Natural Science Forum / Physics / Relativity / July 2006

Collider Folly

Recall New Year, 2000?  Everybody was excited about the arrival of
"the new millennium". Advertising on TV was full of it, so was
radio and the print media as well as the general populace. "The new
millennium, the new millennium, the new millennium" - that's all
you heard.

The only trouble was, the year 2000 was NOT the start of the new
millennium but the end of the old. The new millennium starts with the
year 2001.

Was everybody wrong? You bet. Has "everybody" been wrong before?
Yup. What about the flat earth, or Ptolemy's epicycles, or the earth
as the center of the universe?

We might also mention phlogiston and the luminiferous aether (There are
poor souls still hanging on to that one as well as massless photons).

But the above is only the tip of the iceberg. The real problem is that
today the "accepted model" - or what I call "the party line"
is a group of concepts that are widely, almost universally, recognized
as the correct state of the art and it is flailing up dead ends,
wasting vast amounts of time, effort and money.

What is even worse is that when something different (something
"outside the box") is offered it is immediately and peremptorily
dismissed with prejudice, is not given consideration, usually not even
read.

So the state of the art flounders.

Specifically (though not exclusively) we mention so-called "high
energy physics" or "particle physics". This is a major dead end
in understanding our universe - though the opposite is claimed.

Let' take a closer look.

If you take two pieces of china and smash them together violently, what
do you get?
Small shards flying in all directions.

If you take two protons and smash them together violently, what do you
get? Small shards flying in all directions.

The difference is that in the case of the protons the shards are
standing waves with charge, etc., - but shards nevertheless. However,
as standing waves, they are not in resonance and so are unstable. Thus
they immediately reduce to resonant frequencies and become other stable
particles. This is known as "decay".

IN  NO  WAY  ARE  THESE  SHARDS  FUNDAMENTAL  PARTICLES.

Classifying the plethora of shards became a project - a not too
successful project. Gell-Mann attempted to find common denominators to
the "atomic zoo". Thus was born quarks - which were extended to
ridiculous heights and declared super particles that were the
composition of protons and neutrons, etc. Folly at its best.

In order to keep their jobs, the accelerator operators laid on the
biggest con job in the world. After all they had to keep the money
rolling in or they were out of a job. Besides, they had an unearned
prestige to maintain.

Below is a sample of their technique.

"The machine could cost more than $6 billion, would measure roughly
20 miles from one side to the other and would require so many advanced
technologies that no single country could supply them all. Its goal
would be to mine the areas opened up by evidence indicating that
ultra-powerful new accelerators may be crucial in explaining not just
the nature of matter and energy but also the birth of the universe and
the structure of space and time themselves.

According to some theories, the machine could see evidence for
previously unknown dimensions, beyond the usual four, lurking right
under humanity's noses. Elusive particles that account for most of the
mass of the entire universe - the so-called dark matter - could
also turn up.

Scientists also hope to test theories that describe how the universe
may have behaved in its first explosive instants and to work out the
detailed properties of a particle called the Higgs boson. Believed to
be the key to why other particles have mass, the Higgs, if it exists,
may be discovered by accelerators now operating or being built."

Can you believe that? What smoke! Snake oil hucksters and hawkers of
the great white way were amateurs by comparison.

What we have here is a plethora of very definite maybes and qualified
perhaps.:

"the machine COULD see"

"COULD also turn up"

"also HOPE to test - and work out"

" Higgs boson --- BELIEVED to be"

"Higgs, IF it exists"

"MAY be discovered"

To get a better feeling for the waste, click on the following link:

http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/

This one collider will cost more than the trip to the moon!

The sad part is that it is not only colliders but such concepts as
curved empty space,
tachyons, worm holes, black holes, string theory with its multiple
dimensions - and best of all, quarks. It's bad enough that the big
bang is not firmly confirmed but there are those that dain to tell us
what happened a nanosecond after the explosion.

Flimsy theory is heaped on flimsy theory - and the whole taken as
authentic.

Let's take a quick look at quarks.
Gell-Mann sought a common denominator to the atomic zoo. He wound up
with a few mathematical parameters that he didn't know the real
meaning of so he called them quarks from a piece of literature and gave

them meaningless names such as up down top bottom and as having
color, and other nonsense.
The simpletons came after him and decided these were basic constituents

of particles and have built up a whole fantasyland of quark hypothesis.

Dare you mention anything contrary today and you are immediately
dismissed.

The dogmatism and desperate clinging to the party line exists with the
peer journals as well that by their nature are considered the last
word.

So where do new ideas, new theories go? Where can they receive
exposure?
There is only one place I know of, and that is in the on line
"General Science Journal"
that can be found on the following URL:  http://www.wbabin.net. This
author's works can be found there in the LIST OF AUTHORS under
Vertner Vergon.