For most people, informed solely by the aforementioned fictional matrix curriculum, the word Stargate conjures images of the cliché ridden 1994 film of the same name, starring Kurt Russell. Or perhaps the Stargate SG-1 spinoff series, the longest-running US science fiction series of all time (of which I have seen none). The whole stargate imagery, language and feel is already there, pre-packaged and ready to go. We sort of know what a stargate is and what it looks like. They move people from one point in space and time to another. Wormholes. Star travel. Stuff like that. As to their actual existence however, as real world devices, their authenticity has remained entirely unbroadcast.
The officially stated function of CERN is to provide infrastructure for high-energy physics research. One goal of the LHC is to establish the existence of the "Higgs Boson" particle. It is thought that the Higgs Boson is what gives matter "mass". To observe it, the LHC will be colliding Hadrons (specifically Protons) together at unimaginably high speeds. Six principle experiments at the LHC (named ALICE, ATLAS, TOTEM, CMS, LHCb, and LHCf) aim to explore fundamental elements of existence areas such as gravity, mass, matter, antimatter, the origins of the universe and extra dimensions of spacetime. We don’t typically hear much about that in the news.To quote CERN’s own published documentation: "Some theories suggest that, beyond the three spatial dimensions we experience, our Universe has some extra dimensions. These have finite size, so they are curved onto themselves, for instance in the shape of a circle (although, for more than one extra dimension, more complicated geometries are possible)."
According to American physicist and leading string field theorist, Professor Michio Kaku, the best Nobel Laureates cannot agree on the outcome of the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. They just don’t get it. Kaku suggests that it remains the single most important quandary in the history of modern man.
The Schrödinger’s cat paradox poses a philosophical question about the nature of reality, particularly pertinent to those interested in Quantum Physics. It goes like this. A cat is put inside a sealed box with a device that may or may not release a poison gas, dependent on a totally random 50/50 chance. After one hour, the device will have either released the deadly gas or not. According to quantum theory, after an hour, the cat is actually in a quantum superposition of being both alive and dead at the same time, until someone opens the box that is. When the observer opens the box, the cat then manifests as being either alive or dead.
There are two main possibilities to explain the quantum paradox.
The Copenhagen interpretation. A system stops being a superposition of states and becomes either one or the other when an observation takes place; i.e. when consciousness intervenes. When the observer looks, the superposition state collapses into a single state.
Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation (MWI). Both alive and dead states of the cat occur, but are separate (or decoherent) from each other. When the box is opened, that part of the universe containing the observer and cat is split into two separate universes, one containing an observer looking at a box with a dead cat, one containing an observer looking at a box with a live cat. This infers multiple, perhaps infinite, parallel universes.
CERN and the LHC will shed light on MWI. MWI denies the objective reality of wavefunction collapse. The subjective appearance of wavefunction collapse is actually quantum decoherence. MWI resolves all the paradoxes of quantum theory since every possible outcome to every event defines or exists in its own "history" or "world". In layman's terms, this means that there are an infinite number of universes and that everything that could possibly happen in our universe (but doesn't) happens somewhere else, in another universe. Hence the growing recognition of the term multiverse.
A Super Massive Hot Lump Of Strange Matter
Some are more nervous than others about the experiments conducted at the Large Hadron Collider. The concerned voices focus on the possibility that the LHC could create mini black holes that may last long enough to get out of control and start eating things up. The formation of black hole analogs on Earth (in particle accelerators) has been reported. They act like black holes because of the correspondence between the theory of the strong nuclear force and the quantum theory of gravity. It is presently unknown whether the much more energetic LHC would be capable of producing the speculative large extra dimension micro black hole, as many theorists have suggested. In theory, Hawking Radiation means that any arising black holes will evaporate in Femtoseconds (not long at all), not enough to accrete mass or cause problems. Though this comforting thought has never been proven.
If that wasn’t enough, there’s also the theoretical possibility that quarks could recombine into “strangelets". According to the strange matter hypothesis, when a strangelet comes into contact with a lump of ordinary matter such as Earth, it could convert the ordinary matter to strange matter. This "ice-nine" disaster scenario is as follows: one strangelet hits a nucleus, catalyzing its immediate conversion to strange matter. This liberates energy, producing a larger, more stable strangelet, which in turn hits another nucleus, catalyzing its conversion to strange matter. In the end, all the nuclei of all the atoms of Earth are converted (assimilated by the Borg strangelets) - and Earth is reduced to a super massive hot lump of strange matter. That would be a hell of a day.
Former nuclear safety officer Walter L. Wagner has been raising safety questions for years. In March 2008, Wagner and another critic of the LHC's safety measures, Luis Sancho, filed a lawsuit in Hawaii's U.S. District Court. The suit calls on the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation and CERN to ease up on their LHC preparations for several months while the collider's safety is reassessed. However, similar law suits have failed in the past and are unlikely to prevent the LHC from proceeding. CERN project managers and leading physicists are dismissive of any significant risks. They claim particle collisions “cannot create dangerous things.”
I guess we’ll know soon enough.
Footnotes
(1) It was during a visit to CERN in 1985 that Stephen Hawking contracted pneumonia (life-threatening in his weakened condition) which resulted in acute breathing difficulties. It could only be overcome through a tracheotomy by which Stephen Hawking permanently lost his natural speech ability.
(2) CERN is a central plot element in Dan Brown’s book 'Angels And Demons'. A scientist is found dead at CERN. His murderers appear to have acquired a canister containing a quarter gram of antimatter — an extremely deadly substance with destructive potential comparable to the most powerful nuclear weapons in existence, a potential unleashed upon contact with any form of normal matter. And so a race against time ensues.
(3) The CERN logo is said by some alternative researchers to contain the Antichrist 666 emblem.
(4) The World Wide Web began as a CERN project called ENQUIRE, initiated by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau in 1989. Based on the concept of hypertext, the project was aimed at facilitating sharing information among researchers. The first website went on-line in 1991. On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone. A copy of the original first webpage, created by Berners-Lee, is kept here.
