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Saturday, September 20, 2008

"The Big Bang Machine"

I wish the press would stop referring to the LHC as the "Big Bang" machine, or say that it's recreating the Big Bang. Of course, it's doing no such thing, and it gives the impression that it will somehow tell us what the Big Bang was, and it skips over huge amounts of unknown physics that lies between the LHC and the Big Bang.

The LHC has an energy of about 10 TeV, which particles had at about 10-11 sec after the Big Bang. The entire time before that is still largely unknown and very, very interesting, and there will need to be bigger colliders built to explore it. And even those won't "recreate" the Big Bang.

That's today's pet peeve.

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