Despite their blatherskiting about “listening to the science”, the green-left are often more anti-science than a mediaeval Inquisitor seeing witches under every textbook. Despite its track record of safety, green activists are implacably opposed to nuclear energy. The usual gaggle of nosey-nannas, “doctors for the environment” and alarmist “scientists” also tried to stymie the launch of the Cassini probe in 1997.
When CERN was building the Large Hadron Collider, the alarmist lobbyists crawled out of their private planes and conferences at luxury holiday resorts to ramp up their hysteria yet again. The LHC would create runaway black holes that would swallow the entire Earth! they shrieked.
It didn’t of course, but now real scientists are preparing to thumb their noses at the alarmists by indeed creating black holes. Not the Earth-swallowing variety, but microscopic black holes that will evaporate almost as soon as they are created. But, like most of the particles created in colliders like the LHC, their incredibly brief existence may yield a wealth of new information.
If successful a completely new universe will be revealed – rewriting not only the physics books but the philosophy books too.
This, sadly, is typical of the sort of hyperbole that plagues science journalism these days. If successful, the experiment will help provide sorely-needed evidence for some of the principles of String Theory – such as multiple, undetected dimensions to the universe – but it will certainly not rewrite the philosophy books. It won’t even provide any evidence for the sort of “parallel universes” you’re probably thinking of.
Mir Faizal, one of the three-strong team of physicists behind the experiment, said: “Just as many parallel sheets of paper, which are two dimensional objects [breadth and length] can exist in a third dimension [height], parallel universes can also exist in higher dimensions.
“We predict that gravity can leak into extra dimensions, and if it does, then miniature black holes can be produced at the LHC.
“Normally, when people think of the multiverse, they think of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where every possibility is actualised.
“This cannot be tested and so it is philosophy and not science.
“This is not what we mean by parallel universes. What we mean is real universes in extra dimensions.
Extra dimensions beyond the four we know so well as spacetime are essential to most versions of String Theory – up to 11 dimensions, in fact.
“As gravity can flow out of our universe into the extra dimensions, such a model can be tested by the detection of mini black holes at the LHC.
“We have calculated the energy at which we expect to detect these mini black holes in ‘gravity’s rainbow’.”
Rainbow gravity – also called “gravity’s rainbow”, after the Thomas Pynchon novel – is the theory that different wavelengths of light experience different gravity levels. Such a discovery would, at the least, challenge the conventional cosmological model, the Big Bang theory. Instead of tracing the observed expansion of the universe backwards through time to a single event – the Big Bang – rainbow gravity suggests that, in reverse, the universe would approach such a singularity without ever reaching it. In other words, the universe had no “beginning”.
Some physicists also claim that rainbow gravity could be the long-sought-after bridge between general relativity and quantum physics.
“If we do detect mini black holes at this energy, then we will know that both gravity’s rainbow and extra dimensions are correct.”
When the LHC is fired up the energy is measured in Tera electron volts – a TeV is 1,000,000,000,000, or one trillion, electron Volts.
So far, the LHC has searched for mini black holes at energy levels below 5.3 TeV.
But the latest study says this is too low.Instead, the model predicts that black holes may form at energy levels of at least 9.5 TeV in six dimensions and 11.9 TeV in 10 dimensions.
If successful, the LHC experiments will throw up more questions than answers, for the time being. In so doing, it will confirm Asimov’s dictum that “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not Eureka! but That’s funny…”
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