Sabarish

After a quarter of a century of dreaming and planning, designing and building, at last we are about to see the world’s largest and the highest-energy particle accelerator (LHC) in action – on 10th September 2008.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic (27-kilometre) scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100 m underground. It is a particle acceleratorused by physicists to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things. It will revolutionise our understanding, from the miniscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe.

Two beams of subatomic particles called ‘hadrons’ – either protons or lead ions – will travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world will analyse the particles created in the collisions using special detectors in a number of experiments dedicated to the LHC.

There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions, but what’s for sure is that a brave new world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator, as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of the Universe. For decades, the Standard Model of particle physics has served physicists well as a means of understanding the fundamental laws of Nature, but it does not tell the whole story. Only experimental data using the higher energies reached by the LHC can push knowledge forward, challenging those who seek confirmation of established knowledge, and those who dare to dream beyond the paradigm.

Read more at the following source links:

CERN – LHC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
CERN announces start-up date for LHC
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/08/lhc_preps_to_open_fire/

And the best way to do that is for humans to be eliminated completely, according to the following graphic from a report on TimesOnline, which shows the estimated time required for the disappearance of man’s traces and the recovery of the planet.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released a report on their study of the causes and effects of global warming and the news is not good for the planet -

• IPCC Fourth Assessment Report
• UN delivers definitive warning on dangers of climate change
• Global warming: the final warning
• Humans ‘Very Likely’ Making Earth Warmer 
• Ten years left to avert catastrophe
• Carbon dioxide rate is at highest level for 650,000 years

I hope we are able to slow down or reverse this trend in the coming years through some of the following ways -

• use of cleaner fuels
• recycling
• conserving energy
• reforestation
• more environment friendly procedures/processes
• other recommended steps
• and most importantly lots of awareness

Let’s hope for a cleaner, greener tomorrow.

 

I came across this new initiative called Commute Easy to encourage car/bike pooling in Bangalore and I must say I’m impressed. It provides a forum for us to find car/bike pools that we can be a part of and where we can offer our car/bike for people to join. They have a simple registration process where we enter our details and our routes. We can also search for other car pools along our routes and contact members in that pool to join in. The site even has a savings calculator and lets us know approximately how much money we would be saving through pooling.

This is a great initiative and must be encouraged and hopefully it will help reduce some of the excess vehicular population, like mine! I drive to work alone in my car and sure wouldn’t mind forming a car pool and pick up some people on the way and share fuel costs.

The site claims that by opting to carpool/bike pool, we can

• Help decongest traffic in Bangalore.
• Lower our own travel costs and stress levels.
• Bring about a reduction in pollution levels.
• Increase productivity and morale.
• Broaden your social network.

Lets hope the initiative picks up and the already 2300+ member count increases to greater extent and more and more people start car/bike pooling. Kudos to whoever came up with the idea.

On another note, it would be nice if companies themselves encouraged such initiatives and had some similar process through which employees can get together and form car/bike pools.