What Will the LHC Destroy?

As Woody Allen said, Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on Sunday. Both are just illusions. God and Sunday.

And even if the Large Hadron Collider does get up and running again and destroys our universe, should we really worry about the destruction of an illusion?

Our world may be a giant hologram

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.

If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."

Sorry. We are not living in an illusion. It is a hologram and a hologram is a very real thing.

Susskind and 't Hooft's remarkable idea was motivated by ground-breaking work on black holes by Jacob Bekenstein of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge. In the mid-1970s, Hawking showed that black holes are in fact not entirely 'black' but instead slowly emit radiation, which causes them to evaporate and eventually disappear. This poses a puzzle, because Hawking radiation does not convey any information about the interior of a black hole. When the black hole has gone, all the information about the star that collapsed to form the black hole has vanished, which contradicts the widely affirmed principle that information cannot be destroyed. This is known as the black hole information paradox.

Bekenstein's work provided an important clue in resolving the paradox. He discovered that a black hole's entropy - which is synonymous with its information content - is proportional to the surface area of its event horizon. This is the theoretical surface that cloaks the black hole and marks the point of no return for infalling matter or light. Theorists have since shown that microscopic quantum ripples at the event horizon can encode the information inside the black hole, so there is no mysterious information loss as the black hole evaporates."

So if the LHC destroys the hologram, does the 2D surface from which the projection occured remain? If so, has the universe really been destroyed?

In related news...

Milky Way — the galaxy — not snack-sized anymore

Scientists mapped the Milky Way in a more detailed, three-dimensional way and found that it's 15 percent larger in breadth. More important, it's denser, with 50 percent more mass, which is like weight. The new findings were presented Monday at the American Astronomical Society's convention in Long Beach, Calif

So when you put these two stories together what you are getting is a more detailed 3D map of a hologram that apparently has a lot more mass than what you would expect from a hologram.

Being bigger means the gravity between the Milky Way and Andromeda is stronger.

So the long-forecast collision between the neighboring galaxies is likely to happen sooner and less likely to be a glancing blow, Reid said.

But don't worry. That's at least 2 to 3 billion years away, he said.

Don't worry? But I plan on living forever and now you tell me I've only got 2 to 3 billion years to get the hell out of the galaxy when we aren't even living on our own moon yet! I'd be really damn worried if it weren't all a holographic projection of events taking place on a two-dimensional surface. Now instead of traversing the vastness of space/time I just have to figure out how to fold the 2D bit and pop over to the other side to watch the collision from a safe distance.