Saturday, October 18, 2008

Experimental Failure...?!?!

It has been several weeks now since CERN's historical experiment with its new Large Hadron Collider was postponed due to technical failure. Physicists were decidedly forlorn and media observers cynically laughing in their beards. But now, after some time has passed, I will wonder out loud to you as to whether they might not have missed something important in their respective scientific disappointment and journalistic jadedness?

Perhaps it wasn't a failure? COULD it in fact inadvertently have been revealing something profoundly important about the early moments before the big bang? You can see where I am going with this: I propose to you that the experiment could be seen as evidence suggesting that those astral moments immediately prior to the Big Bang were characterized by, yes, technical problems. Cosmic indigestion so to speak,, or, for those of a more religious persuasion, God's albatross-like reticence to give birth to the universe, if only to take but a few moments longer (with the power of His omniscience) to ruminate upon whether the entire venture would, in the long-run, be a worthwhile affair. And while these were obviously overcome - evidenced by the fact of our very existence - these very systemic imperfections have persisted right through to the present day, from our piss-pot treatment of The Environment, Americans' election of the Bush administration (twice!), global resource allocation imperfections, to the local optimisation failures of reconciling short-sighted parochial selfishness with the greater public interest and systemic stability.

I know I willl still be anxiously waiting for the results from CERN when they successfully complete their historic particle collisions. But in the meantime, they should take some solace in perhaps having contributed yet further evidence to the fragility of the Universe, and by extension the brittleness of human systems - particularly our modern financial system - left to their Randian outcomes.

4 comments:

  1. Such a futile pursuit in present times.

    Can the strong, weak, and electromagnetic fundamental forces, along with the mediating gauge bosons, explain human greed and stupidity?

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  2. ed in texas

    So, you're saying it's a repeat of the Michaelson-Morely interferometer? (i.e., not only are you not going to get the answer, but you don't even understand the question)

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  3. I drift thru the ether daily... Michelson & Morley were only wrong with respect to light.

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  4. It's the Gods to a farthing;

    Their specialty, cracking any two things together for sexual enticement.

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