SlagA
Friday 5th September 2008 2:49pm [Edited]
Blackwood
5,335 posts
I see Ian Wolf's points with the stats. We're talking the 'potential' chance. Although incredibly rare an asteroid strike has more potential than lightning to cause large scale death. I think someone once worked out the chances of being killed by a falling fridge in Norwich. It probaby hasn't happened but the potential aways exists.
As to the experiment creating events to which we're none the wiser (calving black holes ino parallel universes), it strikes me as a pretty poorly designed experiment when it culminates in a lot of perplexed shrugging gestures at the end of it. However, it sounds a typically European ending.
I don't think it'll end with the end of the universe... yet. But what does it say about us as a species that we're prepared to play with things that might destroy not just the planet but the fabric of space-time and it seems of little importance?
I hope we never get off this planet as the rest of the universe doesn't deserve to have us inflicted on it.
Re: Matter and the 'missing' matter. The fact that everything carries mass unexplained by the actual amount of matter we can see. I read one analogy to describe the huge gulfs within an atom: if you remove the interactive forces, people could walk through walls without a single atom (electrons and nuclei) of the wall or the person colliding. Some particles (is it Hadrons, someone?) can pass through the planet without collision with anything solid. We are in a way insubstantial ghosts living in a ghostlike universe where consciousness seems incredibly important in deciding outcome.
I think also that they're looking for the hidden mass of the universe in the wrong place. The true mass is not contained within yet-to-be-discovered sub-atomic particles but more likely within the higher dimensions (at the last count there were eleven) that extend beyond and yet permeate our 3-D world. Although we feel its effects in this plane we are incapable of percieving or understanding those other dimensions. It's like inhabitants within an oil painting trying to explain and understand air pressure from outside rippling the canvass. They live in a 2D world so they're incapable of understanding a gust of wind that originates from the 3D world. They're incapable of fully comprehending the room the painting hangs in, let alone the nature of gas, and the physics of the third (and higher) dimensions. In a 2-D world they would experience gravity between objects within the painting but they couldn't explain the much more massive gravity that the Earth would exert on every object within the painting. There would be a hidden mass that they can't explain.
Personally in my cookie little belief system, I think they'll open something they can't shut. I hope not.