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Thursday, October 15, 2009

A REALLY Different Kind of Construction Problem

OK, so you're building a Large Hadron Collider, hoping to conjure up the elusive Higgs-Boson particle. But somehow, every time you try, smoke gets released. Here is one recent theory (reported in the New York Times) about what is going on:

"I'm talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."

Wow! This is really useful troubleshooting information! Who among us hasn't been working on something that could be considered "abhorrent to nature"? We are, after all, the "ugly" construction guys. Perhaps if things get a little too ugly, a WHOLE DIFFERENT set of problems kick in. No wonder I couldn't get that 440 Mhz transverter working!!!

2 comments:

  1. Bill; In the original version of the report, "who" or "what" was rippling back through time? -- Did they mean to suggest that "people" were somehow manipulating the failures because they now (their future now) felt it had been a bad idea?? Or do they mean imply that the universe itself (some natural force) is doing the policing because the universe (laws of physics, etc) are enforcing an action against this new ugly machine. Very interesting.... And this even leaves room for a 3rd possibility, the supernatural, ie God deemed it bad. -- I looked forward to you discussing this more in a future show, unless somehow future FCC censorship have already bleeped it out. - ki4SGU

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  2. Bill,
    You can't do 70cms in ugly construction. To get anything like the low impedances in the leads, they've got to be too short to be ugly! No loops and whorls like you get in functional (and ugly) HF experiments, no devices flying two inches off the FR4, no. It's got to be straight, flat on the groundplane and real NEAT!

    Heh! It does indeed explain why ugly skywiring doesn't happen at 440MHz. Real physics gets in the way.

    Blessings and 73,

    Pete, G1INF http://g1inf.blogspot.com/

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