The Impressionist reckons he is one of the few people left whose television uses a cathode ray tube.
Having had it for nigh on 30 years now without a single failure (it's a Toshiba), it still faithfully and reliably displays the dross that passes for TV in the noughties. Notting Hill is burned into its phosphors now that it has seen it so many times on digital reruns.
A cathode ray tube works by accelerating electrons (tiny particles that we think of as electricity when they're in wires) using electric fields and guiding them using magnets to crash at high speed into a phosphorescent coating on the screen. Each time an electron hits a particle of the coating it causes it to emit light and what we see is the result of trillions of these little events each second. Happily, some of them make up images of Julia Roberts.
At CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), the European Organization for Nuclear Research, a new experiment has been built and will start working at full power in around a week. The new device is called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and has been designed to crash protons or ionised atoms of lead into each other at very high speeds and watch what happens. As in my TV, (charged) particles are accelerated by electric fields and guided by magnets. Instead of colliding with a phosphorescent screen, two streams of particles are arranged to go in opposite directions and collide with each other.
When tiny particles like protons collide at high speed they destroy each other and for a very brief instant the energy of the collision goes into producing different particles that are very short lived and not normally seen. This kind of experiment has been done by labs all over the world for many decades.
The LHC differs only in that it can get the particles moving faster and so they have more energy. The energies that the LHC can impart are closer to (but still less than) those found in the Big Bang and so the products of the collisions should give us some more information on the very early phase of our universe and more importantly which of our current theories are right and which are wrong.
What makes us human is our desire to make sense of our world and Science is the only endeavour that allows us to do that. It works by constructing precise theories and then testing them by experiment. If the theory says one thing and the experiment says another then both are investigated until a resolution is found - the experiment or the theory was flawed. It's an iterative process and both theory and experiment are refined with experience. In contrast to other types of human behaviour - politics, religion, ... negative results are taken very seriously and not just brushed under the carpet.
This is one big reason to support science. It works.
The theory under test by the LHC is the so-called Standard Model which already accounts for the world we see and much of the world we don't. The big unknown in the Standard Model is mass, which is the property of matter that gives rise to gravity and inertia. In the Standard Model all matter acquires mass by interacting with a particle called the Higgs boson (after its proposer Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh). No one has seen a Higgs boson as it is expected to come into existence only at the levels of collision energy the LHC can attain. So the LHC will provide evidence of either the existence of or the non-existence of this very exotic particle. Either way, we will understand more about our world.
Why bother? Because if we understand it, then we can do something about it. Until electricity was understood, no one could make an electric lamp, a heart pacemaker, or your TV.
To those who question the need for fundamental research and its cost, The Impressionist asks: how much do you use your fridge, your cell phone, your sewer or the myriad of modern devices that exist only because of earlier scientific effort? What would life be like if doctors still bled patients or witches burned at the stake?
To people who say the money would be better spent on feeding starving Africans, I say (for example) that a tiny fraction of their governments' military budgets would have the same effect. The £2.6bn ($5bn) cost of the LHC would buy about one new aircraft carrier.
Compare that with the possibility of finding out how to generate enough energy to power our civilisation for the next 10000 years or how to get to the stars - which would you prefer?
Science has given us the key to the gates of heaven - whether we use it to open them or not is up to us.
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