Tales from the arXiv: World-Ending Edition

When world-ending physics meets the law, we get this:

Title: The Black Hole Case: The Injunction Against the End of the World

Author: Eric E. Johnson

Abstract: What should a court do with a preliminary-injunction request to halt a multi-billion-dollar particle-physics experiment that plaintiffs claim could create a black hole that will devour the planet? This real-life case seems like a legal classic in the making. Unfortunately, however, no court has braved the extreme factual terrain to reach the merits. This article steps into the void. First, the relevant facts of the scientific debate and its human context are memorialized and made ripe for legal analysis. Next, the article explores the daunting challenges this case presents to equity, evidence, and law-and-economics analysis. Finally, a set of analytical tools are offered that provide a way out of the thicket - a method for providing meaningful judicial review even in cases, such as this one, where the scientific issues are almost unfathomably complex.


Note that this article has been published in a legal journal.

Maybe the Higgs just doesn't want to be found?

Apparently, there's a theory out there that maybe the Higgs just doesn't want to be found, so that it's going back in time and doing a bit of self-sabotage of the CERN experiment. At least it makes for a nice story...

(Tip of the cap to Peter Mucha.)

For the Birds

Here is the straight line (you provide the punchline): Apparently, scientists at the £3.6bn Large Hadron Collider (LHC) found their plans to emulate the big bang postponed this week when a passing bird dropped a "bit of baguette" into the machine, causing it to overheat. Awesome!

(Tip of the cap to Heidi Eldenburg Bramlet, although I took the liberty to use a news source other than Fox News for personal reasons.)

The LHC Rap

Courtesy Predrag Cvitanovic, here is a music video about experimental attempts to go beyond the Standard Model. (You can also hear some MC Hawking at the beginning and the end.)

In case any of you, gentle readers, were wondering how something can be simultaneously awesome and "awesome", I ask you to behold this video!

Subatomic particle plush toys

This is just so wrong... and yet it's both awesome and "awesome"...

Namely, this site is selling stuffed toys of subatomic particles. I was tempted to buy some, but the price is a bit too steep. Apparently, the weight of the stuffed toys is supposed to have some correspondence (via 'light' versus 'heavy') with their actual weights. I'm amused.

And when you complete your subatomic particle collection, don't forget to buy some stuffies of internal organs and microbes. (I've seen the microcrobes in a couple of places---first at DragonCon and then at J/L's place.)

There are also a bunch of crocheted Lorenz manifolds out there. (My link is to a page of the Bristol mathematicians who made the first one. Their page links to a few others.) I'd be up for buying or making something like a stuffed network. Does anybody want to help make a stuffed Watts-Strogatz graph? (I was going to suggest a random graph, but that would take more nodes to be able to appreciate.) One could get a bunch of stuffed spheres and connect them with stuffed rods.

(Tip of the cap to Jonathan Adams for posting the link to the subatomic particle zoo.)