The "Big Bang" experiment at CERN near Geneva scored a world record on Monday by accelerating beams to the highest energy ever achieved in a particle collider, the research center announced. Scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said the achievement marked a major milestone on the way to tests next year which they hope will unlock secrets of the origins and make-up of the universe. The energy of the twin beams circulated around 27-km tunnels deep underground went, at 1.18 trillion electric volts (TeV), well past the previous highest — just under 1 TeV — in a collider at the U.S. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The achievement in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) came 10 days after the world's largest scientific experiment was restarted following an accident soon after its launch in September 2008. "We are still coming to terms with just how smooth the LHC commissioning is going," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer (pictured left) as the record was announced. "It is fantastic."- ABC News
Dominant Social Theme: Thank goodness for modern science.
Free-Market Analysis: We promised some perceptive Bell feedbackers a while back that we would write a story about "big science" and now seems as good a time as any since there is "news" about a "big bang" experiment at CERN. The news, this article lets us know, is that science is one step closer to solving the origins and make up of the Universe. Hoo boy!
Anyway … here's our take for the few Daily Bell readers (apparently) who do not already know this stuff. Actually, this is an explanation, below, of the theory from electric-cosmos.org. We've picked it sort of at random since there are plenty of Internet sites now available on this subject (though there weren't nearly so many several years ago when we first became aware of this theory.) We hope it gets the point across. (If it doesn't, we're sure we'll hear about it; feedbackers are invited to suggest other sites as well, if they wish.)
There is a revolution just beginning in astronomy/cosmology that will rival the one set off by Copernicus and Galileo. This revolution is based on the growing realization that the cosmos is highly electrical in nature. It is becoming clear that 99% of the universe is made up not of "invisible matter", but rather, of matter in the plasma state. Electrodynamic forces in electric plasmas are much stronger than the gravitational force.
Mainstream astrophysicists are continually "surprised" by new data sent back by space probes and orbiting telescopes. That ought to be a clue that something is wrong. New information always sends theoretical astrophysicists "back to the drawing board". In light of this, it is curious that they have such "cock-sure" attitudes about the infallibility of their present models. Those models seem to require major "patching up" every time a new space probe sends back data.
Astrophysicists and astronomers do not study experimental plasma dynamics in graduate school. They rarely take any courses in electrodynamic field theory, and thus they try to explain every new discovery via gravity, magnetism, and fluid dynamics, which is all they understand. It is no wonder they cannot understand that 99% of all cosmic phenomena are due to plasma dynamics and not to gravity alone.
When confronted by observations that cast doubt on the validity of their theories, astrophysicists have circled their wagons and conjured up pseudo-scientific invisible entities such as neutron stars, weakly interacting massive particles, strange energy, and black holes. When confronted by solid evidence such as Halton Arp's photographs that contradict the Big Bang Theory, their response is to refuse him access to any major telescope in the U.S.
Instead of wasting time in a futile battle trying to convince entrenched mainstream astronomers to seriously investigate the Electric/Plasma Universe ideas, a growing band of plasma scientists and engineers are simply bypassing them. A new electric plasma-based paradigm that does not find new discoveries to be "enigmatic and puzzling", but rather to be predictable and consistent with an electrical point of view, is slowly but surely replacing the old paradigm wherein all electrical mechanisms are ignored.
Kind of interesting isn't it? Bet that's not being taught at Western universities even now – even for extra credit. Now, to be sure, we don't know whether CERN will ever discover the origins of the universe or not (we tend to think not). But our point is this, dear reader – that Big Physics (or Big Science) is big for a reason. It's likely a promotion, at least parts of it. The idea from our point of view is at least partially to intimidate people.
It has to do with control. If people with moderate IQs (and plenty of persistence) realized that they, too, could contribute to the body of knowledge that is the (increasingly less magnificent) Western Scientific Corpus, then you might have all sorts of untidy discoveries. In fact, any examination of the Internet or even Youtube.com will show incredible energy alternatives, fuel alternatives like water and even air – various discoveries that lack only the main ingredient to make their inventors rich and famous – they cannot be monetized by the powers-that-be.
No, the point of today's Big Science is that it only gets bigger and bigger. The average person is to be intimidated by the size and money put into these efforts. If it takes an accelerator the size of Manhattan to crack an invisible particle (at the cost of billions) then what chance does the average joe have of discovering anything in his puny lifetime?
Not only that, but by driving up the cost and complexity of science, the monetary elite attempts to gain significant control over many of the brightest and best, who will have nowhere else to go. A lot of good science may be prevented in this manner, and a lot of good scientists possibly silenced – or diverted into the backwaters of Big Pharma where they can work on a new headache pill (and take expensive junkets to the Amazon).
We could go on about this for a while, and we will return to it (and, yes, Nikola Tesla, etc. – the rewriting of 20th century scientific history being especially disgraceful in our humble opinion) at another time. Let us close by asserting that the West is hovering on a "dark age" scientifically from our point of view. Of course, we are hopeful because of the Internet – which is revealing real science in much the same way as it has revealed free-market economics.
Anyone who is an open-minded witness to the current Climategate scandal should take into consideration the possibility that the skewing of global warming data is not anomalous. There is a great deal of money in Big Science, and a great deal of corruption and, we believe, suppression of scientific discoveries, potential ones anyway. Controlled publications and the evil repression of good ideas is an inevitable outcome of allowing a power elite, empowered by fiat money, to try to control society for their own ends. Is it ever thus?