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back to article Boffins hope for dimensional portal event at LHC by 2013!

Top boffins at international science alliance CERN have decided to postpone a planned upgrade and keep the Large Hadron Collider - arse-kickingest particle-punisher and largest machine of any kind built by the human race - running at current power levels to the end of 2012. This decision has been made because scientists believe …

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  1. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge
    Grenade

    You cannot stop the Inevitable

    "...that they would be unsuitable for any kind of interdimensional invasion and/or travel by humans, parallel-universe Nazis or Romans, dinosaurs, dark nega-deities from the Nth dimension etc." .... Lewis Page

    Hmmm? Are you a betting man, Lewis? Do you wanna bet against some kind of interdimensional invasion and/or alien infestation and/or virulent infraction or virile program infection and lose some shekels?

    Love the vocabulary in the report, by the way ....... very dynamically florid. And quite a transparent challenge for any non native speaker, although please do not ask ..."a native from where", in case the natives of where are asked to make perfect sense of the tale and fail miserably, which would then suggest that one is a plant from elsewhere. :-)

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  2. Mike Shepherd
    Thumb Up

    It's worth a try

    "Readers should note...that dimensional portals...would be so tiny and exist for such ultra-brief instants of time...that they would be unsuitable ..."

    Well, it's a long shot, but could be the only way to divest ourselves of Terry Wogan.

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    1. Shane Orahilly
      Reply Icon
      Joke

      Mission complete!

      "Success! We've managed to open a dimensional portal for a whole picosecond!"

      -"That's great, really great. At least it explains where these 6 caravans and that burning pile of nappies came from. I TOLD you we should have dug a ditch around ATLAS before trying it."

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  3. ici.chacal
    Alien

    10^-26s

    Hmmm, well if time slows down considerably as those pesky particles approach the speed of light, then 10^-26s might actually be long enough for hoards of lethal space aliens to come rumbling through the portal... !!!

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  4. Bill Fresher

    Coming through the portal

    Isn't it obvious that time will be the dimension they open a portal into and that what comes out of the portal will be whatever they later put into it?

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  5. Graham Bartlett

    Largest machine ever created?

    Nope - that would be the international phone and data system, by a very large margin. Even by cost, the LHC comes in second.

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    1. Cameron Colley
      Reply Icon

      RE: Largest machine ever created?

      So, what is "... the international phone and data system ..."? Does it just include the bits hardwired together, or bits that are in communication, or bits that are usually in communication? Does Egypt's telecoms structure count? Do the various probes out there in the Solar System?

      You may have a point but I think what you describe is a network of interconnected machines.

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  6. lawndart

    says:

    Hang on, if the event is so symmetrical it can be called supersymmetrical, how come most of the Sparticles are showing up on the upper-right side?

    Sparticles. A new internet meme is born...

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  7. James Hughes 1

    Disapointed

    If there are 10 dimensions, then God missed a trick - everyone knows it should go up to 11.

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    1. Michael Dunn
      Reply Icon
      Thumb Up

      Ten dimensions

      Interesting that so much Buddhist literature speaks of the "ten directions" - and he didn't even have a LHC!

      BTW Gong xi fa cai to all on Feb 3rd!

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  8. Jeff Wojciechowski
    Stop

    Bye Bye Fermilab

    For those of us stateside I would like to point out that I took a behind the scenes your of Fermilab in Batavia, IL yesterday and it was absolutely incredible!!! From the coax cables they used when wiring the place that they got with one end melted off from nuclear testing (if its free, who cares if you have to reterminate one end right?) to the amazing equipment to the openness of the place (you can go pretty much any place that doesn't require special training to access) it is an engineering marvel to behold that will be shutting down in September. Check their website for tour details. Thanks to Todd who showed me around yesterday!!

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  9. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Inter dimensional Beings Taxed Off

    It emerged today that the coalition government has announced plans to tax our new inter dimensional friends at a rate of 60% - expect death rays soon

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    Hmmmm.....

    I love the rather blithe "if we open this dimensional gate, something might come out"

    What might come out? A burst of intense gamma radiation that will sterilize Switzerland? A mountain of previously lost but freshly laundered socks? 100,000 gallons of banana Slurpee?

    I'm not so sure that we should be doing this without a plan to contain whatever might arrive from the other dimension.

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    1. Gavin King
      Reply Icon
      Joke

      Well, duhh...

      That's why it's underground.

      And think about it: a new natural resource to exploit. I mean, how many functional sock mines are left in the world? Or how many banana Slurpee wells?

      "There's banana in them thar hills, boy", perhaps?

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    2. Michael Dunn
      Reply Icon
      Happy

      Yeah

      All those unpaired (hence supersymmetry) socks that disappear in the washing.

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  11. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Boffins

    "Top boffins at international science alliance CERN..."

    What projects are the charming bottom boffins working on?

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    1. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Coffee/keyboard

      Charming boffins are no threat

      I'm more worried about what the strange ones are up to.

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    2. Chemist
      Reply Icon

      Obvious answer is ...

      Strange projects but they're up and down about them

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      1. Mephistro
        Reply Icon

        @Chemist

        How charming!

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    3. Michael Dunn
      Reply Icon

      Bottom boffins?

      Best not ask.

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  12. Anonymous Coward
    Welcome

    Customs & Exorcise

    Can't wait for the British press to seize the opportunity for the "Illegal Inter-dimensional Immigrants" angle on this.

    "Refugees from another dimension ? Not in *my* back yard, squire."

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  13. Inachu
    Flame

    Ahhhhh!

    So just maybe this CERN LHC was the reason the guy who went under his kitchen sink and somehow went into the future to meet his future self and took a video of it.

    But in his video he did not explain how he got back. By going under the sink again?

    This guy needs another interview and I suspect traveling waves from the LHC were the cause of his time travel if indeed was real.(which is highly suspect)

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  14. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Dead Vulture

    Rage!!

    "Dr Bertolucci has previously briefed the Reg on the intriguing theory of supersymmetry, which suggests that space-time actually has up to ten dimensions rather than the humdrum four we can normally perceive."

    El Reg should then pay attention to what was being said in that probably well-wined lecture.

    Supersymmetry has nothing to do with "extra dimensions", hidden or not. You need group theory mainly and the iron will to eliminate infinities in your equations.

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    1. Michael Dunn
      Reply Icon
      Unhappy

      Infinities

      Yes, I've often wondered about this.

      When I was a boy I read a couple of books with titles on the lines of "Relativity for T C Mits" (T C Mits being The Celebrated Man in the Street). These books laid out the development of Einstein's Special and General Theories. They introduced a modicum of tensor analysis geared to the understanding of a 14 year old.

      One of the things I always found dubious was their glib references to massaging the equations so as to eliminate the infinities. Now to my immature mind at the time, this always smelt of cooking the books, and I naively thought that Scientists did not fudge facts to fit theories. If there were awkward infinities in the equations then surely these equations represented some phenomena which included infinite quantities.

      Messing with the Maths to get rid of these infinities was surely moulding our understanding of the physical phenomena to fit some pre-conceived comfortable "comfort food" for the limited human understanding.

      Now the subject has cropped up again. If the equations contain infinities, then it's because the phenomena described by the equations have infinite values somewhere hiding in them, or division by zero, which as any first year comp sci student will tell you, is forbidden by convention only, not necessarily by "truth".

      Sorry, I'm a bear of very little brain.

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      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
        Reply Icon
        Boffin

        Because Nature doesn't work with equations but equations model it...

        There do not seem to be "actual infinities" cropping up in real life, so the idea to smell the brimstone when your equation breaks down is a good one. E.g. in General Relativity, you have infinities at Black Hole centers. But this is most probably unphysical - in real life "in the small, and at extreme curvature", spacetime may undergo state transitions so that the equations of GR are no longer applicable at all and you have to switch to something else. Take a look at Chemistry where some equations are applicable "generally", but once things heat up and get too energetic, you better invent new math to describe what happens.

        Wilzek on SUSY is here:

        http://video.ias.edu/stream&ref=409

        Very nice.

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  15. Robinson
    Thumb Up

    Plinkings...

    Word of the week: Plinkings.

    :p.

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