The Big Bang

Recently I was at the switch-on of the LHC, and the papers have been reporting "black holes that swallow up the Earth", another  "Big Bang", "was the original Big Bang an experiment like this that went wrong?", etc.

It just goes to show that papers will print anything to sell copies.

The truth is that none of the above is true. If anyone is in any doubt, I refer you to my blog explanations, the posts which have since been commended for their lucidity and ease-of-understanding for the layman.

Dr Akiko Ito CERN

Interesting stuff eh, Dr Ito.

I wonder, have you met my Half-aunt Claire Lee.

Grayhound wrote:

Interesting stuff eh, Dr Ito.

I wonder, have you met my Half-aunt Claire Lee.

Clair Lee, I half-aunt

(Clearly, I haven't)

You can't fool me

That's not you on the bike on youtube, is it?

Probably!

Errr. .....NO

Grandmothers suck eggs too!

Somehow I fail to appreciate what this comment has in common with my original topic.

I was offered a job in Las Palmas, but I turned it down.

So how how did you physicists manage to break the new toy? At least us astrophysicists haven't managed to break the universe. Yet.

That's because Astrophysicists only deal with the warm temperature of deep space.

Our magnets are cooled to colder than that!!

True, 3K is fairly toasty compared to your magnets.

So when is the beast going to actually run and will it find some dark matter? If it does find some dark matter, how will you know?

It's easy, accelerate it up to near light speed and it should give out Cerenkov radiation. DUH

Does dark matter carry a charge? I don't think it does. If it did it would be very easy to detect and not exactly dark! Accelerating the stuff might also be a tad difficult.

I was joshing you of course, because in empty space it is impossible to get Cerenkov radiation. 

As for the matter of detecting this "dark matter", it will leave "signatures". We already know how to detect matter that is not there already. They are called particles with no electric charge. They do not leave tracks, but we know they have been there because they "decay" into pairs of charged particles which spiral in opposite directions, the curvature determined by their masses.

Dark Matter will detected in exactly the same way.

In fact, it will easier to detect than the neutrinos, which have a mean free path in lead of about 3 light years.

So you need dark matter to decay into ordinary charged matter in a reasonably short time? If it decays that readily into ordinary matter finding the stuff that is already out there wouldn't be hard. In fact, we would have detected it long ago by the same methods you are now proposing. There has to be a better way than hoping the stuff will prove to be unrealistically unstable.

I'm not a physicist by any stretch of the imagination. However, I prefer to believe that the Big Bang was merely the last Big Bang, and that this universe winks on and off. Of course, since anything that might have happened before the last Big Bang is unknowable, it's really pointless to even consider it.

Consider what?

The universe is much bigger than the observable universe.

Jeez