always talks about it, not in the way that I’d always absorbed was going to happen. I have lived my entire life under the assumption that just around to corner, it will all be for naught, because society was going to collapse.

But to world has always been ending, hasn’t it? And furthermore, isn’t sitting and waiting for the forthcoming apocolypse just a way of avoiding learning to deal with the world that is?