LHC
I have been too absorbed with work to make any postings lately, but now that I have some free time, I want to talk about a momentous event: The switching on of the Large Hadron Collider (the most powerful particle accelerator ever built) last Wednesday. Why is this exciting? Aside from it being likely to change our fundamental understanding of the Universe, for someone like myself, who grew up reading science-fiction and day-dreaming about what wonders FTL, or anti-gravity, or wormhole technology, or force fields, (non-sensical or not) may bring, it feels like a re-awakening of hope that the future will arrive, not in tiny bits and pieces, but in a resounding, trumpet-blaring, triumphantly big chunk. For all of my life, there have been no major applied physiscs breakthroughs. We have basically two types of motors: electrical and chemical -stop counting. Electrical motors are about one century old; rockets are centuries old, internal combustion about century also, and jets (the cutti...