Theoretical Physics and Modern Art.

A physicist at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva - the world’s biggest scientific experiment! – speculate that the failure of the collider because of a helium leak soon after it was switched on in September was caused by intervention (ripples!) from the future to stop the experiment happening.

(Kevin Black’s speculation is here and it makes my head hurt but Poneke sums it up thusly: given its complexity I won’t go into the details, but in brief, and quoting other research he was initially sceptical of, he suggests that the expected creation by the LHC of the fabled Higg’s Boson[*] might have created the possibility of Higg’s Bosons from the future coming back to 2008 to stop the creation of multiple Higg’s Bosons upsetting the universe by being created by the LHC.

And as in Back to the Future, this is the paradox that if you could go back in time and while doing so killed your grandfather (or stopped your father meeting your mother), you would cease to exist because you would not be capable of being born.

The LHC is intended to prove whether or not the Higgs Boson exists. What Kevin Black is postulating is that the Higgs Boson may indeed exist, but has come from the future to stop the smarties at CERN finding it, for reasons best known to itself. Although I would also like to know!

Via Poneke's Weblog.



What? You didn't know that I love theoretical physics & thought experiments?
You learn something new every day.**





This orange building the Netherlands is called the Habog Facility and it contains nuclear waste material that they have to store for 100 years while it loses its toxicity, is covered in physics formulas by Einstein and Planck.
Every twenty years, the building will be repainted in a lighter color to symbolize the slowly decaying radiation in the waste.

William Verstraeten, the artist who designed the facility, views his piece as a commentary on metaphorphosis. Open for tours, the building also contains four symbolic paintings. And I WANT TO GO THERE!



* I heart the Higgs Boson! although my mother insisted on likening it to an angel. It is theoretically the most fundamental particle of matter and is what gives atoms mass and gravity. But its existence is totally theoretical. Of course.

**My baby pet favourite theories? Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Schrödinger's Cat.