Gods of Omission

Does god not want us finding the god particle? Maybe youre god doesnt, but mine does. Then
again, I am one of the black sheep that fails to kneel and worship at the aisle of mass media.
Discovering the Higgs-Boson aka the god particle should give us insight on the creation of the
universe. There are two places actively trying to create the god particle, the Large Hadron
Collider on the border of Switzerland and France and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New
York and most Americans dont know either exists. Not knowing about the Large Hadron
Collider is somewhat understandable, due to the fact that it is located in a remote part of Europe.
A couple of reasons why you should know about the LHC are that its one of greatest feats of
human engineering and at $10,000,000 its also the most expensive scientific project ever. Its a
massive 16.78 mile circle that intersects Switzerland and France at four different points. The
LHC has a workforce of over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over hundred countries with
an operational cost for one year could feed a small country (Wikipedia). People here in the
United States know it best for its depiction in the Ron Howard movie Angels and Demons.
Whats amazing is the LHC has a smaller older brother here in the United States. The
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider located in Brookhaven, New York, prior to the LHC coming
online in 2009, the Heavy Ion Collider was the most powerful ion collider in the world. These
types of scientific projects are fascinating to me and Id never heard of the RHIC until recently.
Actually if it were not for a comedian named Joe Rogan I wouldnt know about either one. After
reading his blog, I began researching the LHC, and only then did I learn the RHIC existed. The
Brookhaven site has been operational sense 2000, and with a $1.1 billion price tag and annual
operating costs at around $150 million, its nothing to sneeze at. These two incredible machines
are on the cusp of revolutionizing the laws of physics and teaching us about the birth of the
universe, while maintaining almost complete anonymity within United States.
Heres a real mind-bender, on February 15, 2010, an article in the New York Times stated:
Physicists said that they had whacked a tiny region of space with enough energy to briefly distort
the laws of physics, providing the first laboratory demonstration of the kind of process that
scientists suspect has shaped cosmic history. The blow was delivered in the Relativistic Heavy
Ion Collider, or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, where, since
2000, physicists have been accelerating gold nuclei around a 2.4-mile underground ring to
99.995 percent of the speed of light and then colliding them in an effort to melt protons and
neutrons and free their constituents quarks and gluons. The goal has been a state of matter
called a quark-gluon plasma, which theorists believe existed when the universe was only a
microsecond old (Overbye). The RHIC, may not be as powerful as the LHC, still its able to
propel a gold nuclei around its 2.4 mile underground ring at 99.995% the speed of light. The fact
that mankind has figured out how to propel any form of solid matter to near the speed of light is
amazing. Still there wasnt as much as a blip on the local newscast, why is that? Is it because its
complicated, hard to explain, and hypothetically disastrous? The stock market, nuclear bombs,
and DNA are all complicated and each is potentially dangerous. Even now the majority of
people in the U.S. would say they have a good grasp of stocks, DNA, and nukes, until they were
pressured to explain their understanding in more detail. Yet something with the possibility to
change our understanding of the creation of the universe flies under the radar. I think the reason
is were scared of scientists we dont know messing with things we dont understand. In an
excerpt from his blog Joe Rogan put it best:

.What theyre looking for is a theoretical particle called the Higgs Boson, otherwise known as the God Particle.
The only possible side effect of this fantastically complicated experiment is the ever-so-slight chance that it might
produce a black hole that eats its way through the earth.
Dont worry about black holes or any other space-time ripping complications and side effects though, because
theres no way the half-insane, socially detached super-geniuses operating that thing would ever let that happen,
right? If they thought it was possible for everything to go horribly wrong and destroy the world they would certainly
shut the whole project down. Right? I mean, forget about the fact that theyve invested an enormous chunk of their
finite lives designing, constructing and completing this thing, if they thought for a second that it might possibly
cause harm they would shut it all down and walk away willingly, right? Right?
Im not so sure that those motherfuckers might not just roll the dice and take a chance.
Its a little known fact that before the detonation of the very first nuclear bomb there was a very real concern
amongst some scientists that the explosion might create a chain reaction that would destroy the entire Earths
atmosphere. No one had ever caused a nuclear explosion before, so no one really knew exactly what was going
happen.
So what did they do? They said, Fuck it Lets see.
Now, there are people that will say that those scientists with concerns back then were just misinformed, and that the
destruction of the Earth was never a real concern, but thats real easy to say today.
Truth is, they really didnt know exactly what the fuck was going to happen, and there was a lot of trial and error
involved with the effects of spitting atoms. Anyone that disagrees with that need only look at the old videos of
soldiers willingly running directly towards a nuclear blast as a part of a military drill. Obviously that shit is frowned
upon today, and if you tried to get a U.S. soldier to do that in 2010 they might fucking shoot you .

Is it our fear of the unknown that keeps information about the colliders out of the news and
hidden in their own little black holes? I agree there are plenty of reasons to be scared when
youre creating black holes on earth and so do the Europeans. The European Organization for
Nuclear Research commissioned a safety review to quell any fears the public may have, and its
titled STUDY OF POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS EVENTS DURING HEAVY-ION
COLLISIONS AT THE LHC: REPORT OF THE LHC SAFETY STUDY GROUP. Within it are
ominous sounding chapters about cosmic rays, strangelet properties, and black holes in four
dimensions. While I admit I tried to read it, and it was well above my scientific comprehension,
the titles of those chapters sound scary enough that I want to be kept up to date.
The RHIC authorized a similar study in 2000, a year I remember quite clearly, but to my
recollection there was no mention of it here in Portland, Oregon. If the mainstream forms of
news media did mention anything about the RHIC it mustve been relegated to one sentence in
the paper or a 10 second blip on the evening news. Still the completion of a project costing $1.1
billion usually warrants a bit of media fanfare. So Im at a loss, the catastrophe of 9/11 hadnt
happened yet and everything was hunky dory, so why didnt we hear more about it. I wish I
could understand why the media would feel the need to omit that kind of information, but I just
cant. The only other possibility being that the physics involved is so far beyond our level of
comprehension, that the masses of this country fail to recognize its importance.
While I cant explain quantum mechanics or string theory any better than I could the inner
workings of a nuclear bomb. I do comprehend that nukes cause massive destruction, and I also
understand the temperature readings of the RHIC experiment earlier this month exceeding seven
trillion Kelvin (250,000 times hotter than the sun) is hotter than anything man has ever created.

Can I conceive either one of them, no? Breaking one of the laws of physics is also hard to
conceive, but its inconceivable that it actually happened in my lifetime and didnt even make the
nightly news.

Overbye, Dennis. "In Brookhaven Collider, Scientists Briefly Break a Law of Nature." The New
York Times 15 Febuary 2010.
Wikipedia. Large Hadron Collider. 2010. 21 Febuary 2010
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider>.