First beam in the LHC - Accelerating science and discovering god

Check the novel Angels and Demons and its futuristic prediction on Antimatter...

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Geneva, 10 September 2008. The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN¹ was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometres of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at 10h28 this morning. This historic event marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery.

“It’s a fantastic moment,” said LHC project leader Lyn Evans, “we can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe.”

Starting up a major new particle accelerator takes much more than flipping a switch. Thousands of individual elements have to work in harmony, timings have to be synchronized to under a billionth of a second, and beams finer than a human hair have to be brought into head-on collision. Today’s success puts a tick next to the first of those steps, and over the next few weeks, as the LHC’s operators gain experience and confidence with the new machine, the machine’s acceleration systems will be brought into play, and the beams will be brought into collision to allow the research programme to begin.

Once colliding beams have been established, there will be a period of measurement and calibration for the LHC’s four major experiments, and new results could start to appear in around a year. Experiments at the LHC will allow physicists to complete a journey that started with Newton's description of gravity. Gravity acts on mass, but so far science is unable to explain the mechanism that generates mass. Experiments at the LHC will provide the answer. LHC experiments will also try to probe the mysterious dark matter of the universe – visible matter seems to account for just 5% of what must exist, while about a quarter is believed to be dark matter. They will investigate the reason for nature's preference for matter over antimatter, and they will probe matter as it existed at the very beginning of time.

“The LHC is a discovery machine,” said CERN Director General Robert Aymar, “its research programme has the potential to change our view of the Universe profoundly, continuing a tradition of human curiosity that’s as old as mankind itself.”

CERN, the coolest place in the Universe

“CERN's big chill” - it could be the sensational title of a science-fiction novel, but it's actually a sensational scientific reality! At the beginning of April, a 3.3-km section of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was cooled to a chilly ‑271°C, just a couple of degrees above the lowest temperature possible, absolute zero, and colder than outer space! Sector 7-8 (an eighth of the accelerator) thus becomes the world's largest superconducting installation cooled by superfluid helium.

This great achievement is just a prelude to an even greater one, the start-up of the LHC. The LHC will be the world's most powerful accelerator, designed to answer fundamental questions about the elementary components of matter, the forces that bind them together and the evolution of the Universe.

The whole 27-km LHC ring has to be brought down to this super-cool temperature for the accelerator's magnets to operate in a superconducting state. This will enable them to generate a magnetic field that is sufficiently powerful to bend and focus the proton beams accelerated at close to the speed of light. The cooling will be achieved by placing the 1740 superconducting magnets inside a unique “freezer” – the cryogenic system

Phantoms in the Brain

I suggest that a new set of brain structures evolved during hominid evolution, turning the output from more primitive sensory areas of the brain into what I call a “meta- representation” I think they edited, enhanced and packaged sensory information into more manageable chunks, used for juggling symbols and language.

Ramachandran is director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego.

A few quotes from the book Phantoms in the brain:
A piece of your brain the size of a grain of sand would contain one hundred thousand neurons, two million axons and one billion synapses, all "talking to" each other.
Pain is an opinion on the organism's state of health rather than a mere reflective response to an injury. There is no direct hotline from pain receptors to "pain centers" in the brain.
Your own body is a phantom, one that your brain has temporarily constructed purely for convenience.
The mechanisms of perception are mainly involved in extracting statistical correlations from the world to create a model that is temporarily useful.
One could argue that the term consciousness doesn't mean anything unless you recognize the emotional significance and semantic associations of what you are looking at.
We have given up the idea that there is a soul separate from our minds and bodies.
Every medical student is taught that patients with epileptic seizures originating in this part of the brain [temporal lobes] can have intense, spiritual experiences during the seizures and sometimes become preoccupied with religion and moral issues even during the seizure-free or interictal periods.
But most remarkable of all are those patients who have deeply moving spiritual experiences, including a feeling of divine presence and the sense that they are in direct communion with God. Everything around them is imbued with cosmic significance. They may say, "I finally understand what it's all about. This is the moment I've been waiting for all my life. Suddenly it all makes sense." Or, "Finally have insight into the true nature of the cosmos." I find it ironic that this sense of enlightenment, this absolute conviction that Truth is revealed at last, should derive from limbic structures concerned with emotions rather than from the thinking, rational parts of the brain that take so much pride in their ability to discern truth and falsehood.
Could it be that human beings have actually evolved specialized neural circuitry for the sole purpose of mediating religious experience? The human belief in the supernatural is so widespread in all societies all over the world that it's tempting to ask whether the propensity for such beliefs might have a biological basis.
What would happen to the patient's personality-- especially his spiritual leanings-- if we removed a chunk of his temporal lobe?
The one clear conclusion that emerges from all this is that there are circuits in the human brain that are involved in religious experience and these become hyperactive in some epileptics.
It's probably not coincidence that many of the most creative scientists have a great sense of humor.
[P]erhaps it's time to recognize that the division between mind and body may be no more than a pedagogic device for instructing medical students-- and not a useful construct for understanding human health, disease and behavior.
This need to reconcile the first-person and third-person accounts of the universe (the "I" verses the "he" or "it" view) is the single most important unsolved problem in science.
For centuries philosophers have assumed that this gap between brain and mind poses a deep epistemological problem-- a barrier that simply cannot be crossed. But is this really true? I agree that the barrier hasn't yet been crossed, but does it follow that it can never be crossed? I'd like to argue that there is in fact no such barrier, no great vertical divide in nature between mind and matter, substance and spirit. Indeed, I believe that this barrier is only apparent that is arises as a result of language. This sort of obstacle emerges when there is any translation from one language to another.
I submit that we are dealing here with two mutually unintelligible languages. One is the language of nerve impulses-- the spatial and temporal patterns of neuronal activity that allow us to see red, for example. The second language, the one that allows us to communicate what we are seeing to others, is a natural spoken tongue like English or German or Japanese-- rarefied, compressed waves of air traveling between you and the listener. Both are languages in the strict technical sense, that is, they are information-rich messages that are intended to convey meaning, across synapses between different brain parts in one case and across the air between two people in the other.
If one enumerates all of the attributes that we usually associate with the words "consciousness" and "awareness," each of them, you will notice, has a correlate in temporal lobe seizures, including vivid visual and auditory hallucinations, "out of body" experiences and an absolute sense of omnipotence or omniscience.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Oliver Sacks, M.D.

Preface

Chapter 1: The Phantom Within
Chapter 2: "Knowing Where to Scratch"
Chapter 3: Chasing the Phantom
Chapter 4: The Zombie in the Brain
Chapter 5: The Secret Life of James Thurber
Chapter 6: Through the Looking Glass
Chapter 7: The Sound of One Hand Clapping
Chapter 8: "The Unbearable Likeness of Being"
Chapter 9: God and the Limbic System
Chapter 10: The Woman Who Died Laughing
Chapter 11: "You Forgot to Deliver the Twin"
Chapter 12: Do Martians See Red?