What if.....??

A couple of days back I decided to just kick back a bit, switch off the brains and let the TV do some of the thinking for me. On the Discovery channel was a special about alien life. There are loads of such documentaries that try to give both sides of the story.

The believers will tell of their experiences -- seeing this, hearing that, getting abducted and poked around a bit.

Then there'll be the cynics and people who profess to be men and women of science. And these guys just can't wait to pooh-pooh all this claims as wild hallucinations of nutjobs.

"Forget your leader, take me to Krispy Kreme!"

I'm sitting there listening to each side's accounts...

"They had almond shaped, dark eyes..."
"The guy probably had too much to drink!"

"The saucer flew at such incredible speeds"
"Um.. it was a weather balloon, yeah, or an unmanned vehicle..."

"Thousands of reports came in, all claiming to see the same phenomenon!"
"Its not unusual to have cases of mass hysteria..."

"Those beings are evil, and they are systematically abducting humans for experiments"
"Ah, people will say anything just to go on TV!"

Must not have been too bright, since he got caught!

And so the argument continues. Some of these are supposed to be famous scientists.
So who would you believe, some small town person who may have had too much moonshine or sun or both?

Or a distinguished professor who has chewed through a million dry facts and figures?

I've always wondered what would happen to these very public debates, if one day, the real truth really came about? What would the many vocal skeptics say if really, some green-grey skinned visitor came down one day ... took a look, decided we weren't worth their time and left.... right in plain sight of a hundred TV cameras?

I for one would love to see that day.
And for the record, I do believe there is sentient life out there! Its inconceivable for me that of the bazillions stars in this infinite universe, we are unique.

Remember, just barely a couple of centuries ago, the brightest scientific minds of that time though the earth was flat... um, no, round but in the center of the universe, not that... but the sun rotated around the earth... strike that... the moon is made of cheese....

Flat Earth - circa. 1225 AD

Well, perhaps not that last one. But you've seen scientific and religious dogma being proven wrong with every leap of new discovery and knowledge. Makes you wonder what other 'facts' that we hold as irrefutably true today would turn out to be yet another of our misunderstanding of nature?

I leave you with these famous words, spoken eloquently by many of the world's brightest minds. Its not about aliens or anything funky... but you'll be surprised how people felt about things which we take for granted today.....

• "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." -- Western Union internal memo, 1876.

• "The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" -- David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.

• "The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible." -- A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)

• "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" -- H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927

• "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." -- Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

• "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." -- Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

• "So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'" -- Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and H-P interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer.

• "You want to have consistent and uniform muscle development across all of your muscles? It can't be done. It's just a fact of life. You just have to accept inconsistent muscle development as an unalterable condition of weight training." -- Response to Arthur Jones, who solved the "unsolvable" problem by inventing Nautilus.

• "Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy." -- Drillers whom Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist in his project to drill for oil in 1859.

• "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." -- Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.

• "Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value." -- Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre.

• "Everything that can be invented has been invented." -- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

• "The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon". -- Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria 1873.

• "No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris." -- Orville Wright.

• "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- T.Watson, chairman of the board, IBM, 1943

• "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." -- Popular Mechnics, 1949

• "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olsoon, founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1972

BOOM - an early LHC success story

This my friends, is a simulated picture of the first ever successful proton stream collision at the LHC. It happened yesterday, on day 1 of LHC's operations. The success of getting the world's largest (and most expensive) scientific equipment up and running so quickly surprised even the most optimistic physicists working on it!

Oh yeah, and no accidental black hole resulted from it. DUH! We wouldn't be reading this if that happened, right?

Read more about this first experiment here (also contains a really cool video on how the LHC works, narrated in an equally cool accent!).

BTW, not everybody agrees with the LHC plan as well -- although I think the writer meant it as a satire. Read about that here.

What is everything in the Universe made of?

Stuff.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it. But if you were like Democritos, the Greek philosopher of 300 BC, you'd want to know what exactly is this 'stuff' then?

Democritos figured that if you kept halving something, you'd eventually reach a point where that thing simply cannot halved anymore. He called this an 'atom'.

Today, we know this as a fact. Atoms really are what Democritos imagined it would be -- to a point. For someone who existed over two thousand years ago, I'd say he was waaaaay ahead of time then!

Since then, we have gone a few steps further and discovered that within atoms, there exists Protons, Neutrons and Electrons (halo, still remember your fizik or not?) -- collectively called sub-atomic particles.

These Protons and Neutrons are in turn made up of even tiner particles called Quarks.

Subatomic particles are so small, there is no way we are able to observe them through conventional means. And by 'conventional', that means even the most powerful scanning-tunneling electron miscropes that are able to look at individual atoms!

To describe the behaviour of subatomic particles, scientists resorted to building complex mathematical models that predict their (the particles, not the scientists!) lifespans and characteristics.

But if you really wanted to 'see' them, you'd need a super massive tool called a partical accelerator. You'd have probably read it in the news by now, regarding the CERN particle accelerator called the LHC, Large Hedron Colider?

The LHC (pix by:Fabrice Coffrini / AFP-Getty Images)

The WHAT?

• Its a tube, the shape and size of a gigantic doughnut 26 kilometers in circumference
  
• The system is buried deep underground so it is shielded from solar radiation (which messes up the readings).
  
• Around the tube, there are 9,000 super-conducting magnets that run at a super-cool temperature of minus 270c.
• The machine consumes 120 mega watts of power.
• There are between 7,000 to 10,000 scientists working on this machine.
• It is located at the border of France and Switzerland -- what a lovely place to be!!
  

So what does it do?

• It speeds up one stream of hidrogen atoms within this tube to nearly the speed of light in one direction.
• It speeds up another stream to the same speed on a different path, but on the opposite direction.
• Then it smashes these 2 streams together -- BOOM

In there to record the action, are massive detectors that are described as equal to a 150 megapixel camera (our high end consumer models shot 10 mega pixles) and at 600,000,000 frames per second! Say CHEESE!

These scientists then spend the next months and years theorising further on what they saw, or what they thought they saw... and whether any of the particles' collisions were caused by driving under influence.

The cost of this thing?

Estimates vary, but its been tagged at between 6 to 10 billion dollars.
Its being funded by Europeans, and in part, the Americans.
No Petronas money was being misused for this purpose (sorry, Malaysian-only inside joke here)

What do they hope to get out of this thing anyway?

The scientists hope to answer, prove or disprove 5 theories:
1) What happened milliseconds after the Big Bang?
2) Do Strings (as in String Theory) exist, and are there really 11 dimensions in the universe?
3) Is it universe or multiverse?
4) Find this 'dark matter', that's supposed to make up 96% of the universe.
5) Find this illusive thing called the 'Higgs Boson'... and hopefully find more than that even

No, really, what I mean is, what's in it for us?
Actually there was an initial fear that the machine may somehow create a micro blackhole. If that happens, some fear that it would wipe out our entire planet -- get sucked into something the size of a green pea or something.

The LHC went life today.... and chances are, if you're reading this, it means no blackhole was created. And if it did.... well, it wouldn't matter much anyway. Nothing matters much when you are sharing the space of a green pea with 6 billion other people and a planet! But that has a 1 in 50 million chance of happening!

But beyond satisfying the curiosity of several physicists, there is little of what will come out of this that will benefit the layman any time soon.

Who knows, the findings may open doors to new and more insightful views of our universe?
I guess I would... to a point. But beyond that, I'd focus my energies on the other kind of doughnut -- the delicious ones from Big Apple!

Interested to know more? Check out this excellent article from Wired magazine.