What the 'physics' is that all about?

How much??!!!

CERN the mighty, CERN that discovered the Higgs boson which changed the lives of every person on the planet overnight.

Coming up soon CERN 3.0. Bigger, faster, better.

What’s it called? The Future Circular Collider. Offspring of the Large Hadron Collider itself offspring of the Tevatron.

There’s chatter about the FCC. Some governments, especially the German one, have been saying it’s too expensive. Heresy, blasphemy!! Physics is God, physics explains all, Physics is beyond reproach. What are the politicians worried about anyway? Thanks to their accountants they don’t pay much in the way of income tax. It’s not their money, the estimated 30,000,000,000€ come out of our pockets, we, the taxpayers. It’s only 66.66€ per person which, on the Kebab standard, works out at 6.6 kebabs+chips+ketchup.

What do those cheeky Physicists want to do? Like children on the beach, they want to dig. Not themselves of, course, they want money to pay people to do it while they do calculations. They want to dig a tunnel that will be between 80 and &00 kilometers long. They aren’t fully sure how long which is why they need to get busy doing calculations and aren’t available to do some digging.

These brilliant physicists want to build the FCC in two stages. The LHC can only produce one Higgs boson at a time and they are lonely so they don’t hang around for long. The first stage of the FCC will aim to produce sprinkles of Higgs bosons to check what happens when they bump into each other.

The second stage of the FCC project is a bit vague and falls into the category of ‘by the time it’s built we’ll have the technology ready, we hope’ of human endeavours. After all, it won’t be firing the photons around until 2070, that gives them 2070 - 2025 = 45 years, to get it sorted. It’ll all be fine.

There are some poor, miserable, wingeing Physicists who complain about so much money being invested into one massive project. Well they would, wouldn’t they? They aren’t in the elite CERN club. They complain about the opportunity cost of the project, the 30,000,000,000€ that could be spent on other things. Silliness. What could possibly be more important than banging ‘God’ (the marketing name given to the Higgs boson in order to show us common folk how important it is) particles into each other? These impoverished, sad little physicists pretend that there are other, cheaper, ways of working out how the Universe works. Laugh? I nearly broke a rib.

It’s true that the researchers at CERN are serious people. If I had access to the particle accelerator I’d most certainly be accelerating things like kebabs to see what happens when they collide. Or apples maybe? They did help Isaac invent gravity after all. No, seriously, how much fun would that be? Accelerating two apples to near-light speed and crashing them into each other.

These serious people, to justify their need for 30,000,000,000€ point out, with pride, their achievements with the particle accelerator they already have.

1973: The discovery of neutral currents in the Gargamelle bubble chamber

1983: The discovery of W and Z bosons

1989: The determination of the number of light neutrino families at the Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) operating on the Z boson peak

1995: The first creation of antihydrogen atoms

1995–2005: Precision measurement of the Z lineshape

1999: The discovery of direct CP violation

2000: The Heavy Ion Programme discovered a new state of matter, quark–gluon plasma

2010: The isolation of 38 atoms of antihydrogen

2011: Maintaining antihydrogen for over 15 minutes

2012: A boson with mass around 125 GeV/c2 consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson

It’s a good thing that CERN is partly based in France, the researchers have easy access to the Champagne needed for so many celebrations.

They gloss over the faster-then-light neutrinos they found in 2011. It turned out that their GPS synchronisation cable wasn’t connected up correctly. When they did the experiment again using the GPS from someone’s car they couldn’t find the FTL neutrinos. I have a similar problem sometimes when the GPS takes me down a farm track when I had been hoping it would take me to a major highway.

I do remember being pleased that they had managed to maintain anti-hydrogen for over 15 minutes. I was trying molecular cuisine at the time.

Another problem with CERN has to do with the scientific method. You have an idea, you develop a hypothesis, you run some experiments and you publish the results. Other researchers copy your experiment and try to show how it, and your results, were flawed. There is only one CERN so nobody else can test the CERN results. Imagine if they hadn’t noticed that their GPS was on the blink. We’d have people all over the world wasting time fiddling around in their sheds and garages trying to make faster-than-light neutrinos. Imagine running your car with them rather than with petrol.

Years ago I read a book called Pythagoras's Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender War by Margaret Wertheim. Not only does Margeret show how women were excluded from science but also how physics became the unassailable ‘top dog’ of all the different branches of science.

You can be explained by biology which can be explained by chemistry which itself can be explained by physics. Eventually, from the mighty physics will come a theory that explains everything. Yes, everything. The nature of the universe, why the orange curd I made yesterday didn’t set enough. Everything.

The above idea died in the 1980s and 1990s, some say even earlier when Quantum physics started upsetting people like Einstein. He had spent years trying to explain why one sock of a pair disappears in the washing machine. Quantum mechanics showed that this was because the socks start off as an entangled pair. Due to their different positions in the wash during the spin cycle the socks entangled waveform collapses. They are now separate and, as we know (Δx⋅Δp ≥ ℏ/2) so we can’t know both the position and momentum of one of the socks. We know that the sock’s momentum is zero because the spin cycle has finished, so we can’t possibly know where it is. I hope this helps, it’s not your fault you lose socks but a fundamental feature of the Universe. Social sciences picked up on this to show how many major historical events can be explained by people wearing unmatched socks, or just one.

Margaret Wertheim, in her book, shows how Physics has been a male-dominated science since its inception. This would seem short-sighted but shows that a human male may develop a theorem or two but is a total idiot about everything else. Margaret also argues that Physics should be dethroned, she is, herself, a physicist so she knows what she’s talking about.

I wholeheartedly recommend her book. It’s an eye-opener about the misogynistic nature of scientific endeavour over the centuries, including this one. She helps us understand why so many books about physics have the word God in their titles. She argues that ‘from its inception physics has been a mystically inspired activity – a science rooted in a conception of God as a divine mathematical creator.’

In the end, physics cannot explain life, which is surely the greatest mystery of all?