CERN Lights Up the Large Hadron Collider

Not many people know this, but the organization that invented the world wide web - today lit up another big experiment - the Large Hadron Collider. This collider is a cut above - in the 7 Tera Electron Volt range. Basically running two beams at 3.5 each and then smashing them into each other.

What I find really interesting about this energy range is that the symmetry theories can be tested out. This may be the door that opens to a model that finally makes sense of some of the 250 odd particles that the standard model is producing - and help us to understand the unification of the forces electro-weak and electro-strong, and possibly even gravitational. The ideas of Garrett Lisi are really pretty interesting here - and in this energy range we can try a few out.

Have you ever wondered if maybe the four dimensions of space and time are a subset of higher dimensions? Sometimes I feel like there is an echo of them that we can detect - as people. A way in which we can sense the higher orders and work within them. Atheists tend to enjoy telling people that the sensory realm is all that is - but what really interests me is how limited those senses are - and how quickly they will add that they would include artificially boosting that sense range to be able to detect things like solar flares, or slow down the beat of a hummingbird's wing.

What if we could, organically - sense other dimensions? There may be no other way of describing it other than through the binding of that sense to a set of rules that are for a lack of a better word - right now - mystical. I recently read a Star Trek novel in which the Enterprise is called upon by a race under duress - one in which a set of the aliens who refer to themselves as the "people" where were worldlessly slaughtering all residents of the plant besides themselves - caging some children and then silently leading the others off to become part of their race - those that somehow were not speaking but able to communicate. The betazoid in the crew figured out that they were communicating telepathically - or so it seemed - and that they would annhilate anyone who couldn't communicate soul to soul. Because, after all - if you don't have a soul, you're an animal , right?

But what was actually going on - was that they had a strange, organic frequency that they could communicate on. And Data, being an android - and so being part organic - could pick it up somehow. It wouldn't show up on the computer scan - the mechanical scanners couldn't pick it up. They wired Data up as a sort of semi-organic transceiver so that he could communicate - it wasn't telepathy but for all intents and purposes, it looked like it. Eventually he burned the semi-organic circuit out but not before the Enterprise had established diplomatic communication and ended the war. The novel was called "Metamorphosis".

The work at the LHC will take about 2 years and after that we should have a real view into the type of symmetry that our universe enjoys - what it would mean, to you and me - if we were to discover that the universe actually does have these extra dimensions - would, I think, bring a greater attunement to the types of games people play as two lives orbit, entertwine, and regenerate. I think perhaps that is a part of our lives where we break through. Not sure. It should be fun to see what happens.