TONIGHTS LIGHT HEARTED MISSIVE: Life, the Universe and Everything…… Mankind has been searching for the answer to that question ever since he got up from all-fours and gazed wonderingly at the stars. Of course fans of ‘The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy’ know that the answer is ‘42’, as revealed by the greatest super-computer of all time - Deep Thought - following years of cogitation. The author’s ability to cast off the shackles of the known world and give unfettered licence to the pursuit of the unknown created a cult book, radio and television series, enjoyed by millions. The central heroes of the story, Arthur Dent (in his dressing gown) and Ford Prefect (so called because he took his name from the first thing he saw upon arrival on planet Earth), cascade from one unlikely scenario to another, whilst encountering numerous weird and wonderful creatures along the way. However improbable the book’s theme may be, it is fast becoming apparent that the reality of our universe is indeed more akin to fantasy than fact. Generations of scientists, each one unveiling a little more about the way our world works than the last, have nevertheless failed to crack the ultimate answer to ‘life, the universe and everything’: every time they thought they’d found the rainbow’s end, only to see another one on the horizon. We still have no real proof of how large is our universe, or how small is the smallest indivisible particle of matter. Starting now, an international team of scientists will attempt to crack the problem once and for all. Stephen Hawking’s ground-breaking book, ‘A Brief History of Time’, opened up the world of the cosmos to the common man like no-one before. It is a sad fact that the recent Channel 4 two-part drama documentary of his life, ‘Master of the Universe’, was relegated to the off-peak, post-9.00pm slot in deference to the masses’ demand for an endless diet of soap operas and lifestyle programmes. But even Hawking – possibly the greatest physicist of modern times – had to admit, in the conclusion, that he had failed to expose the final unifying theory of what makes it all fit together. The science of the very big and the very small has always defied a common link. Einstein’s famous General Theory of Relativity made a decent fist of explaining the very big, i.e. the universe. Rutherford, Bohr, et al had a good stab at the very small – Quantum Mechanics. But the over-arching, unifying principle linking the two – a Quantum Theory of Gravity - has refused to yield up its secret. Until now that is…… If you were to dig a hole 300 feet down from the centre of the charming French village of Crozet, you would pop into a world more fitting of a science fiction movie. A garishly lit tunnel, packed with countless technological gizmos, curves away into the distance. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC if you’re sad) is a 17-mile long circular underground tunnel, ten feet in diameter, built at a cost of billions, and designed with only one thing in mind: to smash stuff into other stuff at a rate just less than the speed of light (which is knocking on!). Hadrons are the atomic nuclei such as protons, neutrons and the smaller particles of which they are composed like quarks. Massive electro-magnetic coils will contain two opposing, accelerated particle streams, and ‘detectors’, positioned strategically around the periphery, will attempt to converge and collide these streams to, quote: “See what happens”. Doom-mongers predicted a cosmic catastrophe that could destroy the universe or create a mini-black hole that would consume the Earth. Fearful of a paranoid reaction from the ill-informed, Daily Mail-reading public, the scientists have been somewhat circumspect as to the outcome. One thing is for sure, however, and that is that never before will anyone on Earth have unleashed a more powerful monster in the name of science. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were more powerful - but that was war. So what does this all mean for the man in the street? Well, depending upon your perspective, not much or everything. The human mind is capable of coming to terms with a three-dimensional world: we do Up, Down and Sideways. Foremost scientists, Hawking included, now think we may need up to 11 dimensions to fully explain everything about the way the universe works. The more radical proponents believe that no matter how vast our universe may be, it could be just one of many universes – a multi-verse. A Light Year is not a measure of time; it is a measure of distance: a long walk for anybody. Light travels at about 186,000 miles a second. The Sun is 93 million miles away and its light gets here in eight minutes. A light year is the distance that light travels if it misses the Earth and carries on for a year – not just eight minutes. Blow your mind then by imagining that the farthest galaxies are billions of light years away and still expanding. The light that left Earth when the dinosaurs were about has still not reached these outposts of the universe. Now if all of this is leaving you feeling just a bit dazed, don’t worry because the best scientific minds in the world are also currently unclear as to whether they feel punched or drunk. It’s almost as though the unifying force in the universe – God if you like – is playing a game of tease with the academia: giving them, all the time, just enough hope that they may finally crack the issue (somewhere over the rainbow), and yet always denying them their goal with yet another conundrum. Size is a relative measure. The only ultimate frame of reference for mankind is his body: I am six feet tall and that’s a little above the average; I think the Eiffel Tower is big, and a grain of sugar is small. But there is no logical limit to how big or how small anything can be – by definition. Human existence relies on boundaries to create security, whether it is a boundary fence to keep out marauding animals or a moral boundary to prevent us all from descending into anarchy. We have evolved over time to see a just a fraction of the electro-magnetic radiation that impacts our everyday lives. What we call the visible spectrum sits somewhere between infra-red (lower frequency, microwave) and ultra-violet (higher frequency) radiation. This is what we see in a rainbow. The same limits are true of our hearing range. If we were to ‘see’ radio or mobile phone waves, we would probably all go mad. In our quest to know everything about everything there is a danger that we may unwittingly be setting ourselves up for failure. The chances of success for the Large Hadron Collider at the headquarters of CERN (Centre European Recherche Nuclear), in Geneva, are pretty uncertain. It may be the opening of Pandora’s Box, or instead, turn out to be a damp and highly expensive squib. This aside, when the LHC starts smashing particles, Europe will suddenly become the dominant location for particle physics research, and the ‘Good Old U S of A’ will find itself struggling to figure out how to stay relevant. Ever since the Manhattan Project (atomic bombs), there has been a general notion that the US dominates the world of physics – not anymore, I’m afraid. The ‘brain drain’ that used to go from Europe to the States has definitely reversed. The cynical amongst you may say this project is just an expensive scientific folly from which the money could have gone to feed starving millions or build hospitals. That may yet be proven to be the case, but if mankind had never invested ‘risk-money’ into uncertain scientific research we would all still be swinging from the lianas. I used to work in Agricultural R&D (research and development) and every day we have to take a view on spending money on projects which have no certainty of success, or even an outcome. The ‘uncertainty principle’ is a central tenet of Quantum Theory and to some extent General Relativity. Liken it to the way drops of water falling onto your hand will bounce off in a manner which is more difficult to predict than a Grand National winner. We cut down on R&D spending at our peril. For example, last month I tried to paint a picture of the need to accelerate food productivity to ensure the survival of the world’s exploding population. There are some worthy parallels with the LHC project. In the closing line of his book, Hawking concludes that in knowing the answer to ‘Life, The Universe and Everything’, we may coincidently also come to know the mind of God…… Robin Limb
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 16:09:17 +0000
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