It only took a couple web site visits to find the comparison, first look was at Nat Geo's take, then I found it at The New Yorker's take....
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The L.H.C. is a kind of Babel built underground.
Crash Course
Can a seventeen-mile-long collider unlock the universe?
By Elizabeth Kolbery
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/05/14/crash-course
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'Babel' references the Tower of Babel in the Bible...
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6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
Genesis 11
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In the Valley, I made up nick names for places and things...Cook's Meadow became Bobcat Meadow, Liedig Meadow, Two Top Pine Meadow...and, and, the food court where I worked became Last Chance...I had thought to name it after Douglas Adams' restaurant at the end of the universe, and I had a name like that in mind while writing, but wasn't thinking clearly and wrote Last Chance down instead...I looked at that, and thought, that's okay, as the food court was a kind of last chance for some employees...employees would hop about from unit to unit in the Valley...if they didn't like working at a store, they could apply to work at the stables, and such...the ambitious could move up, move to a unit that paid better, or some such...those who had trouble in a unit could escape to another, and if one was too much trouble for any unit management to tolerate, one went 'down the hill'...there were other reasons for unit movement, but, at times, new arrivals at the food court, seemed to all have a tale of woe from another unit, and were hoping for happier circumstance...movement usually happened at the end of the summer season, and the food court being open all winter, and one of the few units that was, became a popular unit to hook on to with for those who wanted work year round...and if during the winter, food court management found one's effort unsatisfactory, there were no options, no other units to transfer too as they were winter time filled, and one was left with 'down the hill'...the food court was a 'last chance'...at least I thought of it that way, and always felt a kind of sorrow and lament to see fellow workers going down the hill after some dust up...it was such a common thing in the fall, to see dust ups that meant nothing in the busy summer. become serious enough for a 'downhill', that it was a kind of running joke about a 'culling'!...Last Chance was the only unit I knew, and I survived dust ups year round, until I just sorta self destructed, and went down the hill to take my chances in the city!...so, when I write, Last Chance, in my posts, it is with a personal sense of the place, and too, given where the food court is located, it has the sense of Adams' restaurant at the end of the universe, which has a name...brb...
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There is some consternation that the L.H.C. will do something, make a black hole or something, that will gobble up the earth...
quote from New Yorker article...
Among his responsibilities is dealing with the frequent calls and letters CERN receives about the possibility that the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world. When I asked about this, Engelen picked up a Bic pen and placed it in front of me.
“In quantum mechanics, there is a probability that this pen will fall through the table,” he said. “All of a sudden, it will be on the floor. Because it can behave as a wave, it can go through; we call that the ‘tunnel effect.’ If you calculate the probability that this happens, it is not identical to zero. It is a very small probability. But it never happens. I’ve never seen it happen. You have never seen it happen. But to the general public you make a casual remark, ‘It is not identical to zero, it is very small,’ and . . . ” He shrugged.
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oh....this is just fine, but I just read this...
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Feynman's account reveals a disconnect between NASA's engineers and executives that was far more striking than he expected. His interviews of NASA's high-ranking managers revealed startling misunderstandings of elementary concepts. For instance, NASA managers claimed that there was a 1 in 100,000 chance of a catastrophic failure aboard the shuttle, but Feynman discovered that NASA's own engineers estimated the chance of a catastrophe at closer to 1 in 200. He concluded that the space shuttle reliability estimate by NASA management was fantastically unrealistic, and he was particularly angered that NASA used these figures to recruit Christa McAuliffe into the Teacher-in-Space program. He warned in his appendix to the commission's report (which was included only after he threatened not to sign the report), "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."[53]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman#Challenger_disaster
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Maybe I'm comparing an apple and an orange...maybe CERN doesn't require 'public relations'...
I'm wondering if they make the particle collision just right, they'll not just get an earth gobbling black hole, but another big bang universe!...September soon looks to be the time they're firing the collider up, so maybe more than a half hour or so to go...
DavidDavid
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