Talk Like A Physicist

Why I am joining the law suit to stop LHC

As an attorney and as a physicist, people have asked me about my views on the recent law suit to stop the Large Hadron Collider. In the law suit, a few concerned individuals have argued that LHC might create blackholes and endanger our planet, and hence any further work on LHC should be stopped.

I support the plaintiffs in this case and also plan to provide free legal services to them. I think this is the least I can do to help the humanity.

I am against LHC, not because I am afraid of micro-blackholes, or that some worm-hole will be created (I know these objects: I co-edited a book called Blackhole, wormholes and superstrings eons ago), I am against LHC because I do not want Higgs particle to be found, period. Life will be so boring if Higgs particle was indeed in the range that it is expected. I want physicists to keep struggling to find something beyond the God particle.

I would take the $8-10 Billion dollars that it is going to cost and get 100,000 more high energy theorists to start working on all the unsolved problems - I think the humanity will learn much more from 100,000 theorists then it will from LHC operations.

Physicists make it soooo easy to pursue these kinds of law suits because physicists are incapable of saying that something is “impossible”. As the law suit says :”No absolute refutation of the adverse scenarios that have been described has yet been articulated”

I’ll give you a simple example, ask any person “what are the chances that you will win$10 Billion in a lottery by next month?” Answer would be “impossible, because no state/country offers $10B in lottery prizes and then on top of it, for me to win that prize is just not going to happen”. Ask the same question to a physicist and chances are he/she will start calculating the chances of accumulating the powerball prize, buying all possible lottery tickets, chances that dollar will devalue so much that 1 Euro will be worth $1M and then come up with a probability that you will win $10 Billion next month. As I said, physicists are incapable of saying that something is impossible.

<Posting on April 1st - filed under Physics Humor>

Tuesday physics tattoo : elliptical partial differential equation

All physics & Math PhD students should be required to get a tattoo of the most important equation from their work.

Notes about the above physics tattoo:

“I’m currently a Ph.D. student studying maths in Australia (submitting next week). The the tattoo on the top, I got about three years ago in Berkeley, CA. The other tattoo I got about a year later in Sydney, Australia. Both these tattoos are closely related to the research I’ve done for my Ph.D., which is in the area of elliptic partial differential equations. The top equation is called the Monge-Ampere equation and is the archetype of the equations I currently study. The bottom equation is called the ‘Infinity Laplacian’ and was chosen because it is correlated to variational theories which I find to be beautiful. Loosely speaking these equations are correlated to how surfaces (in arbitrary dimension) bend and curve. I figured since I did half my Ph.D. in the US and half in Australia, I would get at least one tattoo in each of those countries. The tattoos are meant to represent a memory of the time I spent in my studies.”

Tattoo from Greg, via Carl Zimmer