Visiting the Big Bang

DarkKnightRadick writes "An article at the NYTimes.com (Free reg) is reporting that researchers in Long Island, NY are attempting to create the quark-gluon plasma that existed a trillionth of a second after the big bang, when the universe was just the size of a marble or grapefruit. "Sam Aronson was perched a few stories up on a metal catwalk, surrounded by tons of Russian steel and Japanese electronics, and enough wires to impress even Con Ed, when he paused to say what really interested him about the $600 million machine. Time, he said. More precisely, the beginning of time, just after the Big Bang, some 14 billion years ago.""

Comments

Like an old shoe....

[Kibo]

It's always nice to see this continuing story make it to the mainstream media from time to time.

I wouldn't be opposed to something like a half hour or hour special, really.

But every now and then if I watch my local neighborhood college channel, they have this old MIT physics lecture series which coincidently featers one of the researchers involved with this. The last lecture of the series, he talks a lot about the project, as a send off to his students. My college professors were rarely so engaging.

I can't help but be in awe of the incredible might of our intellect. That the minds of men were are able to fling heavy nuclei together bringing the temperature of a little pocket of space to two trillion degrees (at temperatures that great units are almost irrelivant, but K), pushing the hands of time back, esentially, to the moment of our universe's conception, is why we have words like 'brilliant', 'awesome', and 'incredible'.

That I should be fortunate enough to live in a society that permits an average Joe, such as myself, to understand the mechanics of such a feat in qualitative terms, even if the quantitative methodes elude me, is truly a blessing. That a majority of my people seem to think creationism should be taught in schools, tells me too few of my countrymen take advantage of it.

Re:Like an old shoe....

[Kibo]

While not exactly generalizable to all Americans, the last poll I saw (major web site, doesn't make ballot stuffing easy, and there are all sorts of biases that would need to be accounted for) something like 60% thought creationism should be taught along with evolution. More thought evolution should be taught. If I was going to draw conclusions, I would conclude that most people (who took that poll) are undecided, and hedging their bets. That's sad. Creationism isn't a search for answers it's an excuse to not look for them. Faith has it's place, pretending to be fact isn't it.

While the puzzle, as you point out, is far from complete, we should encourage the innovative investigation of the questions that remain, as opposed to endorsing magic.

I might remind you that empircal evidence in support of a 'flat earth', as people so unwisely yet frequently remark, was limited to, "It looks more or less flat to me." By the time people got around to actually conducting experiments designed to test that assumed hypothesis, they discovered not only that the earth was round, but that it was big. I might also note, that the people most fond of creationism took a few extra millenia to pick up that handy bit of information.

Your example, far from being a call to tolerance is a call to arms. A cry for better education.

And here I thought I was saying something no one could disagree with. That'll teach me to share my wonder at man's achivements and my lament that not everyone chooses to share in them.