The perfect gift for the materialist with everything

[imomus]

I'll spend Big Bang Day -- with consummate irrationality, since we all know it's the last day of life, the universe and everything -- writing my Friday spot for the New York Times website. As if there were going to be a Friday! As if my spot's name (The Post-Materialist) weren't going to be tragically literal by Friday, when all matter will have been sucked into a series of miniature but deadly black holes!



Okay, physicist Michio Kaku doesn't believe this is a risk.

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And, as I write, they've already switched the machine on, and sent the first beam of protons around the 27 kilometer-long tunnel near Geneva. So far we're still here (I'm following events live on Radio 4, fully expecting the coverage to turn into Quatermass and the Pit).

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I think my theme for the NYT will be the aesthetics of Hadron. I want to tie it in with the architecture of industrial agriculture, seen in the amazing documentary Our Daily Bread. And maybe the science aesthetics of Rod Lord's animation sequences in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which raise the "functional-didactic style" to new levels of cool.



The beauty part is that, although the look of science is somehow dry and non-decorative, it's super-expensive. So I'll be able to portray the Large Hadron Collider as a cool piece of jewelry, a massive ringlet hanging around Switzerland's neck, and for once I'll be able to trump the price tag snobbery of my colleagues at The Moment: this trinket cost five billion. The perfect gift for the girl who has everything! If she hasn't been post-materialized.

Comments

[mnog.livejournal.com]

have you seen the cern rap?: http://www.vimeo.com/1431471?pg=embed&sec=1431471

in Blackburn, Lancashire

[walloftime.livejournal.com]

Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.

[drywbach.livejournal.com]

Exciting stuff -- and we survived (so far) yay! (Although this may not be the same universe we were in earlier this morning)

BBC Four has shown programmes related to Big Bang day, including a Quatermass remake (not that they want to worry us, or anything!) and an interesting documentary presented by Brian Cox. I couldn't find it on Youtube (it's still on iplayer), but here he is talking about his work at CERN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6uKZWnJLCM

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Do you mean the Horizon on Hadron?

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[drywbach.livejournal.com]

Found it! Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHs7hu9hgKc

Thank you, I'm going to watch the whole of that Horizon a bit later!

[(Anonymous)]

Great. The world is still here. I'm still stuck at this crap job. I always KNEW science was useless.

kind of crappy

[(Anonymous)]

am in milano
and finding it a bit rubbish
no any where i should visit
i mean like nice galleries or eating places
or gardens the people here are a bit kind of crappy

Re: kind of crappy

[(Anonymous)]

Oh you poor bastard, vacationing in Italy. Perhaps instead you'd have liked to ride in to work on American public transportation and be mauled by a hammer-wielding maniac.

http://www.philly.com/philly/hp/news_update/20080909_Psycho_hammers_subway_passenger.html

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

YOU NEED TO FIND RENATO AND FUCK HIM.

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

As a scientist, it's always nice to see a massively expensive piece of equipment work properly. Props to the collider team!

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Hey, I'd put out if someone gave me a world-destruction/time travelling device as a present.

[chesh.livejournal.com]

Hell yes!

Also, I'm really surprised that it's working properly. Something that big and complicated, I was expecting them to flip the switch, then

silence.

"Huh." the great scientists would say, "Something was supposed to happen."

[(Anonymous)]

Hah "I don't know what universe you're from"...those scientists and their wacky humor!

I'm just really happy that something as abstract and theoretical as particle physics can make front page news. I'm starting to think maybe that was possibly a brilliant publicity-generating thing to say "There's a chance that this could destroy the world". The videos CERN has released all feature young men and women rather than cranky old scientist guys. And Brian Cox has many time been called the "Rock Star Physicist" in the media.

I just hope we get to hear about what they find.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

The LHC didn't make front-page headlines because it's scientifically important, It made headlines because it's the biggest and most expensive machine ever and because a few kooks thought it would destroy the world. So basically, hugely showy, hugely expensive, and hugely sensationalist -- nothing exceptional in the world of media hacks trying to grab the gnat-like attentions of today's modern pleb.

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

You don't seem to understand that the people with the MOST accurate predictions of an insanely complex scientific experiment are the people with the LEAST amount of even remotely scientific knowledge.

You must not have gone to a liberal arts school and gotten a degree in Philosophy or Renaissance Literature. Those enable you to throw out the useless equations and laws of the universe in order to embrace the TRUTH contained in foaming-at-the-mouth pseudoscientific gibbering based on reading Piers Anthony novels as a freshman.


Kumakouji, your common sense is always harshing the mellow of the artists and poets!


(Good on ya!)

[fluorophoric.livejournal.com]

Little do you know, the small black holes have already sucked us into another universe, our pervious memories of the universe we used to live in have been erased.

Sort of like that story in the Sandman series, with the Cats ruling the earth and all that, then one day the humans all dream that they rule the earth... eh, whatever. No one knows what I'm talking about.

[(Anonymous)]

I was discussing this with my friends yesterday. Possibly simply activating this giant machine with its huge capacity for generating energy, regardless of making any black holes or big bangs or anything, what if it simply began attracting energy from multiple unseen dimensions and daily life from here on out just got WEIRDER and WEIRDER?

Like next monday everybody goes to work and realizes that everyone else is either late or early because everyone's clocks are running at completely independent frequencies? Weds we see on the news a skyrocketing of ghost sightings but it takes us until Halloween to realize they aren't conscious entities like the classical idea of ghosts but in fact SELF-AWARE LUMINESCENT RIPPLES IN SPACE TIME? By then Fall season is in full swing but tree leaves flicker in transparency and the moon seems to be getting CLOSER and CLOSER to the planet?

Adam

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Tuesday we look up at the sky and see a RAGING NUCLEAR REACTION in place of our friendly old sun!!!

Quatermass and the Pit

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

The sixties narratives much like the "Avengers".



The 14th is the best nite for viewing celestial activities.
Best suggested arena http://www.roppongihills.com/tcv/en/

[(Anonymous)]

By the way this is a picture from the control room: Not as cool as the Hitchhikers graphics (=vector heaven!!) but has kind of a nice mandala-esque quality to the top three...

http://img388.imageshack.us/my.php?image=ohptoftimemeasured13sepjy2.png

[nina-blomquist.livejournal.com]

Scientists are better artists.

Keep up to date

[youllstillbe.livejournal.com]

http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/

comes with RSS feed

Meh...

[muzan-e.livejournal.com]

It wasn't provided that yesterday there could have been a collision between two beams. Yesterday they only let one or two run clockwise around the device. And sure, we're still alive, but that's because nothing truly happened. Let's wait mid October, at least, before to talk.
Also, one of the sections of the device got burnt twice while the fashions were running, and they could not let two of them run altogether at the same speed.
They possibly don't know what they're doing, and they will keep on not.