We are literally all the children of light. The protons, neutrons and electrons that make up all matter in the universe came into existence a small fraction of second into the Big Bang a bit more than 13.7 billion years ago. That’s right, the components of every atom in your body, and indeed the atoms themselves came into existence In the Big Bang. In the first moments of this event, the Bang that produced our universe, huge amounts of high energy photons, that is to say, light came into existence. The collision of these photons produced all the protons, neutrons and electrons that exist today, including the atomic particles that comprise you and me.
This isn’t theory, but a fact that has been reproduced at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), at their high energy particle accelerator on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, and other high energy particle accelerators around the world. Of course, it’s not all good news. The other name for the light composed of such high energy photons is gamma radiation, a form of light that is inimical to life. It’s just another of the wry gestures intrinsic to the universe after the Big Bang. Of course, people, especially those of a fundamentalist disposition, often ask “What was here before the Big Bang?” Expecting that the answer will be their notion of the author of the Bang, but such speculations are nonsensical, as time itself came into being in the Big Bang. There is no “before,” only after. But we are wired to seek causality, and as such, this answer is deeply dissatisfying, regardless of its truth.
Without knowing it, people asking that are posing a question that runs directly into Zeno’s paradox: Zeno, a Greek philosopher from 2500 years ago put it something like this.
Mathematically, it actually makes sense that Achilles must reach each of an ever changing series of half way points. It’s a question whose logic is such as to have an intrinsic appeal, even though we understand intuitively that this is not the way things work in the real world. So too, when we ask about events “before” the Big Bang we are asking a question that seems legitimate on its face, and by the standards of rhetorical logic can be asked, but which modern physics demonstrates is illegitimate.
We, as beings in time, cannot imagine timelessness, and thanks to the form of our evolved brain, and the limits of our sensory abilities can neither directly perceive or understand. It’s not that we don’t try. We speak of moments or events that are “timeless. The religious sometimes claim that their ecstatic experiences take them to an unmediated otherness “beyond time.” For all our poetic utterances of time flowing as a river, when we make such claims we speak metaphorically. Our perception of time may change, occasionally seeming to slow as our attention s either focussed or lost, but time exists whether we perceive it or not. It is an empirical phenomenon tied to the physical nature of space and the mass of stellar objects..
The difference between our perceptions and remembrances of time and time’s reality points to flaws in our ability to perceive and process the nature of the universe’s reality. We think and remember in moments, frozen images of events, or at best brief “film strip” like remembrances, while time is unforgivingly a continuum, whose expression is not tied to our interests, but to relations of the physics mass and distance we are incapable of directly perceiving or capturing as memories.
What is genuinely remarkable is that some of us can, through the language of mathematics understand the structure of time, in spite of the handicaps of the mammalian brain as evolved as Homo sapiens. But the physicist remembers the everyday experiences of time, not as it is or as she or he understands it, but just like the rest of us, as captured by memory and all the limitations that implies. Children of light we may well be, but we are neither gods nor, divorced from our animality, but creatures evolved to see and understand the universe as is needful. We evolved to see threat and opportunity in our environment, with a memory meant to capture patterns of threat and opportunity. We are built with the ability to form memories that represent time more as flash cards than films, and without the sensory capacity to directly perceive time in its physical reality.
D.H.H.
A Small Addendum on CERN.
The Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire is a European collaboration begun almost immediately after World War II ended. It was a response to the terrible bright nuclear flashes above Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where two bombs developed by the immense Anglo-American* Manhattan Project together killed or severely wounded more than 225,000 human lives, overwhelmingly civilians. CERN's avowed purpose was to increase the knowledge of physics for peace, a promise that has been kept in programs like the Large Hadron Collider, where immense energies are used to further humanity's understanding of the Cosmos.
The magnet structure in the photo -- the metal plates stacked horizontally in a U shape around the reddish central tube -- functions best at low superconductor temperatures of 455.8 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit), just under 4 degrees above absolute zero. At absolute zero the vibrations of atoms we understand as heat are at their theoretical minimum.
This incredibly cold temperature has to be maintained along the entire 17 mile length of the collider’s precisely circular track, enabling the magnets to carry up to a 12,000 ampere current. To put this in perspective, a typical home electrical circuit is rates at 10 or 15 amperes. At 10 amperes, it would take 1200 home circuits to feed the collider's magnetic field without "blowing the breakers." All this power produces a field capable of constraining and directing particles with a momentum of up to 14 TeV (trillion electronvolts), or 14,000,000,000,000 electronvolts. Including the energy required for cooling, instrumentation, computers, et alia, the CERN facility's power requirements are more than 200 megawatts, or roughly the same as that of the neighbouring city of Geneva.
A significant portion of this power bill is to supply CERN's computers. Every year for the last several, various projects at CERN have produced a combined total of more the 14 Petabytes of raw data. Even at a time when new personal computers often have a storage capacity of a terabyte or two, this is a remarkable volume of data. My somewhat complicated studio set up is still unusual for having 14 terabytes of internal and external storage, which at the moment is about 65% used. A Petabyte is 1015 bytes or 1000 terabytes, so this number looks like 14,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Another way of thinking it is that they annually produce raw data 975 times that of accumulated works in the entire Library of Congress. Now you know why CERN scientists (not a certain former Vice President) invented the internet. It was to share and shed data.
___________________
*British participation in the Manhattan Project is often forgotten or underestimated. British scientists, mathematicians and engineers working both in the U.K. and the U.S. provided vital expertise to the project, though the U.S. provided virtually all the funding, and retained exclusive control over the weapons developed during the war. Fractious post-war politics initially undermined this cooperation, with the U.S. reneging on promises to share data and technology. Some information sharing was eventually restored, but only after it became clear that the U.K's native nuclear weapons endeavour was moving forward regardless of U.S. desires otherwise, and could be traded as part payment for American airforce basing rights on what American's sometimes referred to as the "aircraft carrier U.S.S. Britain."
This isn’t theory, but a fact that has been reproduced at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), at their high energy particle accelerator on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, and other high energy particle accelerators around the world. Of course, it’s not all good news. The other name for the light composed of such high energy photons is gamma radiation, a form of light that is inimical to life. It’s just another of the wry gestures intrinsic to the universe after the Big Bang. Of course, people, especially those of a fundamentalist disposition, often ask “What was here before the Big Bang?” Expecting that the answer will be their notion of the author of the Bang, but such speculations are nonsensical, as time itself came into being in the Big Bang. There is no “before,” only after. But we are wired to seek causality, and as such, this answer is deeply dissatisfying, regardless of its truth.
Without knowing it, people asking that are posing a question that runs directly into Zeno’s paradox: Zeno, a Greek philosopher from 2500 years ago put it something like this.
Achilles [The great athlete mentioned by Homer in the Iliad as having been at the siege of Troy] races a tortoise, and as a generous hero type gives the tortoise a ten metre head start for their 100 metre race. As the race starts, the tortoise hurries along at 1/10th of a metre per second, while Achilles, not wanting the poor tortoise to be embarrassed, moves off at a stately 1 meter per second. Five seconds later Achilles reaches the halfway point to the tortoise’s starting position, but it is no longer halfway to the tortoise. As slow as he is, the tortoise has moved on. Achilles reaches the new halfway point, but again the tortoise has moved on, repeat ad nauseam. At some point poor Achilles must have realised that there are an infinite series of halfway points, thrown down his laurel ring sun shade and gone off for a nice bottle of Corcyraean Asyrtiko.
Mathematically, it actually makes sense that Achilles must reach each of an ever changing series of half way points. It’s a question whose logic is such as to have an intrinsic appeal, even though we understand intuitively that this is not the way things work in the real world. So too, when we ask about events “before” the Big Bang we are asking a question that seems legitimate on its face, and by the standards of rhetorical logic can be asked, but which modern physics demonstrates is illegitimate.
We, as beings in time, cannot imagine timelessness, and thanks to the form of our evolved brain, and the limits of our sensory abilities can neither directly perceive or understand. It’s not that we don’t try. We speak of moments or events that are “timeless. The religious sometimes claim that their ecstatic experiences take them to an unmediated otherness “beyond time.” For all our poetic utterances of time flowing as a river, when we make such claims we speak metaphorically. Our perception of time may change, occasionally seeming to slow as our attention s either focussed or lost, but time exists whether we perceive it or not. It is an empirical phenomenon tied to the physical nature of space and the mass of stellar objects..
The difference between our perceptions and remembrances of time and time’s reality points to flaws in our ability to perceive and process the nature of the universe’s reality. We think and remember in moments, frozen images of events, or at best brief “film strip” like remembrances, while time is unforgivingly a continuum, whose expression is not tied to our interests, but to relations of the physics mass and distance we are incapable of directly perceiving or capturing as memories.
What is genuinely remarkable is that some of us can, through the language of mathematics understand the structure of time, in spite of the handicaps of the mammalian brain as evolved as Homo sapiens. But the physicist remembers the everyday experiences of time, not as it is or as she or he understands it, but just like the rest of us, as captured by memory and all the limitations that implies. Children of light we may well be, but we are neither gods nor, divorced from our animality, but creatures evolved to see and understand the universe as is needful. We evolved to see threat and opportunity in our environment, with a memory meant to capture patterns of threat and opportunity. We are built with the ability to form memories that represent time more as flash cards than films, and without the sensory capacity to directly perceive time in its physical reality.
D.H.H.
A Small Addendum on CERN.
The Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire is a European collaboration begun almost immediately after World War II ended. It was a response to the terrible bright nuclear flashes above Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where two bombs developed by the immense Anglo-American* Manhattan Project together killed or severely wounded more than 225,000 human lives, overwhelmingly civilians. CERN's avowed purpose was to increase the knowledge of physics for peace, a promise that has been kept in programs like the Large Hadron Collider, where immense energies are used to further humanity's understanding of the Cosmos.
 |
| A cutaway showing the packed magnets surrounding the slender red and clear tube where particles are accelerated. Courtesy of CERN © 2014 |
The magnet structure in the photo -- the metal plates stacked horizontally in a U shape around the reddish central tube -- functions best at low superconductor temperatures of 455.8 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit), just under 4 degrees above absolute zero. At absolute zero the vibrations of atoms we understand as heat are at their theoretical minimum.
This incredibly cold temperature has to be maintained along the entire 17 mile length of the collider’s precisely circular track, enabling the magnets to carry up to a 12,000 ampere current. To put this in perspective, a typical home electrical circuit is rates at 10 or 15 amperes. At 10 amperes, it would take 1200 home circuits to feed the collider's magnetic field without "blowing the breakers." All this power produces a field capable of constraining and directing particles with a momentum of up to 14 TeV (trillion electronvolts), or 14,000,000,000,000 electronvolts. Including the energy required for cooling, instrumentation, computers, et alia, the CERN facility's power requirements are more than 200 megawatts, or roughly the same as that of the neighbouring city of Geneva.
A significant portion of this power bill is to supply CERN's computers. Every year for the last several, various projects at CERN have produced a combined total of more the 14 Petabytes of raw data. Even at a time when new personal computers often have a storage capacity of a terabyte or two, this is a remarkable volume of data. My somewhat complicated studio set up is still unusual for having 14 terabytes of internal and external storage, which at the moment is about 65% used. A Petabyte is 1015 bytes or 1000 terabytes, so this number looks like 14,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Another way of thinking it is that they annually produce raw data 975 times that of accumulated works in the entire Library of Congress. Now you know why CERN scientists (not a certain former Vice President) invented the internet. It was to share and shed data.
___________________
*British participation in the Manhattan Project is often forgotten or underestimated. British scientists, mathematicians and engineers working both in the U.K. and the U.S. provided vital expertise to the project, though the U.S. provided virtually all the funding, and retained exclusive control over the weapons developed during the war. Fractious post-war politics initially undermined this cooperation, with the U.S. reneging on promises to share data and technology. Some information sharing was eventually restored, but only after it became clear that the U.K's native nuclear weapons endeavour was moving forward regardless of U.S. desires otherwise, and could be traded as part payment for American airforce basing rights on what American's sometimes referred to as the "aircraft carrier U.S.S. Britain."
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