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01 January 2011
And who knew the Big Bang looked like a child’s spin art, or a Jackson Pollock painting? But that’s what the photos from CERN produced.
Now, why, if the CERN scientists have been banging particles in the super collider since its startup, is this latest collision so freaking fantastic? All previous collisions produced “beginning of time” particles but on such sub/micro/nano/ infinitesimal time frames that to even say they lasted a blink of the eye would be off by a googleplex of eons.
This latest collision, say the scientists, lasted in what they referred to as “a time frame everyone could understand.” While the “source” wouldn’t say how long that actually was, he didn’t hide his enthusiasm to the extent that a seasoned reporter couldn’t deduce he was referring to many seconds, which in Big Bang terms is an incredibly long, long time, with reams of data produced that will take hopefully not eons to decipher but will certainly keep the CERN guys busy for some time to come.
But why was this collision different? Well, essentially someone said let’s try something different, and they did. Instead of slamming their usual gallery of hydrogen protons, scientists collided lead ions for a few days at speeds just shy of the speed of light around the 16.8 mile/27 kilometer collider, producing temperatures 500,000 times hotter than the core of the sun and for the first time producing a plasma where the activity of two of the elementary particles within the plasma could be clearly tracked, traced, observed and recorded, giving CERN scientists clear clues on how matter evolved into stars, planets, and us.How soon after the Big Bang did the scientists create? Experts said they re-created the super-hot quark-gluon plasma considered to be the totality of the whole known cosmos a fraction of a second after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.
Can’t get much closer than that!
In a related issue, we go from the beginning point of time and existence to the farthest points of the known cosmos. Recent research by astronomers at Yale University, using the Keck telescope in Hawaii, upped the star count from the 100- billion-to-1-trillion galaxies in the universe, each with 100 billion to 1 trillion stars, to about a third of the galaxies each having as many as 1 trillion to 10 trillion stars. Way beyond the pittance of 100 billion.
That translates to 300 sextillion stars — that’s a 3 followed by 23 zeros, people — 3 trillion times 100 billion.
300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
After all the number crunching, it’s a three-fold increase. And that’s the low estimate.
Back to CERN, which is knocking on the door of creation to see how all those galaxies, all those stars, all the planets, and all the life on all those planets evolved.
Researchers were going to shut down the Big Bang project at the end of this year, but will decide this month whether to extend the project to the end of 2012 instead, to keep the momentum, so to speak. Scientists are saying the collider is working so well, far beyond their expectations, that if they can add a year now without any risk to the collider, why shouldn’t they do it?
Full steam ahead, guys. Mayan calendar be damned. It’s a wonderful life.
The Big Bang del två
Little did I know when I chose the cover of this issue to celebrate CERN’s late year a near Big Bang explosion that it would take on a double meaning with near big bang explosion mid-December in Sweden by a fanatical Islamist and subsequent plots by Swedish Muslim nationals to blow up newspaper buildings in Denmark.
I couldn’t have thought that analogy up in 300 sextillion years.
Luckily for the Swedes, no one was killed by the fanatical Muslims — except himself. The Swedish atheist/humanist group Humanisterna subsequently put out this press release
“Sweden has suffered its first suicide bomber. We are now forced to add Stockholm to the list of world cities that suffer from terrorist attacks. In this situation it is important to act wisely and not react irrationally or in a panic.
“The idea of an afterlife and a reward in paradise is perhaps one of humanity’s most dangerous myths. The idea of an alluring paradise has motivated many religiously-colored conflicts throughout history, not just within Islam but just as much in the history of Christianity. Hindu reincarnation belief has also sanctioned the caste system and contempt for those less fortunate.
“It is only when we realize that this is the only life we have that we can take full responsibility for this life and for each other.
“Research indicates that the suicide bomber was a Muslim and said he was acting in the name of Islam. But we must never resort to collectivization or the categorization of people. The suicide bomber is no more representative of all Muslims than the [Swedish neo-]Nazis who [annually in early December] march in Salem ‘to defend Sweden’ are representative of all Swedes.
“We feel great compassion and sympathy for all the Muslims who are threatened and will unjustly suffer human judgmental generalizations and simplifications because of this terrorist attack. Central to secular humanism is to consider and assess each individual as a separate individual. None other than terrorists and any assistants will have to answer for this weekend’s suicide attack.”
For Humanisterna to equate the actions of the Christian past with the actions of the Muslim present is a false and dangerous comparison. I don’t recall that many Christians blowing themselves up recently in the name of their religion and world domination.
(Timothy McVeigh blowing up a federal building in Oklahoma, USA is the usual contemporary canard tossed out to justify such comparisons. McVeigh was marginally Christian, but his attack was against what he considered a repressive government; it had nothing to do with religion, let alone Christianity.)
Add to this the press reports of Muslims sporadically attacking Swedes, and you have an ostrich and sand situation.
It’s good that the attack was immediately denounced by many of Sweden’s Muslim community, groups, and Sweden’s most influential cleric, who issued a fatwa condemning the attack.
But just a few days later Swedish and Danish state intelligence agencies arrested the militant Islamists and thwarted an attack on the Copenhagen offices of Jyllands- Posten, which in 2005 published cartoons criticizing and mocking Mohammed, causing an uproar in the Islamic world and demonstrations and attacks in other countries.
The latest incident was to have taken place before this past new year rang in. It was the seventh attack or threat since 2008 against the Jyllands-Posten building or someone connected to that newspaper.
Four of the five perpetrators lived in Sweden (one in Denmark) and three were Swedish nationals. The militants were arrested after a reportedly long investigation by Swedish and Danish police and intelligence agencies, which were on top of this situation.
The Scandinavian countries once considered themselves unlikely targets, given their renowned tolerance. Tolerance is one thing, but it’s not Christians who are blowing themselves up throughout the world in the name of their religion, or flying planes into U.S. buildings, or blowing up U.K. subway/ underground systems, or bombing nightclubs in Bali, or killing millions in Africa.
I agree with much of what Humanisterna said in its press release, but it’s time for atheists, humanists and freethinkers the world over to take their heads out of the sand and see religion — all religions, but right now, this most dangerous one — for the threats its “true” believers pose. As Bangladesh- born and former Muslim Hossain Salahuddin writes in his article on page 19, and exemplified by the Atheism-Islam debate coverage beginning on page 13, Islam is not a religion, it’s a way of life.
Welcome to 2011.
Blasphemy, Thy Name is Redux
Pakistan started off the new year with a crippling strike, and not the military kind so often in the news these days.
No, the strike took place New Year’s Eve day as thousands of people took to the streets to once again stop any change in that country’s blasphemy law, forcing businesses to close. Police fired tear gas into a crowd to stop protestors from marching toward the president’s residence.
Incendiary speeches by religious leaders in major towns and cities warned the government against making any changes in the blasphemy law, which rights groups have said is used to persecute minorities, in particular, Christians and minority sect Muslims. The law was enacted in the 1980s as a way of uniting a deeply divided Islamic society.
Is this any way to run a country?
While in Australia for the GAC, I was told that certain things I was saying wouldn’t be appreciated and I might be approached by the police if someone wanted to press charges. Same thing when visiting Canada. To be honest, I have no idea what it was I said that could be interpreted as “blasphemous,” let alone to the tune of being arrested, but free speech restrictions in those countries have me a bit wary of relocating.
In the U.S., many colleges have free speech restrictions, essentially so people’s feelings don’t get hurt. I’m all for laws that prevent me shouting fire in a theater, but my right to free speech doesn’t stop at your sensitivities. It may be prudent and/or polite not to say certain things, but to legislate such is just wrong. Get over it people. Plain and simple.
I wonder what they’ll say to me when I attend the AAI 2011 convention, in Ireland? Bail, anyone?
