A smile without a cat

Every time I hear some new discovery in quantum physics, I think, "Okay, it can't get any weirder than this."

Each time, I turn out to be wrong.

A few of the concepts I thought had blown my mind as much as possible:

• Quantum superposition -- a particle being in two states at once until you observe it, at which point it apparently decides on one of them (the "collapse of the wave function")
• The double-slit experiment -- if you pass light through a closely-spaced pair of slits, it creates a distinct interference pattern -- an alternating series of parallel bright and dark bands.  The same interference pattern occurs if you shoot the photons through one of the slits, one photon at a time.  If you close the other slit, the pattern disappears.  It's as if the photons passing through the left-hand slit "know" if the right-hand slit is open or closed -- or that a photon can, somehow, go through both slits simultaneously and interfere with itself.  Whatever that means.
• Quantum entanglement -- two particles that somehow are "in communication," in the sense that altering one of them instantaneously alters the other, even if it would require superluminal information transfer to do so (what Einstein called "spooky action-at-a-distance")
• The pigeonhole paradox -- you'd think that if you passed three photons through polarizing filters that align their vibration plane either horizontally or vertically, there'd be two of them polarized the same way, right? It's a fundamental idea from set theory; if you have three gloves, it has to be the case that either two are right-handed or two are left-handed.  Not so with photons.  Experiments showed that you can polarize three photons in such a way that no two of them match.

Bizarre, counterintuitive stuff, right there.  How could it get any stranger than that?

Wait till you hear about this one.

In 2021, three physicists, Yakim Aharonov of Tel Aviv University, Sandu Popescu of the University of Bristol, and Eliahu Cohen of Bar Ilan University, said they'd demonstrated something they called a quantum Cheshire Cat.  Apparently under the right conditions, a particle's properties can somehow come unhooked from the particle itself and move independently of it -- a bit like Lewis Carroll's cat disappearing but leaving behind its disembodied grin.

The Cheshire Cat from John Tenniel's illustrations for Alice in Wonderland (1865) [Image is in the Public Domain]

I'll try to explain how it works, but be aware that I'm dancing right along the edge of what I'm able to understand, so if you ask for clarification I'll probably say, "Damned if I know."  But here goes.

Imagine a box containing a particle with a spin of 1/2.  (Put more simply, this means that if you measure the particle's spin along any of the three axes (x, y, and z), you'll find it in an either-or situation -- right or left, up or down, forward or backward.)  The box has a partition down the middle that is fashioned to have a small, but non-zero, probability of the particle passing through.  At the other end of the box is a second partition -- if the particle is spin-up, it passes through; if not, it doesn't and is reflected back into the box.

With me so far?  'Cuz this is where it gets weird.

In quantum terms, the fact that there's a small but non-zero chance of the particle leaking through the first barrier means that in a sense, part of it does leak through; this is a feature of quantum superposition, which boils down to particles being in two places at once (or, more accurately, their positions being fields of probabilities rather than one specific location).  If the part that leaks through is spin-up, it passes through the right-hand partition and out of the box; otherwise it reflects back and interacts with the original particle, causing its spin to flip.

The researchers found that this flip occurs even if measurements show that the particle never left the left-hand side of the box.

So it's like the spin of the particle becomes unhooked from the particle itself, and is free to wander about -- then can come back and alter the original particle.  See why they call it a quantum Cheshire Cat?  Like Carroll's cat's smile, the properties of the particle can somehow come loose.

Whatever a "loose property" actually means.

The researchers have suggested that this bizarre phenomenon might allow counterfactual communication -- communication between two observers without any particle or energy being transferred between them.  In the setup I described, the observer left of the box would know if the observer on the right had turned the spin-dependent barrier on or off by watching to see if the particle in the left half of the box had altered its spin.  More spooky action-at-a-distance, that.

When this idea was proposed in 2021, it sounded so completely bizarre that it couldn't possibly be correct.  And earlier this year, a paper in Nature by Jonte Hance of Hiroshima University et al. seemed to rule out the phenomenon; but now, a second experiment described in the same journal by Armin Danner of Atominstitut Wien et al. appears to show conclusively that it does, in fact, occur.  So it looks like however counterintuitive the quantum Cheshire Cat is -- like the outrageously odd Bell's theorem, we're stuck with it.  It may twist our brain into knots, but it seems to be how reality works.

What I have to keep reminding myself is that none of this weirdness is some kind of abstract idea or speculation of what could be; these findings have been experimentally verified over and over.  Partly because they're so odd and counterintuitive, the theories of quantum physics have been put through rigorous tests, and each time they've passed with flying colors.  If these concepts sound crazy -- well, maybe the universe is crazy.

"What is the most important for us is not a potential application – though that is definitely something to look for – but what it teaches us about nature," said Sandu Popescu, co-author of the 2021 paper that got the smile-without-a-cat idea started.  "Quantum mechanics is very strange, and almost a hundred years after its discovery it continues to puzzle us.  We believe that unveiling even more puzzling phenomena and looking deeper into them is the way to finally understand it."

Indeed.  I keep coming back to the fact that everything you look at -- all the ordinary stuff we interact with on a daily basis -- is made of particles and energy that defy our common sense at every turn.  As the eminent biologist J. B. S. Haldane famously put it, "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine -- it is queerer than we can imagine."

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Requiem for a visionary

I was saddened to hear of the death of the brilliant British physicist Peter Higgs on Monday, April 8, at the grand old age of 94.  Higgs is most famous for his proposal in 1964 of what has since come to be known as the "Higgs mechanism" (he was far too modest a man to name it after himself; that was the doing of colleagues who recognized his genius).  This springboarded off work by the Nobel Prize-winning Japanese physicist Yochiro Nambu, who was researching spontaneous symmetry breaking -- Higgs's insight was to see that the same process could be used to argue for the existence of a previously unknown field, the properties of which seemed to explain why ordinary particles have mass.

This was a huge leap, and by Higgs's own account, he was knocking at the knees when he presented the paper at a conference.  But it passed peer review and was published in the journal Physical Review Letters, and afterward stood up to repeated attempts to punch holes in its logic.  His argument required the existence of a massive spin-zero boson -- now known as the Higgs boson -- and he had to wait 48 years for it to be discovered at CERN by the ATLAS and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments.  When informed that the Higgs boson had been discovered, at exactly the mass/energy he'd predicted, he responded with his typical humility, saying, "It's really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime."

It surprised no one when he won the Nobel Prize in Physics the following year (2013).

Higgs at the Nobel Prize Awards Ceremony [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Bengt Nyman, Nobel Prize 24 2013, CC BY 2.0]

Higgs, however, was a bit of an anachronism.  He was a professor at Edinburgh University, but refused to buy into the competitive grant-seeking paper-production culture of academia.  He was also famously non-technological; he said he'd never sent an email, used a cellphone, or owned a television.  (He did say that he'd been persuaded to watch an episode of The Big Bang Theory once, but "wasn't impressed.")  He frustrated the hell out of the administration of the university, responding to demands for a list of recent publications with the word "None."  Apparently it was only caution -- well-founded, as it turned out -- by the administrators that persuaded them to keep him on the payroll.  "He might get a Nobel Prize at some point," one of them said.  "If not, we can always get rid of him."

In an interview, Higgs said that he'd never get hired in today's academic world, something that is more of an indictment against academia than it is of Higgs himself.  "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964," he said.  "After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department.  I thought I was well out of it.  It wasn't my way of doing things any more.  Today I wouldn't get an academic job.  It's as simple as that.  I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough."

Reading about this immediately made me think about the devastating recent video by theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, a stinging takedown of how the factory-model attitude in research science is killing scientists' capacity for doing real and groundbreaking research:

It was a rude awakening to realize that this institute [where she had her first job in physics research] wasn't about knowledge discovery, it was about money-making.  And the more I saw of academia, the more I realized it wasn't just this particular institute and this particular professor.  It was generally the case.  The moment you put people into big institutions, the goal shifts from knowledge discovery to money-making.  Here's how this works:

If a researcher gets a scholarship or research grant, the institution gets part of that money.  It's called the "overhead."  Technically, that's meant to pay for offices and equipment and administration.  But academic institutions pay part of their staff from this overhead, so they need to keep that overhead coming.  Small scholarships don't make much money, but big research grants can be tens of millions of dollars.  And the overhead can be anything between fifteen and fifty percent.  This is why research institutions exert loads of pressure on researchers to bring in grant money.  And partly, they do this by keeping the researchers on temporary contracts so that they need grants to get paid themselves...  And the overhead isn't even the real problem.  The real problem is that the easiest way to grow in academia is to pay other people to produce papers on which you, as the grant holder, can put your name.  That's how academia works.  Grants pay students and postdocs to produce research papers for the grant holder.  And those papers are what the supervisor then uses to apply for more grants.  The result is a paper-production machine in which students and postdocs are burnt through to bring in money for the institution...

I began to understand what you need to do to get a grant or to get hired.  You have to work on topics that are mainstream enough but not too mainstream.  You want them to be a little bit edgy, but not too edgy.  It needs to be something that fits into the existing machinery.  And since most grants are three years, or five years at most, it also needs to be something that can be wrapped up quickly...

The more I saw of the foundations of physics, the more I became convinced that the research there wasn't based upon sound scientific principles...  [Most researchers today] are only interested in writing more papers...  To get grants.  To get postdocs.  To write more papers.  To get more grants.  And round and round it goes.

You can see why a visionary like Peter Higgs was uncomfortable in today's academia (and vice versa).  But it's also horrifying to think about the Peter Higgses of this generation -- today's up-and-coming scientific groundbreakers, who may not ever get a chance to bring their ideas to the world, sandbagged instead by a hidebound money-making machine that has amplified "publish-or-perish" into "publish-or-never-get-started."

In any case, the world has lost a gentle, soft-spoken genius, whose unique insights -- made at a time when the academic world was more welcoming to such individuals -- completed our picture of the Standard Model of particle physics, and whose theories led to an understanding of the fundamental properties of matter and energy we're still working to explore fully.  94 is a respectable age in pretty much anyone's opinion, but it's still sad to lose someone of such brilliance, who was not only a leading name in pure research, but was unhesitating in pointing out the problems with how science is done.

It took 48 years for his theory about the Higgs mechanism to be experimentally vindicated; let's hope his criticisms of academia have a shorter gestation period.

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The asymmetrical universe

I'm currently reading the 2006 book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, by the brilliant theoretical physicist Lisa Randall.  As you might imagine from the title, it's a provocative and mind-blowing read.  And although it's written for laypeople, with most of the abstruse mathematics removed -- theoretical physics is, honestly, 99% math -- I must admit that a good chunk of it is going so far over my head that it doesn't even ruffle my hair.

The rest, though, is way cool.

The heart of the book is the consideration of superstring theory as a model for the way the universe is built.  The idea -- at least at the level I understand it -- is that the fundamental building block of matter and energy is the string, a one-dimensional structure that can either be open-ended or a closed loop, and the various manifestations we see (particles, for instance) are the different vibrational modes of those strings.  But deeply embedded in this model is the idea that the universe has fundamental symmetries, which unify seemingly disparate forces and allow you to make predictions about what exists but is as yet undiscovered based upon what might be necessary to complete the symmetry of the theory.

This search for underlying patterns in what we see around us drives a lot of theoretical physics.  And certainly there are times the approach pays off.  It was that mode of inquiry that allowed Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg to come up with electroweak theory, which showed that at high enough energy the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces act as a single force.  (It was later experimentally confirmed, and the three won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 for the discovery.)  Carrying this approach to its extreme are people like Garrett Lisi, whose eight-dimensional model of particle physics (based upon a mathematical structure called a Lie group) tries to unify everything we know from experimental results into a symmetrical whole based upon it seeming to fit into a pattern that is "too beautiful not to be true."

The superstring model, too, makes predictions of particles and forces, largely based upon arguments of symmetry and symmetry breaking.  Each of the particles in the Standard Model should, the math tells us, have a "supersymmetric partner" -- each known fermion paired with a boson with the same charge and similar interactions, but a higher mass, and vice versa.

Experimental confirmation, of course, is the hill on which scientific theories live or die, and what the theorists need is hard evidence that these predicted particles exist.  Randall's book is peppered with optimistic statements such as the following:

In a few years, CERN will be the nexus of some of the most exciting physics results.  The Large Hadron Collider, which will be able to reach seven times the present energy of the Tevatron, will be located there, and any discoveries made at the LHC will almost inevitably be something qualitatively new.  Experiments at the LHC will seek -- and very likely find -- the as yet unknown physics that underlies the Standard Model.

Randall's book was published in 2006; the LHC came online in 2008.

And in the sixteen years since then, not a single particle has been found confirming superstring theory -- no superpartners, no Kaluza-Klein particles, nothing.  It did find the Higgs boson, which was a coup, but that was already predicted by the Standard Model, and didn't explain anything about the fundamental messiness of particle physics; why particles have the masses they do, forces have the strength they do, and (most vexing) why the extremely weak gravitational force seems to be irreconcilable with the other three.

This understandably bothers the absolute hell out of a lot of particle physicists.  It just seems like the most fundamental theory of everything should be a lot more elegant than it is, and that there should be some underlying beautiful mathematical logic to it all.  Instead, we have a model that works, but has a lot of what seem like arbitrary parameters.

But the fact is, every one of the efforts to get the Standard Model to fit into a more beautiful and elegant theoretical framework has failed.  Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, in a brilliant but stinging takedown of the current approach that you really should watch in its entirety, puts it this way: "If you follow news about particle physics, then you know that it comes in three types.  It's either that they haven't found that thing they were looking for, or they've come up with something new to look for which they'll later report not having found, or it's something so boring you don't even finish reading the headline."  Her opinion is that the entire driving force behind it -- research to try to find a theory based on beautiful mathematics -- is misguided.  Maybe the actual universe simply is messy.  Maybe a lot of the parameters of physics, such as particle masses and the values of constants, truly are arbitrary (i.e., they don't arise from any deeper theoretical reason; they simply are what they're measured to be, and that's that).  In her wonderful book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, she describes how this century-long quest to unify physics with some ultra-elegant model has generated very close to nothing in the way of results, and maybe we should accept that the untidy Standard Model is just the way things are.

Because there's one thing that's undeniable: the Standard Model works.  Just to give one recent example, a paper last year in Physical Review Letters described a set of experiments showing that a test of the Standard Model passed with a precision that beggars belief -- in this case, a measurement of the electron's magnetic moment that agreed with the predicted value to within 0.1 billionths of a percent.

This puts the Standard Model in the category of being one of the most thoroughly-tested and stunningly accurate models not only in all of physics, but in all of science.  As mind-blowingly bizarre as quantum mechanics is, there's no doubt that it has passed enough tests that in just about any other field, the experimenters and the theoreticians would be high-fiving each other and heading off to the pub for a celebratory pint of beer.  Instead, they keep at it, because so many of them feel that despite the unqualified successes of the Standard Model, there's something deeply unsatisfactory about it.  Hossenfelder explains that this is a completely wrong-headed approach; that real discoveries in the field were made when there was some necessary modification of the model that needed to be made, not just because you think the model isn't pretty enough:

If you look at past predictions in the foundations of physics which turned out to be correct, and which did not simply confirm an existing theory, you find it was those that made a necessary change to the theory.  The Higgs boson, for example, is necessary to make the Standard Model work.  Antiparticles, predicted by Dirac, are necessary to make quantum mechanics compatible with special relativity.  Neutrinos were necessary to explain observation [of beta radioactive decay].  Three generations of quarks were necessary to explain C-P violation.  And so on...  A good strategy is to focus on those changes that resolve an inconsistency with data, or an internal inconsistency.

And the truth is, when the model you already have is predicting with an accuracy of 0.1 billionths of a percent, there just aren't a lot of inconsistencies there to resolve.

I have to admit that I get the particle physicists' yearning for something deeper.  John Keats's famous line, "Beauty is truth, and truth beauty; that is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know" has a real resonance for me.  But at the same time, it's hard to argue Hossenfelder's logic.

Maybe the cosmos really is kind of a mess, with lots of arbitrary parameters and empirically-determined constants.  We may not like it, but as I've observed before, the universe is under no obligation to be structured in such a way as to make us comfortable.  Or, as my grandma put it -- more simply, but no less accurately -- "I've found that wishin' don't make it so."

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Beauty, truth, and the Standard Model

A couple of days ago, I was talking with my son about the Standard Model of Particle Physics (as one does).

The Standard Model is a theoretical framework that explains what is known about the (extremely) submicroscopic world, including three of the four fundamental forces (electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force), and classifies all known subatomic particles.

Many particle physicists, however, are strongly of the opinion that the model is flawed.  One issue is that one of the four fundamental forces -- gravitation -- has never been successfully incorporated into the model, despite eighty years of the best minds in science trying to do that.  The discovery of dark matter and dark energy -- or at least the effects thereof -- is also unaccounted for by the model.  Neither does it explain baryon asymmetry, the fact that there is so much more matter than antimatter in the observable universe.  Worst of all is that it leaves a lot of the quantities involved -- such as particle masses, relative strengths of forces, and so on -- as empirically-determined rather than proceeding organically from the theoretical underpinnings.

This bothers the absolute hell out of a lot of particle physicists.  They have come up with modification after modification to try to introduce new symmetries that would make it seem not quite so... well, arbitrary.  It just seems like the most fundamental theory of everything should be a lot more elegant than it is, and that there should be some underlying beautiful mathematical logic to it all.  The truth is, the Standard Model is messy.

Every one of those efforts to create a more beautiful and elegant model has failed.  Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, in a brilliant but stinging takedown of the current approach that you really should watch in its entirety, puts it this way: "If you follow news about particle physics, then you know that it comes in three types.  It's either that they haven't found that thing they were looking for, or they've come up with something new to look for which they'll later report not having found, or it's something so boring you don't even finish reading the headline."  Her opinion is that the entire driving force behind it -- research to try to find a theory based on beautiful mathematics -- is misguided.  Maybe the actual universe simply is messy.  Maybe a lot of the parameters of physics, such as particle masses and the values of constants, truly are arbitrary (i.e., they don't arise from any deeper theoretical reason; they simply are what they're measured to be, and that's that).  In her wonderful book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, she describes how this century-long quest to unify physics with some ultra-elegant model has generated very close to nothing in the way of results, and maybe we should accept that the untidy Standard Model is just the way things are.

Because there's one thing that's undeniable: the Standard Model works.  In fact, what generated this post (besides the conversation with my science-loving son) is a paper that appeared last week in Physical Review Letters about a set of experiments showing that the most recent tests of the Standard Model passed with a precision that beggars belief -- in this case, a measurement of the electron's magnetic moment which agreed with the predicted value to within 0.1 billionths of a percent.

This puts the Standard Model in the category of being one of the most thoroughly-tested and stunningly accurate models not only in all of physics, but in all of science.  As mind-blowingly bizarre as quantum mechanics is, there's no doubt that it has passed enough tests that in just about any other field, the experimenters and the theoreticians would be high-fiving each other and heading off to the pub for a celebratory pint of beer.  Instead, they keep at it, because so many of them feel that despite the unqualified successes of the Standard Model, there's something deeply unsatisfactory about it.  Hossenfelder explains that this is a completely wrong-headed approach; that real discoveries in the field were made when there was some necessary modification of the model that needed to be made, not just because you think the model isn't pretty enough:

If you look at past predictions in the foundations of physics which turned out to be correct, and which did not simply confirm an existing theory, you find it was those that made a necessary change to the theory.  The Higgs boson, for example, is necessary to make the Standard Model work.  Antiparticles, predicted by Dirac, are necessary to make quantum mechanics compatible with special relativity.  Neutrinos were necessary to explain observation [of beta radioactive decay].  Three generations of quarks were necessary to explain C-P violation.  And so on...  A good strategy is to focus on those changes that resolve an inconsistency with data, or an internal inconsistency.  

And the truth is, when the model you already have is predicting with an accuracy of 0.1 billionths of a percent, there just aren't a lot of inconsistencies there to resolve.

I have to admit that I get the particle physicists' yearning for something deeper.  John Keats's famous line, "Beauty is truth, and truth beauty; that is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know" has a real resonance for me.  But at the same time, it's hard to argue Hossenfelder's logic.

Maybe the cosmos really is kind of a mess, with lots of arbitrary parameters and empirically-determined constants.  We may not like it, but as I've observed before, the universe is under no obligation to be structured in such a way as to make us comfortable.  Or, as my grandma put it -- more simply, but no less accurately -- "I've found that wishin' don't make it so."

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ConCERNing Osiris

Many of you undoubtedly know about CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), the world's largest particle physics laboratory, located on the border of France and Switzerland.  It's home to six particle accelerators and some of the most impressive discoveries in subatomic and high-energy physics in the world, including last year's demonstration of the existence of the elusive Higgs field, the field that confers the property of mass to every bit of matter in the universe.

Pretty impressive stuff, and most of it over my head even given my bachelor's degree in physics.

Now, switch gears for a moment.  You'll see why in a bit.

Many of you undoubtedly also know about Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of the dead, although perhaps not the same ones who knew about CERN.  Osiris was one of the most important gods in ancient Egypt, given their fixation on the afterlife.  Unlike his fellow deities, who had animals' heads, Osiris looked pretty much like an ordinary guy, except that he had green skin.

Osiris became the god of rebirth when he was killed by his brother Set, who chopped his body up and threw it into the Nile river.  Osiris's wife Isis found her husband, in chunks, and sort of stuck the chunks back together and brought him back to life, only to find out afterwards that there was a chunk missing.  Unfortunately for Osiris, that chunk turned out to be a body part that most of us males are pretty fond of, if you get my drift.  Understandably upset at his wife for not finding a fairly important bit of him, he convinced Isis to make him a new one out of gold, which strikes me as a pretty poor substitute, all things considered.  But it must have worked, because soon after Isis gave birth to the god Horus, who looked just like his parents hoped except for the possible problem of having a falcon's head.

Then Osiris died again.  Poor guy just couldn't catch a break.

Now, by this time you're probably wondering what CERN and Osiris can possibly have to do with one another.  So let me explain.  CERN, you see, isn't just a place where physicists go to conduct complex and far-reaching experiments about the subtle structure of matter; it is actually a portal whose chief purpose is to create a wormhole, which will allow Osiris to be raised from the dead.

Again.  Hopefully they'll remember to bring along his penis this time.

Don't believe me?  Take a look at this article over at UFO Sightings Hotspot, called "Ta-Wer AKA Osiris AKA CERN."  Here's the main argument, if I can dignify it by that name:

According to researcher William Henry, the ancient Egyptian object named Ta-Wer aka “Osiris” device, was a stargate machine capable to open wormholes or dimensional openings used by Seth and Osiris to “travel across the underworld.”Is CERN the new “Osiris Ta-Wer”? A modern stargate machine based on ancient technology?

When work at CERN's Large Hadron Collider is completed in 2015, the collider should have twice the power and be able to help unlock more of the universe's mysteries and to explore an entirely new realm of physics.

With the LHC power doubled, they will start looking for what they think is out there and they hope that something will turn up that no one had ever thought of.

It is known that the secret societies are obsessed with the raising of Osiris and maybe they already know what they are looking for and was the placement of a Shiva Statue outside the CERN Hadron Collider a hint?

Sure.  Because a green-skinned Egyptian god and a multi-armed Hindu god are clearly the same guy.  But do go on:

According to Stephen Hawking: “ bending space-time is theoretically possible— by exploiting black holes, or wormholes if they exist, or by traveling at super speeds, based on Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

Although many people believe that time travel is science fiction, it is not, and taking into account the obsession of the illuminati to use CERN as a stargate machine, it may be possible in the near future, we will face God’s miracles as seen by the ancient Hindu people when their Gods travelling through stargate devices. 

You know, if I were Stephen Hawking, I would be really pissed at the way nutjobs use quotes from legitimate research, lectures, and interviews to support their bizarre ideas.  These guys cherry-pick almost as much as the fundamentalist Christians do.  And at least the evangelical Christians basically understand the stuff they're reading.  With articles like this one, though, you get the impression that the folks that write this sort of woo-woo horse waste have about as much actual comprehension of quantum mechanics as my dog.

They end, though, with a question:

Is there some occult ritual being carried within the LHC facility and is Shiva the one they are attempting to bring to Earth?

No and no.  Thanks for asking.  And once again, Shiva and Osiris aren't the same dude.  By no stretch of the imagination is a three-eyed, eight-armed dude wearing a necklace of skulls even remotely like a green-skinned bearded dude with a missing wang.  Are we clear on that now?

 And CERN has nothing to do with gods of any kind.  They do physics there.  End of story.

It's a regrettable tendency on the part of a lot of people to hear bits and pieces of stuff they don't understand, combine it with other stuff they only partially understand, and come to drastically wrong conclusions.  The cure, of course, is to try and find out a little about the actual facts, to learn some real science, but that, unfortunately, is a level of hard work that some people are unwilling to undertake.  So we haven't seen the end of this kind of thing.

Woo-woo wingnuttery, it seems, will be with us always, sort of like death and taxes but even more annoying.

The LHC, lawsuits, and the time-traveling seagull of doom

Sometimes I feel like all I do in this blog is to deliver bad news.  Gullibility and credulousness are rampant, not to mention hoaxers and charlatans who are eager to turn a quick buck by ripping off the less rational segment of society.  All around us we see examples of absurd, counterfactual nonsense, and evidence that a regrettably small number of laypeople have any idea of how science actually works.

It thrills me no end that today I have a cheering story, a story of the triumph of critical thinking over fearful, superstitious woo-woo.  The gist: German courts have ruled, once and for all, that the Large Hadron Collider is what physicists say it is -- a scientific device designed to investigate the subatomic world -- and that it most definitively is not going to destroy the entire universe, or even just the Earth.  [Source]

Claims that the LHC is going to kill us all have been going around for some time.  I suppose that it was inevitable that people would be afraid of the device, given the fact that subatomic physics is a fairly esoteric area of study, poorly understood by anyone who doesn't have a master's degree or better in physics.  For another thing, it's hard not to be awestruck simply by how amazingly big it is.  The tube down which particles are accelerated to near-light speed, and then smashed into targets, is 27 kilometers in circumference.  The magnets in the device alone weigh over 27 tons, and require 96 tons of liquid helium to keep them at the right (extremely cold) temperature.

So it shouldn't be surprising that the woo-woos got freaked out by the thing.  Here are a few cheery suggestions they made about what was going to happen when the LHC was activated:

• It would produce a mini black hole that would devour the Earth.
• It would produce a Higgs boson that would then generate a new universe inside ours, ripping apart our universe from the inside out.
• It would create a particle called a "strangelet" that then would convert everything it touched into "strangelets," and the whole world would explode in a burst of, um, strangeness.
• The beam would break loose from containment and vaporize France.  Some American conservatives, of the sort who still eat "Freedom Fries" with their cheeseburgers, thought this was a good idea.

Of course, it didn't help that the first year that the LHC was up and running, it was plagued with problems.  There were funding shortfalls, technical difficulties, and even a shutdown caused by a seagull dropping a piece of a baguette on the power lines near the facility, causing an electrical short.  All of this, the alarmists said, couldn't be a coincidence.  There were religious folks that claimed that god himself was sabotaging the LHC to stop it from destroying everything.  My favorite version of this theory was dreamed up by, of all people, two physicists -- Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya -- who wrote a paper suggesting that scientists in the future were reaching back in time and stopping the LHC from operating because they (the future scientists) know that the LHC will cause widespread destruction, havoc, and chaos.  The seagull, presumably, was one of their minions, sent here from the future with a Death Baguette to short-circuit the place.

Well, of course, now that the LHC has been running off and on since 2009, and we haven't died, a lot of the furor has died down.  There have been no black holes, new universes, or strangelets, France remains unvaporized, and there have been no further visits from the Time-Traveling Seagull of Doom.  But not all of the craziness has ceased, of course.  Whatever else you might say about woo-woos, they're tenacious.  Just because the destruction of The Universe As We Know It hasn't happened yet, they claim, doesn't mean that it won't ever.

So there have been lawsuits to try to stop the research.  The most recent was launched by a German woo-woo who filed suit in both Germany and Switzerland to halt operations, because, after all, you never know when we might all be swallowed by a black hole, and when that happens it will be too late.

And unlike the court case earlier this week in Italy, where unscientific foolishness won the day, here the courts ruled in favor of science.  There is no evidence, the judge ruled, that anything being done at the LHC is dangerous in the global sense.  Physicists are quite certain that any claims of black holes and new universes are impossible, and that was good enough for the court.  The suit was thrown out, and (it is to be hoped) the plaintiff was instructed to become better educated in science before wasting the legal system's time further.

So, it might be rare, but we should cheer it when it happens: sometimes the rationalists win.