#Supercollider france professional
#Supercollider france series

Ramachandran has pointed out in Phantoms in the Brain (1998), it takes only one talking pig to prove that pigs can talk. Case studies have a sample size of one and no control group. Occasionally, however, unfortunate accidents yield case studies: opportunities for researchers to study scenarios that can’t be experimentally induced for ethical reasons. Such thought experiments can be useful tools for exploring situations that can’t be studied in the laboratory. “Would I put my hand in the beam? I’m not sure about that.” “y the scales of energy we notice, it wouldn’t be that noticeable,” he said, likely with a bit of British understatement. Probably be very bad for you.” Professor Laurence Eaves was also cautious about drawing conclusions. Professor Michael Merrifield put it succinctly: “That’s a good question. In a 2010 YouTube interview with members of the physics and astronomy faculty at the University of Nottingham, several academic experts admitted that they had little idea what would happen if one were to stick a hand inside the proton beam at the LHC.

#Supercollider france professional

Which returns us to our original question: What happens when a beam of subatomic particles traveling at nearly the speed of light meets the flesh of the human body? Perhaps because the realms of particle physics and biology are conceptually so far removed, it’s not only laypeople who lack the intuition to answer this question, but also some professional physicists. Aage Bohr, the Nobel laureate whose father Niels invented the Bohr model of the atom, and his colleague Ole Ulfbeck have even gone as far as to deny the physical existence of subatomic particles as anything more than mathematical models. Instead, the study of particle physics is best described by chalkboard equations and squiggly lines called Feynman diagrams. Unlike a NASA probe sent to Mars, CERN’s research doesn’t produce stunning, tangible images. Yet, despite its accomplishments and glamour, the world of particle physics is so abstract that few understand its implications, meaning or use.

#Supercollider france series

With that major accomplishment, the LHC entered popular culture it was featured on the album cover of Super Collider (2013) by the heavy metal band Megadeth, and was a plot point in the US television series The Flash (2014-). Then, in 2012, the LHC detected the long-sought Higgs boson, a particle needed to explain how particles acquire mass.

But physicists argued that the idea was absurd and the lawsuit was rejected. It came as no surprise when two people filed a lawsuit to stop the LHC from operating, lest it produce a black hole powerful enough to destroy the world. To many, this sounds like the plot of a disastrous science-fiction movie. By delving into the mysteries of the universe, colliders have entered the zeitgeist and tapped the wonders and fears of our age.Īs far back as 2008, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), was charged with creating microscopic black holes that would allow physicists to detect extra dimensions. Particle accelerators allow physicists to study subatomic particles by speeding them up in powerful magnetic fields and then tracing the interactions that result from collisions. What would happen if you stuck your body inside a particle accelerator? The scenario seems like the start of a bad Marvel comic, but it happens to shed light on our intuitions about radiation, the vulnerability of the human body, and the very nature of matter.