Is the New Physics Here? Atom Smashers Get an Antimatter Surprise | Large Hadron Collider LHCb | Matter & Antimatter Asymmetry & CP Violation
This giant magnetic is part of the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland.
CREDIT: CERN/LHCb
The world's largest atom smasher, designed as a portal to a new view of physics, has produced its first peek at the unexpected: bits of matter that don't mirror the behavior of their antimatter counterparts.
The discovery, if confirmed, could rewrite the known laws of particle physics and help explain why our universe is made mostly of matter and not antimatter.
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider, the 17-mile (27 km) circular particle accelerator underground near Geneva, Switzerland, have been colliding protons at high speeds [...]
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It makes sense that the Universe, seen on a timeline, would progress through the same phases of 'life' as all it's subparts, going from an initial excited state of heavy growth and differentiation through a life cycle in which we'd appear to be on the declining side of halfway, until it reaches stasis, collapses, and explodes again into all-beingness. I mean, there is only one point of space and one moment of time, within which all possibilities (including nothingness) exist. We see it linearly as part of the eternal, infinite reaction that is all people, places, things, and ideas in existence, cohabitating in that single place/time and given order by our particular form of consciousness. The Earth experiences her lifetime very differently than we do ours, exclusively through touch and the sensation of energy. She has no eyes or ears, although she can hear (there's nothing of note for her to look at, so sight would be a bit wasted on her). She can feel herself hurtling through space and the wind of the sun and space moving past her and herself through it, but she has no nervous system, and no emotions when it comes to us. She may feel some kinship with her fellow planets, but personally I believe emotions wouldn't serve her. She fills a place and does her job in the solar system, nothin' to think about; all she has to do is let her form be what it is and do what it does within the laws of nature, easy-peasy. But her body is a living thing, and just like bacteria live on us, we live unnoticed on her. Difference is, when we get infected, when a virus or bacteria gets so far out of whack in our personal system that the system begins to malfunction, it can kill our bodies. We can't kill Earth's body yet. We may reach a time when we can, but... an event of the magnitude it would take to disrupt her body enough to actually cause her system to go so far out of whack that it ceases to function? I think that'll be out of our reach for some time to come. She'll just absorb and recycle whatever we throw at her, although the results of her processes in doing so may be devastating or fatal to us. She doesn't care. She's not mad. She's never going to love us or approve of our choices. She doesn't even comprehend choice, as it plays no part in her role in the Universe. She is what she is, she does what she does, and we go along believing that what's good or bad for us is good or bad for her. Nope, it's just us. If she thinks, it's in a way so incomprehensible to us that we'll never get it, most likely, and that's okay. She does what she does, we do what we do. We've gotta stop blamin' the effects of that on the 'wrath of Mother Nature/Earth' (whose fault any effects we may be having are is really a secondary matter to what we can do to save our specie from extinction if we're headed in that direction, since the Earth doesn't care if we live or die and we should care), educate ourselves and learn from each other, and make what in our individual estimations are generally positive changes in our own lives, for our own sake (and yes, that of others, but what's good for us really is what's good for our community, since the better we are, the better off we are, the better off we can be together if we will, which we will if we're being the best we can be). Anyway, the natural order is such that the Universe, like everything else, would go from the initial burst into consciousness, through a period of adjusting to a steady 'metabolism', to a period where things cool down, functions begin to cease, and it settles in for it's end-of-life journey back to that Source, to be born again (looking at it from a human, linear perspective of which our minds are able to make sense). And I believe that we're moving from a time of belief to a time of knowledge, and I think figuring out and being able to prove through human means certain fundamental truths about the underlying nature of the universe (rather than just believing things are true with no evidence to support one's thinking) is crucial to that shift. There came a time when we realized that Thor was not some god, but the natural result of natural forces converging under particular circumstances. Now, we'll realize that god is what is. If it exists, it can be quantified, but we will never quantify everything. There will always be things that remain unknown, but we'll understand their principles anyway because underneath everything is a governing set of principles that we'll be able to follow and demonstrate sufficiently to assume that they apply to everything at every level. (And then, an anomaly will arise. :D)
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