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. John G Imrie
    Joke

    Re: Boot Note

    "Readers should note, disappointingly perhaps, that dimensional portals which could be opened by the LHC would be so tiny ... "

    So I need a really *small* crowbar then?

    1. Marcus Aurelius
      Coat

      No small crowbar

      But it seems that it will be a really small Cthulhu which emerges ....

  2. Scott 53
    Coat

    Sparticle

    Will a particle come out announcing "I am Sparticle?" Or will it only spin to the far left?

  3. Geezer
    Coat

    I'm Sparticles!

    That is all.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Remember the film

      No - I'm Sparticles !

      1. Sarah Bee (Written by Reg staff)

        Re: Remember the film

        I see what you did there.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        No, I'm Sparticles

        and so is my wife

        1. Spartacus
          Alert

          No your not I am..

          Oh... Errr... no... apparently I'm not..

  4. Graham Lockley

    But....

    Will there be cake ?

    1. stucs201
      Coat

      No...

      ...the cake is a lie.

      (Mines the one with the weighted companion cube in the pocket)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Coat

        But...

        I guess we better be prepared to welcome our Combine overlords then.

        Mine's the one with the icing stains, thanks.

      2. thecakeis(not)alie

        stucs201

        But there really was cake!

        It's well documented. Search http://www.thecakeisnotalie.com/ for "Cake Sphere". The recipe for the cake is there...

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    10E-26 seconds

    10-E26 seconds might be plenty of time in a different time frame

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Should have been clearer...

      Is that 10^-26 from the CERN boffin point of view or from our new extra-dimensional overlords'* point of view?

      * Whom I welcome

  6. Ian Michael Gumby
    Joke

    Oh yeah...

    There was this guy Maxwell who lived in a cave...

    He was a wizard who kept a pet daemon who blocked all of the fast moving particles from entering the cave in the summer and then kept the fast moving particles in during the winter so to keep the cave warm.

    So you've got to wonder.... where did Maxwell get such a small daemon?

    If he could open a portal way back when... what makes you think one of his little daemons wouldn't pop through now?

    1. MinionZero
      Linux

      @"So you've got to wonder.... where did Maxwell get such a small daemon"

      The daemon grew up and now works for the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence.

      Penguin icon, as its the nearest to a cat like icon I could find. :)

      1. Ian Michael Gumby
        Boffin

        @MinionZero

        You're mixing stories... Maxwell and Harry Potter don't mix.

        Here's a hint... "And the lord said let there be light..."

        Now do you know who Maxwell was?

        1. MinionZero
          Happy

          @Maxwell and Harry Potter

          @Ian Michael Gumby: "You're mixing stories... Maxwell and Harry Potter don't mix."

          Just as well I wasn't referring to Harry Potter then. :)

          FYI, the demon working at the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence, is Hellboy.

          By the way, Hellboy likes cats (not to eat, but as pets). (I have no idea what he thinks about Penguins, but we don't have a cat icon).

          Meanwhile, the pet daemon you refer to is Maxwell's demon, a thought experiment to discuss from a statistical point of view, the nature of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Incidentally, Hellboy is fireproof, which is an ideal quality to have if he wanted to work for Maxwell as his demon.

          So there you go, there is some logic lurking behind my insanity. :)

          1. Ian Michael Gumby
            Alien

            @MinionZero

            You are correct, I stand corrected.

            You truly are a twisted nerd who needs to get a life.

            But who am I to talk?

            I'm the guy wearing the MIT Hillel's T-Shirt w Maxwell's Equation printed on the front with the added line '... and there was light'.

            (Ok I haven't worn it for years and I wonder if they still print it.)

      2. Michael Dunn

        Cat?

        We've only got your word for it that the cat is alive - open the box!

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    resonance cascade?

    Remember, headcrabs are vulnerable to shotgun blasts and well timed crowbar swings.

    1. tumbleworld
      Pint

      Delicate times

      I believe CERN's finances exist in vast numbers. _Vast_.

      They can afford to employ one measley portal scientist skilled in xenomartial guerilla warfare. I'd go so far as to say it's a duty. If he just so happens to be a slim, dark-haired chap with close-cropped hair, glasses and a goatee, so much the better. I think we'd all sleep better at night.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    But...

    "exist for such ultra-brief instants of time"

    But that's longer than a clamper waits before clamping your car. So can we expect inter-dimensional traffic wardens, to be waving their fine pads around?

  9. Big_Boomer Silver badge
    Terminator

    We are all DOOOMED!!

    When the LHC finally exposes the Higgs Boson Sparticle for all to see the universe will cease to exist. Since we live in a universe that is based on observer interactions, finding the final particle will complete the human experiment which will subsequently be turned off.

    That isn't to say that it won't be run again to see if the results are the same, after all repeatability is a requirement of any good experiment.

    Next time around I plan to be Giant Tortoise.

    Sod the coat,.... where are my pills?

    1. Bill B

      in your coat

      The dried frog pills are in your left hand pocket.

      1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

        Title?

        One theory states that as soon as we discover what the universe is for, and why it is here - it will instantly vanish, and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable.

        A second theory states that this has already happened...

        1. Michael Dunn

          Aye

          The Higgs boson is a boojum, and we'll slowly and silently vanish away.

        2. Nigel 11
          IT Angle

          already happened ....

          ... several times ....

    2. Mark123
      Go

      No we are not!

      You should know by now what will really happen....

      As soon as the Sparticle is discovered, the entire world as we know it will dissolve away into white and a big sign will appear saying "LEVEL 2!"

      I can't wait for the new maps and powerups!!

      See you in the next level

  10. Oliver Mayes

    "Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it,"

    If we're going to send something through might I suggest Jedward? Or would that be considered un-neighbourly to our interdimensional bretheren?

    1. Loyal Commenter Silver badge
      Happy

      Nah, that's fine

      Cthulhu is hungry

    2. BorkedAgain

      Oh great plan.

      You're just itching to start an interdimensional war aren't you? No sooner do you find a useful hole than you start dumping all our old shit through it...

      1. It wasnt me
        Thumb Up

        Indeed...

        ....perhaps before we find these portals we should really come up with an international convention on fly-tipping.

        1. John Murgatroyd

          Do....

          you not mean INTERDIMENSIONAL conference on fly-tipping ?

        2. stucs201
          Joke

          Fly tipping?

          Is that like cow tipping, but with small winged insects?

  11. envmod

    you may laugh

    at the idea of interdimensional beings squeezing their way into our plane through any tiny portals created by CERN, but I have yet to see definitive proof that this will absolutely not happen. I mean, these being might just be waiting on "the other side" for us to create a portal that they can then commandeer and control with their advanced 10th dimension portal stabiliser.

    1. Bilgepipe

      But...

      But if there's no portal already there for them to swarm through, how would they know about us lot on this side? Perhaps it's a read-only portal.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Linux

        Read Only?

        Well just in case...... sudo chmod a=r Portal

    2. Anonymous Coward
      FAIL

      but I have yet to see definitive proof

      Do you think they would be experimenting if they had definitive proof?

  12. oldredlion
    Thumb Down

    a boffins promise is worth?

    Portals... what a lot of nonsense. Science keeps promising but never delivers.

    Michael Rudd (or maybe Judith Hahn) promised us jet packs back in the 70s... and where are they? Hmmm? no where, that's where.

    Sticking wings onto a car is not a jet pack. I want my jet pack!

    1. Scott 53

      Get your jetpack here

      You even get change from $100,000

      http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/31/water-propelled-jetpack-is-no-dream-can-be-yours-for-99-500-th/

      (Still grinning from being first with "I am Sparticle")

    2. John Murgatroyd

      No

      Jet packs are canceled.

      No way to have speed cameras at higher-than-ground-level, and traffic wardens would need ladders...

  13. JeffyPooh
    Coffee/keyboard

    Nice wording.

    "...maximum particle-prang potential of 7 TeV: the more cautious red line had to be painted on the big dial..."

  14. ShaggyDoggy

    Wrong by 11 days

    21/12/2012

    I, for one, .... etc

  15. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

    Before opening doors to higher dimensions

    should we not work out how to fire missiles at right angles to reality?

  16. Mystic Megabyte
    Happy

    Hey Yankees! 110 volts aren't enough

    "1 TeV plinkings" LOL

  17. stucs201

    running at current power levels to the end of 2012

    Hmmm, isn't that around when the Mayan calendar hits the end of its current big cycle? The end of the world nutcases are going to have a great time with the idea of interdimensional portals opening on that date.

  18. Pete 2 Silver badge

    The easiest business case in the world

    Boffin: "We've got to keep the LHC running for another year - that way we'll open an interdimensional portal and we will be able to communicate with the future"

    Bean counter: "How can you be sure"

    Boffin; "Simple, I got am email from myself, dated 2013 telling me how to do it"

    1. VinceH

      Letters, Digits

      The barman said "Sorry, we don't serve time travellers in this establishment."

      A time traveller walks into a bar.

  19. KCM

    All we need now....

    ... is a computer with a mad AI and cake.

    And a hand-held portal creation device would be useful admittedly....

  20. 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. :-)

  21. 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.

    1. Shane Orahilly
      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."

  22. 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... !!!

  23. 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?

  24. 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.

    1. Cameron Colley

      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.

  25. 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...

  26. James Hughes 1

    Disapointed

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

    1. Michael Dunn
      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!

  27. 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!!

  28. 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

  29. 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.

    1. Gavin King
      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?

    2. Michael Dunn
      Happy

      Yeah

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

  30. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Boffins

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

    What projects are the charming bottom boffins working on?

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

      Charming boffins are no threat

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

    2. Chemist

      Obvious answer is ...

      Strange projects but they're up and down about them

      1. Mephistro

        @Chemist

        How charming!

    3. Michael Dunn

      Bottom boffins?

      Best not ask.

  31. 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."

  32. 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)

  33. 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.

    1. Michael Dunn
      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.

      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
        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.

  34. Robinson
    Thumb Up

    Plinkings...

    Word of the week: Plinkings.

    :p.

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