For Yale team, a search for dark matter
Yale scientists began work Wednesday on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest and most expensive international particle physics experiment to be undertaken to date.
The Yale team, which will work on ATLAS, one of the six LHC experiments, will join nearly 7,000 scientists from 80 other countries that are expected to experiment with the LHC in the years to come. The scientists will search for particles that resemble the still-theoretical construct of “dark matter,” which scientists think — along with dark energy — makes up most of the universe, Yale researchers said in...
Much of this article should is just embarrassing, counterproductive hype. For some hype-free LHC predictions and serious science the reader might want to check out the blog CERN Resonaances [http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-will-lhc-discover.html].
"Resonances" doesn't even mention the probability of seeing anything relevant to string theory, and supersymmetry is given a one-tenth of one percent chance, on the grounds that "1% is a typical fine-tuning of susy models, and the additional factor of .1 is because it makes me puke." The chance that LHC will produce a black holes is said to be less than the chance it will produce a dragon.
It should make every person at Yale cringe to think that a Yale physics professor would say something like this without at least four generous Vermont apple martinis under his belt: “I would call this a singular moment in human history, [like] … crossing the Alps on elephants, the building of the pyramids — these are things that defined humanity. I think what we’ll do over the next decades or few decades to describe the universe could be another singular period in human evolution.”
O, yuck. I would call this an unusually banal statement by someone who has a ridiculously bloated sense of the significance of his own field or of himself, and/or is trying to land a grant. Please, Baker. Take a pill.
>Zeller, ...
>“What did they say in ‘Star Wars’? We’re
>going where no man has ever been? Well,
>that’s where we’re going,” he said.
Star Trek, not Star Wars. "Where no man has gone before."
Why is this Zeller in charge of something powerful when he makes stupid mistakes like this? Is he going to use inches instead of centimeters?
Yo, this article made it into Colbert's Threatdown last night!
Yeah it did:
http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/full-episodes/index.jhtml?episodeId=185055
About 11 mins in...
It's "To boldly go..."
"Where no man has gone before" was an episode in the original series.
However, to clarify the miquoted quote's truncated and implied reference, it is an excerpt narrative of Starfleet's listed mission statement as stated by fictional characters Captain Kirk and Captain Picard in the beginning of their respective Star Trek series:
"To explore strange new worlds."
"To seek out new life and new civilizations."
And finally, "To boldly go where no man has gone before." -Kirk
or
"To boldly go where no one has gone before." -Picard
Lol: http://gizmodo.com/5048865/lhc-scientist-confuses-star-wars-with-star-trek-universe-doomed