This is in continuation of my previous post on LHC (Large Hadron Collider).

For many reasons this is an amazing moment in the history of science (many which have probably been repeated on this blog before).

There are roughly 75 countries with at least one institution (university or lab) which has contributed to the construction of this machine. The list includes strange bedfellows: India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran and the United States, Greece and Turkey, Russia and Georgia, all of western Europe, most of eastern Europe, some of northern Africa and south America, Japan, China, S. Korea, etc. This unlikely team has constructed the biggest single machine in the history of the planet after over 20 years since the first plans were laid. At 10,000 scientists, this project represents the modern day pyramids.

This is the kinda stuff that makes this one of the biggest scientific experiments ever conducted by mankind! To give you a scale of the things involved, the LRC Homepage has listed out a series of facts about the experiment:

- The vacuum in the LHC is comparable to outer space, if it were a car tyre with a leak, there are so few gas molecules that it would take 10 000 years to go flat.
- When protons arrive in the LHC they are travelling at 0.999997828 times the speed of light. Each proton goes around the 27km ring over 11 000 times a second.
- The Large Hadron Collider at CERN could be the most ambitious scientific undertaking ever. The results of LHC experiments will probably change our fundamental knowledge of the universe.
- A nominal proton beam in the LHC will have an energy equivalent to a person in a Subaru driving at 1700 kph.

Check out all the other facts here.

Man has now succeeded to set up one of his biggest experiments ever to understand the fundamentals of our universe and its creation. 

“Particle physics is the unbelievable in pursuit of the unimaginable. To pinpoint the smallest fragments of the universe you have to build the biggest machine in the world. To recreate the first millionths of a second of creation you have to focus energy on an awesome scale.”

Sitting at my desk, trying to solve some of the most crucial problems in the internet space (really), a colleague walks up to me.

“Should we change the homepage of this site? I think we should add a new section here”, he says pointing at a section of my product’s webpage.

Suddenly, this seems very familiar to me. As though I had lived this moment before. A deja-vu, as many nowadays would term it. A deja-vu it indeed was. I have been in similar situations before and I am sure I am not the only one who has had this rather strange experience.

This time, however, I was determined to make some sense out of it. Every time I uttered a reply, I quickly predicted (in my mind) what the response would be and surprisingly, the response came out as per my predicition – right up to the last word.

Now, I quickly decided to do another thing – I shall predict the next moment in this deja-vu warp, and instead of saying the thing that I am supposed to, I would say something drastically opposite. That is, I wanted to make a conscious effort to force a change of events, different from what I knew was coming. I did so, the responses suddenly changed, the wall of familiarity was gone and we were back in unknown territories of time (speaking on a macro level).

What then intrigued me is this – Did I, by consciously changing the line of thought and making it different from what the deja-vu was supposed to go towards, alter history? Or did I alter my future by that small exercise?

All this might sound like a crackpot idea and I am inclined to believing in the crackpotness of it all. But somewhere, when I felt a similar pattern being revisited, I realized that there is probably a lot more out there which is not seen by the eye, or felt by the mind.

On a related note, I came across this article by Sean Carroll (of Preposterous Universe). It is very well written and goes on to describe the concept of “memory” with regards to the changing entropy of the universe.

Another related article is this one on Boltzmann’s Universe.

Ladies and gentlemen, a very good morning to you all. Enjoy.

Two big stories, in a cosmic sense:

Astronomers find a hole in the universe

Astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. That’s got them scratching their heads about what’s just not there. The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That’s an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday.

Planet Formation Mystery Solved

Planet formation is a story with a well-known beginning and end, but how its middle plays out has been an enigma to scientists-until now.
A new computer-modeled theory shows how rocky boulders around infant stars team up to form planets without falling into stars.

News courtesy: Yahoo! News