I'm a little surprised that I haven't seen bloggers commenting on Tom Hanks's appearance on The Daily Show, in which he talks about CERN:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M - Th 11p / 10c | |||
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Everything he says is pretty much true, but garbled and exaggerated for comic effect. People at CERN have to be shaking their heads, though. Or maybe they don't bother watching the interview segments...
At any rate, it's not nearly as good as their earlier segment with John Oliver at CERN
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M - Th 11p / 10c | |||
| Large Hadron Collider | ||||
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Then again, the hook for the Hanks interview is the new movie based on Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, so as dopey as the Hanks interview is, it's probably at least a hundred times better than the book.
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I wasn't paying full attention to it, but my ears did perk up when I thought I heard him say "Higgins Boson." But given all the drugs and women in his past (according to Stewart at the opening of the show) I'll give him a pass on his physics competency.
Posted by: Tom | May 14, 2009 11:16 AM
CERN's got way bigger problems than Tom Hanks to worry about.
Posted by: ScienceSealedDelivered | May 14, 2009 11:17 AM
Would you believe I totally hadn't seen this when I commented on your links post?
Heh.
Posted by: Skwid | May 14, 2009 11:38 AM
"Higgins Boson!" That cracks me up. "The rain in CERN falls mainly on the magnets?"
Posted by: Dave Bacon | May 14, 2009 11:45 AM
"The rain in CERN falls mainly on the magnets?"
I suspect a different Higgins, namely the character from Magnum, PI. A self-important little thing. Though, come to think of it, Enry Iggins was plenty self-important, too.
Posted by: Eric Lund | May 14, 2009 1:16 PM
Yeah, he said "Higgins boson". Most amusing.
And it *is* true that if you turn off the storage ring, the antimatter goes away. Fortunately for CERN (unfortunately for the premise of the movie), the bang is pretty small.
Posted by: CCPhysicist | May 14, 2009 2:14 PM
And it *is* true that if you turn off the storage ring, the antimatter goes away. Fortunately for CERN (unfortunately for the premise of the movie), the bang is pretty small.
I'm not sure it's bad for the premise of the movie-- what quantity of antimatter does Brown claim they have?
The bang is pretty small at real CERN, because they have trivial quantities of antimatter. If Dan Brown's imaginary CERN has kilograms of the stuff, the bang could be pretty big.
Posted by: Chad Orzel | May 14, 2009 2:17 PM
they have trivial quantities of antimatter
Are you thinking on a micro or macro scale here? A microgram of antimatter would be trivial* on a macro scale, but it's O(10^17) anti-atoms, which is not a trivial number. Have all antimatter creation experiments to date created this many antiprotons combined?
*The annihilation energy would be on the order of a megajoule, which is in the same ballpark as the kinetic energy of an incoming howitzer shell. So yes, this would hurt if you were so unlucky as to be right there when it happened. But it wouldn't take a lot of distance to put you in the "mostly harmless" region.
Posted by: Eric Lund | May 14, 2009 2:32 PM
Current record for antimatter in one place at one time is counted in individual atoms. In single figures.
So no. Just little explosions. Maybe enough to damage precission detection devices, not take the side off a mountain.
Posted by: Veltyen | May 15, 2009 1:38 AM
I quickly found 2006 News release from Fermilab saying their production rate had increased to 200 billion (2x10^11) antiprotons per hour. At that rate, it would take about a century to make the microgram mentioned above.
And those are antiprotons. Some would argue that you need to have a neutral anti-atom to have antimatter, but it is much easier to control a charged particle than a neutral one when that particle is not allowed to touch any normal matter! Suspending it with lasers is the only alternative, and both require a really REALLY good vacuum.
But there is a problem with antiprotons: That microgram of anitprotons has a total charge of -96 mC. One tenth of a Coulomb in a ball of charge has one heck of a lot of repulsion (called a "space charge effect" in beam physics), making it quite unstable.
Posted by: CCPhysicist | May 18, 2009 1:37 PM
Both of the clips were cute. However, the main problem with either sci-fi false premises or Comedy Central lampooning parody is that both entertainment devises can skew the science away from impartial objectivity.
Although I am glad that all this attention that antimatter is getting is ultimately good for educational purposes, I wonder weather lampooning concern might lead to a false and cavelier disregard for risk.
LHC is the largest most powerful machine ever built. For this reason it needs to be handled with the absolutely highest amount of respect and care. In many ways it is like a gun, it can be used to serve a useful purpose, but accidents occur when not observing safety protocol or considering all options. The hunt is to find elusive answers, not wild-game, but the concern is the same.
Unlike a gun, we do not know for certain all of the parameters of its use. We *believe* it is safe, because, until recently, there were no plausible alternatives the the tradidional operating assumptions. However, that has changed. A modern retrofitting of the lens through which we view established data has been advanced. The new Dominium model is completely compatible with all established evidence, however it seeks to overturn several unverified traditional rote assumptions.
One unverfied assumption being challenged is also the lynchpin of LHC safety arguments, the belief that mini black-hole evaporate away. The Dominium categorical deduces the opposite conclusion. Check it out for yourself. http://hypography.com/forums/alternative-theories/18910-the-dominium-model-by-hasanuddin.html If you disagree with the more modern account, then post and defend your objections. To dismiss the concerns raised in this post w/out defending this dismissal runs along the same line as given a gun to a kid to play with only an unspoken hope the they will be responsible.
Posted by: Hasanuddin | June 8, 2009 12:42 PM