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Happy 50th Cern!
Anonymous Coward writes "The facility that has earned three scientists Nobel prizes, provided the impetus for Berners-Lee's hypertext program (aka the WWW), oh and has also helped answer some fundamental questions regarding the universe has turned fifty today! And with the LHC in development, here's hoping for another 50!"
Can humanity possibly put a price on knoledge? Is there a limit to the ammount of money we should spend to learn - to further our understanding of the world around us?
/mod me off topic if you want
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
it will never be over. .. what? .. early on in 20th century? If there's any "deeper understanding" gained since it certainly didn't make it into the wild yet...
the more we learn about nature, the more opportunities for speculation open up. I may be wrong on that but it certainly seems that particle physics didn't really make any progress since quantum theory was accepted in
that's a four-momentum, man.
(I did make it small p unlike capital P later on, didn't I?)
Ever heard about Lorentz vectors? (E, px, py, pz) with "funny" (1, -1, -1, -1) metric (flat space diagonal) meaning when you multiply them, or square in our case, it expands to E^2 - px^2 - py^2 - pz^2. The magnitude of four-vector is called "interval". Four-momenta of real massive particles have interval > 0 ("time-like"), photons have inteval=0 ("light-like"), events in time-space that cannot possibly be cause-effect related are separated by interval less then 0 ("space-like").
Special Relativity postulated that interval is the same in all possible coordinate systems(4D of course), and everything else is derived from it. That's all there is to Special Relativity.
Now if you'll indulge me in a gratuitous attempt at being insightful, I was recently contemplating that in the long run, mastering electromagnetic waves might have been the most disasterous technological breakthrough in history. Of course, we'll never know for sure until at least a few decades or centuries, but the significance of the telephone and semiconductor cannot be underestimated. How can we be so sure that they are Good Things?
There's that quote about our technology surpassing our humanity, blah blah, and everyone always talks about cloning or flying cars or laser guns that kill without a bang (karma whore opportunity to link to the short story here). Rarely do people think about the present in that context and almost never to history. I think there is a good argument that the telephone was perhaps the first moment in history where technology played an active role in replacing a person's community. I could be full of crap (likely) but maybe THAT was the moment when our technology surpassed our humanity.
Nothing else made it possible to import someone else's community into our own. It wasn't a night and day shift from postal service to IRC addicts and kids in rural states expressing violent rage somehow related to pop culture (and I'm trolling here about violence on TV creates violence in Colorado - bear with me). The miracle of communcations at the speed of electromagnetism made it possible to inject someone else's society, customs, culture, values, ethics, and attitude into our own, no matter how poorly those things fit.
Before this stuff, if you wanted to disconnect yourself from your neighbors and your community, you were a freaking recluse - the town outcast, the weirdo who never left his house, the werewolf (karma whore opportunity to link to the hypothesis that werewolf stories grew out of society's earliest serial rapists/murderers), the drunkard, et cetera. Now you're just a normal guy/gal whose "community" consists of Jon Stewart (I'm guilty of that), CNN, Fox News if you must, Martha Stewart, Hollywood, The Sopranos, and so on. I grew up in a small town in the midwest but now I live in suburban D.C. and don't know the name of a single person in my apartment building.
Are we so sure that the future is where our technology surpasses our humanity? Are we so sure that the "technological revolution" is such a GOOD thing? I'm not even whining about violence on TV or in the movies - I'm whining about the fact that all these great inventions make it SO EASY for me to replace the life that surrounds me with a life that's imported from 3,000 miles away.
And this isn't some holier-than-thou rant, either. I'm just as guilty of living in the midst of all of this as anyone. I'm not suggesting some plan of action, either. I just wonder if, in The Big Book of Human History, there will be a chapter called, "Instantaneous Global Communication and the Five Hundred Years of Crap that Followed".
Actually, I disagree. Explaining it in two sentences is next to impossible, but if somebody is willing to listen for ten minutes, I find it relatively easy.
I also try to be honest, i.e. I avoid the usual "CP violation is studied to understand the excess of matter over antimatter in the universe" crap.
In my experience, honesty (it has no pratical applications) also pays here. There are many things without partical applications which are more expensive than particle physics, so it's not a problem.
Was there a song, which was on alternative radio around 1994, that mentioned CERN?
For some reason I think there was, but I can't remember anything else.