Saturday, July 07, 2012

Mostly dead plankton

By smashing protons together at the speed of light in the huge underground tube near Geneva they have isolated a new particle that existed in the collision for a trillionth of a second, then shattered. 
In that moment a 48-year theory became a fact. The glimpse of the 'Higgs boson', or something like it, allows minds to boggle on the existence of "dark matter" and the possibility there really is a dimension to the world that is beyond human sensory perception.
Who knows where that knowledge will lead? Next they will work out how to control the particle, then they will remove it to enable things - people - to travel at the speed necessary to explore the galaxy.

Science!  Who knows where this ignorance will lead? I do. It leads to the bottom of the page, that's where. And there in the depths of John Roughan's resentment can be found environmentalists, the greens who stole science:
  It is a distinct crustal mass ridged and pitted with mountain ranges and basins and over eons of geological time a constant rain of organic matter, mostly dead plankton, will have settled in the basins. There it would have been buried by mud erosion from the mountains and fossilised into oil or gas trapped in layers of rock.  
Geology says we should let oil prospectors go looking for it, environmentalism says we should not.
Oh well, at least we have Geology, the science that says "go west, young man!"

But what about those bosons? What will will do with them once we have extracted them to make massless astronauts? Should we keep them for the astronauts' return? Are they stackable? Will they shatter?

I think we should be told.



The Raincoats:


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