As the Cern scientist Barbara Maria Latacz told Nature: “We are trying to understand why we exist.”
Science rules!
Of course that won’t actually answer why we exist - only how.
Why is likely to be just an imaginary question with no answer.
Do we really want to know the how? The answer could help someone figure out how to balance the equation. Poof!
Yes the wonders of “progress” must continue.
Moving the antimatter will be a scientific first, though it has a fictional precursor. In Dan Brown’s thriller Angels & Demons – made into a film starring Tom Hanks in 2009 – terrorists steal a canister of antimatter from Cern and try to obliterate the Vatican with it.
I find that a revealing comment. Hollywood Dreaming carries the day as usual
That the cosmos seems to be filled with galaxies, stars, planets and living beings made of matter shows this notion must be wrong. There is a basic asymmetry that has favoured matter and stopped the universe from becoming a simmering, empty void.
For this reason, physicists want to study the differences between the particles that make up matter and antimatter. These might provide clues about why the former has come to dominate the universe…
It won’t even do that.
This stuff is about the formation of matter, and the universe, not about life.
If one wants to learn about the formation of life, the only place* to learn about that is through and within this sadly neglected and abused planet Earth and her history.
- Sure potentially other planetary bodies. But certainly not in the extreme conditions of cosmos.
Life is matter. We pretend it is more.
Yes, yes, yes.
But matter is not biology.
Funny how it comes back down to understanding and appreciating the Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide.
The problem is all the fascination with the Big Bang compared to the disregard displayed toward grasping our Earthly Evolution.
Whereas the details of cosmology at the edge of the Big Bang or at the Planck scale will always be border line dreaming, since there’s no way to get that sort of clear physical evidence we can gather from Earthly observation about local historical conditions can.
Evolution is way more knowable, and actually more important to figuring out how to live on this Earth. Although I guess we’ve basically given up on that living on Earth part, all we are about these days is chasing progress for the sake of progress until it finally annihilates us.
For example, yesterday I was at an all day AI workshop. During the introduction a host of dangers that are inherent with this truly miraculous technology, that is developing at warp speed, was discussed a little.
But, if everyone is a good-faith player, and if we are thoughtful, those problems can be avoided.
With that they tiptoed away from that issue and on to the wonders AI, then we were off to the races, never looking back.
People is as people does.
That’s why it was so important for people to get a grasp on their human animal selves at this crucial inflection point in our march towards overwhelming Earth’s complex life support systems.
But that was difficult, and we don’t do difficult anymore,
we need the rush of the new and exciting.
How many are left behind by the new and exiting?
Well, that’s just the Cost of Progress, we take it in stride.
Crisis, what crisis?
Big bang curiosity is science. Disregard of our environment is a societal ill. You shouldn’t blame science for an ignorant society. Science is the light. It isn’t responsible for the dark.
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I’m not knocking science’s ceaseless curiosity, neither am I knocking cosmology.
I was thinking about the audience and the pundits, not the scientists themselves.
I was also thinking about the notion that understanding cosmology will reveal how biology and life came into being. I don’t see how that can be rationally be justified.
Since biological life can only unfold upon a very specific type of planet and location - I believe that notions of cosmic secrets to life or consciousness is ill-placed.
Oh there’s another point I think worth making, Cosmology is fundamentally trivial mind candy, good for building philosophies and religions, and perhaps hydrogen bombs out of - while Earth’s evolution and biology are of existential importance of the highest order.
That’s confusing. Cosmology is a loose term. There’s physical cosmology, metaphysical cosmology, and others. Science builds trustworthy knowledge and generally debunks religion.
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No one said it would. The “why” in the quote is why matter exists as it does. That’s obvious.
Except when I do that you say I’m not doing it right. It’s important that we have priorities. Plural. Not everyone seeing things the way you want them to.
Sure but I don’t hear people discussing how we create our own Gods and religions from within our own heads.
We aren’t allowed to call anyone disconnected even though I’m told a huge portion of this nation is people who believe a Personal God Almighty is telling them to go to war, and who believe the Prosperity Doctrine is God’s plan for them.
When it is simply another ruthless human money gathering state of mind.
And the notion of consciousness being a product of one’s own body, why doesn’t seem to justify a thought or discussion?
Not especially, yes and no,
The way I understand, even the “rigorous” theories and mathematics of cosmology
are actually somewhat beyond simple physical science’s domain* - mathematical conjecture upon mathematical conjectures, rigorous though it may be, is still conjecture laced, with a minimum of actual observable evidence to underpin anyone’s conjectures.
(* it’s why I often specify Earth Sciences & biology)
No one of any intellectual expert authority? Okay.
Plenty of nonsensical talk that titillates the masses.
Again google it, there’s plenty out there. Ignore it, but it’s there.
Plus the simple state of societal confusion thinking and all that we’ve avoided dealing with and where we’ve arrived at - all that speaks for itself. My god we the people just destroyed the vestiges of our democracy (if with loaded dice) and our government with a balance of power, etc…
STOP MAKING IT ABOUT YOU!
We, our entire society and media the lords that control the Consumer Units that we’ve become - we have been and continue doing it wrong, take a look at any trajectory you want. We’ve been thoughtless beyond comprehension, but you keep trying to . . . I don’t know.
My way???
Being able to admit and discuss the fact that our consciousness, thoughts and God are produced from within us. Believing one is in communication with a personal god is a sign of genuine mental illness of being consumed by one’s own Ego, it is a reflection of a supreme disconnect from Earth’s physical reality - that despised Nature/Environment thing.
It’s not “my way” it is way of Earth’s natural Reality!
Well, that wouldn’t fit in a technology forum like this. I have certainly read plenty of people discussing those things in the proper places.
In those cases, “beyond physical science’s domain,” people are venturing into philosophy. I don’t do philosophy. I’m not good at it (except as a logician, perhaps.)
Right and then there’s the rest of science.
This is the expert opinion that I have my faith in, beyond that, seems to me, it turns into thoughts upon thoughts, with no physical feedback to temper our imagination.
The bottom line, courtesy of:
Mysteries of Modern Physics by Sean Carroll
Jan 29, 2020 - Darwin College Lecture Series
. . . these are the particles that make up you and this table and me and this laptop and really everything that you have ever seen with your eyes touched with your fingers smelled with your nose in your life.
Furthermore we know how they interact with each other and even better than that, the most impressive fact is that there will not be a discovery tomorrow or next century or a million years from now which says you know what there was another particle or another force that we didn’t know about but now we realize plays a crucial role in our everyday life.
As far as our everyday life is concerned by which I really mean what you can see with your eyes touch with your hands etc we’re done finding the underlying ingredients. That is an enormous achievement in human history one that does not get enough credit, because of course as soon as we do it we go on to the next thing.
Physics is not done. I’m not saying that physics is done, but physics has understood certain things and those things include everything you encounter in your everyday life - unless you’re a professional experimental physicist or unless you’re looking of course outside our everyday life at the universe and other places where we don’t know what’s going on. …
This is also why I make a big deal out of the label Earth Centrist. This is where the really interesting stuff happened. Don’t get me wrong, I like star gazing and moon dreaming, but this Earth is my home and my love and my mother.
Dark energy, dark matter.
Well, what from that area do you want to discuss that has to do with antimatter?
No one in this article. Quit making every thread about your personal axe to grind.
Yes, you. You hijack another thread then say I’m making it about me. Even when I try to address you, you go off on a tangent about you.
How are any of those people you listed relevant to the transportation of anti-matter.
I’ll put in my 2 cents worth.
IMO, it’s all about “dynamics” and what originally caused a dynamical universe.
Dynamics is explained by “differential equations” between 2 (or more) differentiated properties. There is a natural movement to achieve or maintain balance that is causal to dynamic movement. The difference between a high-pressure and low-pressure system causes a storm.
The greatest differential equation that can exist is between “matter” and “anti-matter” and it appears that concept describes the “inflationary epoch”, the initial expansion of the fledgling universe where even the law of SOL was exceeded and existed in a dynamic state of total chaos.
The rest is explained by the gradual evolution of order in this dynamical environment and the self-formation of all the regular patterns that we can observe in both the inanimate and animate objects,
So it is my take that “life” (biology) is actually just another expression of evolved dynamical organization, mainly utilizing the most abundant chemicals that originated in the early universe, i.e. hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, etc.
“Consciousness” is the gradually emergent property of self-referential awareness in living systems, starting at the most fundamental expressions of living organisms such as the unconscious bacteria that communicate via “quorum sensing” and the single-celled Paramesium, which has memory and motility, all the way up the scale to the large-brained mammals who have the ability of “decision making”.
I know this is a total simplification of the process, but as Robert Hazen posits, "given enough time, space, and raw materials, “evolution via natural selection” can produce
everything we can observe today.
IOW, there is nothing mysterious in this grand universal laboratory with unlimited resources for experimentation.
As Hazen calculated, the earth alone has performed some (2 trillion, quadrillion, quadrillion, quadrillion) chemical and bio-chemical experiments in its relatively short existence compared to the universe’s age. The number of dynamical interactions between physical objects in the entire universe is incalculable and may well approach infinity.
What about it?
I don’t pretend to have an opinion and I’m certainly in no position to weigh those arguments. Plus I have no clue how it relates to our lives, perhaps another God like gadget will force it into our lives, thought I doubt it.
Which is why I try to be clear about my Earth sciences classification.
Gotta be careful clambering up mountains, it’s shocking where a rock kicked loose can end up.
Excuse me.
Well that one was sort of personal. How much money are we spending on that, how much of a life time does our society have ahead of it at its current insane levels of consumption and growth and dreams?
What do real human get out of this progress??
Hasn’t anyone noticed we’ve become automatons feeding the machine?
We live upon a planet that is entering a radical era of increased harsh weather disruption and we’re playing with all this super tech crap, and never taking about how we people are going to continue to survive the way our society and Earth’s health is going.
Excuse me if I’m like a party crasher, like I said, I’m an Earth Centrist and it is time human start recognizing how their self-absorbed thinking (oh golly gotta harness anti-matter yippy, think of all we can learn.) and self-serving actions. (war as a profits driver)
When are we going to start thinking about using our knowledge toward our survival?
I agree with Sean on this point. I’ve posted that more than once.
It’s not personal to ask you to stay on topic. I know threads get off topic, but usually not in the third post and usually not off to the same topic by the same person for months and months.
I have excused you for months, but you haven’t just crashed the party, you stayed overnight and trashed the bathroom.
The most dangerous delivery truck?
How a lorry-load of antimatter will help solve secrets of universe
Fantastically expensive and hard to handle, the substance holds the key to a holy grail of science. And experts at Cern now know how to transport it
Robin McKie, science editor
Sun 8 Dec 2024
Researchers are preparing to make one of science’s most unusual journeys. They are planning to transport a container of antimatter in a lorry across Europe.
Antimatter is the most expensive material on Earth – it’s estimated it would cost several trillion dollars to make a gram – and it can only be manufactured in particle physics laboratories such as the Cern research centre near Geneva.
It is also extremely tricky to handle. If antimatter makes contact with normal matter, both are annihilated, releasing a powerful burst of electromagnetic radiation. Only by carefully combining sets of powerful electrical and magnetic fields in special devices can antimatter be stored safely.
“That makes moving it around very difficult, though we are now close to making our first journey,” said Prof Stefan Ulmer, a scientist at Cern. “Antimatter has so much to tell us. That is why we are doing this.”
Guess I keep wanting to know what about us humans?
This Anti-Matter jazz is splendid as heck, gotta love the science & technical achievement, in a world where everyone can have whatever they want, it’s dazzling. But it’s all in the head stuff, that is stranded within our mindscape business. Trying to come up with more accurate numbers for mathematician philosophers to plug into their musings.
What about the real humans out here? - As opposed the behemoth entities of eternal profit drivers that fund all this super duper technical stuff. Progress is God and must continue, no matter what the costs to Earth, society and the people who compose it.
After all, we are destined for the Moon, Mars and the Stars, why worry about civil society, water, food, shelter, living live that finds the goodness within the struggle? Well I do worry about it. I am still a human, and haven’t consented to becoming a consumer unit.
I’m astounded that striving to investigate and better understand our human condition, who we are, where we come from, what’s the point of being here, etc, resolving that lost feeling that so so many American are consumed by, as reflected in mental health statistics.
And most of all how we managed to make such a god awful, dead end mess of country (and world) of plenty.
But to heck with talk people about people’s lives, only want to hear about how cool and intelligent people are, we can move a truck load of a Anti-Matter contraption across Europe, but we as a collective society can’t bring ourselves to admit that Global Warming with it’s existential long term promises, is real.
Or that solutions require it being at the top of everyone’s priorities. If humanity is going to survive to see the end of this century. You say it’s unrelated.
To me that sentiment only underscores people’s great ability to compartmentalize, isolate, not deny, simply overlook.
We live on planet with limited resources and we keep doing all the wrong things, and then get really really p’d off when anyone complains and wants to make us think about that neglected ugly flip side of our obsession with warp-speed technological “progress” - Problem is that it is progress that is driving and intensifying current self-destructive trends?
Yeah yell at me.
Take a look outside your house, we Americans have just abandoned our US Constitution along with our principled (if humanly flawed rule of law), the foundation of trust USA was built upon and depended on has been utterly trashed, but you save your shithouse scolding for me - because I dare imply most my fellow citizens are in deep denial?
CERN consumes one and half trillion dollars a years, along with consuming the resources that can buy - And to what good will any of it be 20 - 30 years and beyond? You know when our global infrastructure falls apart because of our deliberate neglect of this planet we depend on for everything? Which it surely will given current trends.
I mean electrical grid problems in a warming world, roads, transportation ports, vessels in harsher seas, AMOC collapse, farming in a world of heat waves and droughts punctuated by torrential rain and wind events. Cascading consequences from just those impacts will have runaway chain reactions, coalescing with other impacts, and so on.
In a way none of those early climate challenges are impossible to deal with, but not while squandering trillions on what is becoming more and more Vanity Projects rather than anything practical for humanity, in a time of increasing real world crisis.
WHY NOT try to rethink our philosophical religious fundamental? Imagine humans starting to take responsibility for ourselves, by learning to seriously consider the dark destructive side of progresses promise.
Why not wonder why we can’t muster a nurturing attitude towards this planet that most people of substance seem to hold in contempt. That right there is going to need some serious soul searching if anything is to change.
Oh but of course, no change is also an option and is probably how this will play out. Though that will be most painful.
For the first time in my life, I’m not looking at national/world news, no point in it, too horrendous, especially for someone sober enough to remember the path we took to get here, someone who’s paid attention to what we are doing to this planet and ourselves as a people.
Fortunately at 69, it’s okay paring it down to focusing on the local and my 40 acre happy place, with my Maddy doggie and wife and some friends and of course that bouquet of children in my life. Counting my blessings while I have them, and mourning the promise lost when it so moves me, and avoiding thinking about a future that will surely turn into a living nightmare likes of which we Americans have never known. And venting once in a while, when I need to.
Lausten, it’s all tied together.
If you want to talk waste of money, here are some things you can see from the comfort of your home.
Who are the richest people?
Some tech billionaires, and
Bernard Arnault
The founder of LVMH, which owns French fashion brands like Christian Dior and Louis Vuitton, has a net worth of $164 billion.
No scientists in that list, FYI. A couple of computer programmers who turned into salesmen.
What are most people talking about and spending their money on?
The 2024 film Wicked had a budget of around $150 million per part, for a total cost of around $300 million. This doesn’t include the cost of the film’s marketing campaign
What could we do as a species if moving some anti-matter was something that millions of people would pay $12 each to see?
I don’t read your posts when you are start with these rhetorical questions about the state of the world. Why do you think you are the only one who sees it?
Addition. Major free news has a story on a study published in one of most trusted science journals