Bill's Comments

The supercollider in Geneva, Switzerland, has finally achieved its goal--collisions between particles that involve huge amounts of energy. The headlines and subheadings read:

Mini-Big Bangs created in cosmos origins project

* Scientists collide particles at highest energy ever

* Success hailed as huge step in understanding universe

* Mysterious dark matter, new dimensions may be found

In terms of engineering, this is a tremendous feat. The supercollider is miles in size yet requires focus control in the millions of an inch. I want to take nothing away from that.

However, I have great reservations that this will actually lead to a better understanding of the universe. The problem is the fundamental assumptions that underlay such an interpretation--that what occurs at the atomic level is simply a smaller scale version of what occurred at the universal level. Particle science has created this wonderful, highly self-consistent world of observation and interpretation. In the sense of predicting what might occur at the next higher levels of energy interaction the theories are very successful. But I have doubts that scaling up the conclusions from the interior of an atomic collision will correctly apply to the Universe at the time of the Big Bang.

In rather prosaic terms, what the experiments do is take two large nuclei, speed them up to very close to the speed of light, then do a head-on collision with them. The spray of particles (debris) from the collision is then analysed to try to figure out what went on inside the collision. If you imagine a nucleus as a collection of varying size gravels held together with mud, it would not be far off. In effect they are trying to figure out what the gravel and mud are made of by analysing the pieces from the collision. The theory is that only certain kinds of debris can be created, and it will have a distinct appearance in the instrumentation.

The technology and the espistomologic aspects of this are extremely sophisticated and to be admired. Like most of modern science, I have a lot of trouble with its metaphysics. The Universe is hundreds of powers of ten greater in size than the interior of the collision. One of the problems with the Big Bang theory is that the Big Bang comes from what is called a singularity--the math and physics used to describe the normal world do not work there. All that is accepted about it is, that it is the black hole to end all black holes, and that at some point as it expanded the behavior became like what we can describe, or at least theorize about. This new collision process supposedly is closer in energy to the beginnings of the expansion, so therefore will provide clues to an earlier fraction of a second after the start of the Big Bang. The comparison is being made on the basis of comparable energy levels. The problem is that the scope of the universe is all of matter at that energy, and the collider is only a relatively few particles at that energy and they are in an environment that constrains them. I think it is a false analogy.

It may be that good will eventually come from such efforts. I don't ascribe to the various doomsday theories about this work, as they come from a lack of understanding of the science and behavior of black holes. However, there are times when this kind of work seems to me to be more kids playing with bigger and bigger Lego sets rather than creating something substantial. My own view of particle science is that it is at the same analogous stage as astronomy before Copernican theory took off. It is getting more and more complex in its descriptions because it fails to see some underlying simplicity.

....for the technology of science.