The LHC, The End Of The World And The Fountain

The Large Hadron Collider [LHC] officially came online on Wednesday. Doomsayers and the rest of mankind alike heaved a sigh of relief. There were no black holes created, even less any strangelets. Maybe they rejoiced without reading the fine print. Maybe the end-of-the-world-is-nigh folks need to strap on their boots once again because the funny rhyming rapper/scientists never really initiated any collision. Yeah that's right, the CERN scientists and engineers "rapped" about the LHC. And it's pretty impressive. Watch the video below shot at the LHC itself with CERN scientists and engineers all grooving around in it.

So there is CERN playing around with some protons on wednesday in some test runs. Even xkcd joked about it. The collisions are scheduled to happen within the month, no specific date. So should we be worried? Not according to the overwhelming majority of scientists. The probability of micro black holes devouring the earth is even lesser than that of Bush solving a quadratic equation. You see micro black holes will likely form but a form of radiation called "Hawking radiation" [after Stephen Hawking] will seep out of them and they will fade away in microseconds.

On the other hand Professor Otto Rossler from the University of Tubingen,Germany is all crazy over the LHC. This is one of the sweet things he has to say about the LHC - “Nothing will happen for at least four years. Then the weather will change completely, wiping out life. There will be a Biblical Armageddon.”[1]. Yeah ... that kind of "crazy". He's sued CERN in the European Court of Human Rights and ranted on and on about the "end of humanity" to the hungry world media. But inevitably his voice soon began to be ignored. Feeling sympathetic and wanting to know about this "mad" professor, I checked out the Wikipedia entry on him. And let me tell you, this guy is no dufus. He is close to being a polymath in scientific circles, authoring scientific papers on biogenesis, differentiable automata, artificial universes and the origins of language !! He bases his LHC claims on some obscure commentary by a scientist on the General theory of relativity some hundred years back. Ok, maybe he's a bit paranoid but we will just sit around and watch if his predictions come true. Rest assured, there won't be anyone (or anything) around to congratulate him if he turns out right :).

The end of the world aside, yesterday I happened to watch a movie called "The Fountain" by Darren Aronofsky. And boy did it take my breath away. It was pure poetry in motion. And I couldn't make any sense of it. But I felt that wasn't it. I was missing something. There was some hidden meaning behind it all. The story was spread across three ages with the lead actor Hugh Jackman as a conquistador, a scientist and as a astronaut/Bodhisattva and the story kept going back and forth the time lines. And the common theme that bonds it all is the Mayan "tree of life" and the protagonist's love/devotion for Izzy/Queen Isabella played by Rachel Weisz. It's about a man's quest to find the elixir of life, a cure for mortality. Later I went and downloaded the movie [I do piracy for educational purposes only ;)]. Finally I could claim to make some sense out of it. And one thing I learned was that this movie has to be appreciated by one's own terms. I would recommend watching it alone. Frankly, it's an awesome spiritual experience. I remember a critic saying so "This movie is too advanced for our times, our tastes have not evolved enough to truly appreciate the movie". One thing I can definitely say about the movie is that the protagonist finally understands the futility of it all and finally accepts death as the true path to immortality.

The Mayan Tree Of Life in The Fountain

Talking about LHC and the Mayan tree of life, it is interesting to note that the Mayan calendar ends on December 21st, 2012. The "long" version of their calendar which started around 5000 years back stops abruptly at 2012. They don't exactly say what happens then. Maybe Professor Otto is onto something.