{link » It's sex and drugs and particle physics as D:Ream star recreates the Big Bang}
Er ... as the Hertz commercial has it, "Not exactly". It may be sex, and drugs, and particle physics, as well as the D:Ream star. And it might even recreate something. But, most definitely it will NOT recreate the Big Bang. It would require ALL the mass/energy (including the dark varietal) in the so-called Big Crunch to recreate the Big Bang. The difference between the amount of energy available to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment and the amount of mass/energy in the Big Bang/Crunch is analogous to the difference between a couple of accelerated protons and all the protons (hydrogen nuclei) and photons (particles of light) in the entire universe. That ratio is in the neighborhood of 80 orders of magnitude, give or take, and we might as well be talking about the scale of a googol (the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros).
Lest you think I may be exaggerating the mass/energy googol-scale above (which I am, by roughly 20 orders of magnitude, for simplicity) to prove my point, allow me to underestimate the relative scale in more familiar terms.
Recall the advice given Sky Masterson by his father:
Er ... as the Hertz commercial has it, "Not exactly". It may be sex, and drugs, and particle physics, as well as the D:Ream star. And it might even recreate something. But, most definitely it will NOT recreate the Big Bang. It would require ALL the mass/energy (including the dark varietal) in the so-called Big Crunch to recreate the Big Bang. The difference between the amount of energy available to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment and the amount of mass/energy in the Big Bang/Crunch is analogous to the difference between a couple of accelerated protons and all the protons (hydrogen nuclei) and photons (particles of light) in the entire universe. That ratio is in the neighborhood of 80 orders of magnitude, give or take, and we might as well be talking about the scale of a googol (the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros).
Lest you think I may be exaggerating the mass/energy googol-scale above (which I am, by roughly 20 orders of magnitude, for simplicity) to prove my point, allow me to underestimate the relative scale in more familiar terms.
Recall the advice given Sky Masterson by his father:
“Son, I am sorry that I am not able to bankroll you to a very large start, but not having any potatoes to give you I am now going to stake you to some very valuable advice. One of these days in your travels a guy is going to come to you and show you a nice brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken, and this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the Jack of Spades jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear. But son, do not bet this man, for as sure as you stand there you are going to wind up with an earful of cider.”Now then, imagine the prima facie improbability of the above-described earful of cider. If you multiply that improbability by the square of the improbability that you will have lunch with Jimmy Hoffa in a trans-Siberian rail car on Tuesday, the reciprocal of the resulting improbability will be much smaller than the disproportionate scale of the mass/energy ratio between all the energy in the universe and how much of it is available to the LHC.
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