How to win a Nobel Prize in Physics?
It’s quite simple actually - all you need to do is answer one question - although by no means you should limit yourself to just one, treat yourself to as many as you like if you are in the mood. The answer, however, should be somewhat elaborate and probably contain numbers and formulae - but these are just minor details. So where do you find this question?
There you will find a bunch of unanswered physics questions - pick and choose. My personal favourite is “the horizon problem”.
On colliders
Good news, everyone! The end of the world has been postponed until 2013 (sorry 2012 folks) - the LHC (large hadron collider) will not be fully operational until then due to the fact that those people at CERN will have to fix a few magnet interconnection joints - and they won’t start doing that before 2011. Until then they will be toying around with the maximum of just about 7 Teraelecton volts (TeV), which they are yet to reach anyhow - so far the highest energy collision achieved was at 3.5TeV. So we are still quite far off the proposed 14TeV level at which the protons will be moving and colliding at 99.9999991% of the speed of light, (hopefully) emitting those reclusive Higgs boson particles and creating black holes, time travel paradoxes (“year zero”) and other fun but potentially planet-annihilating things in the process.
So with this whole bunch of people freaking out about the LHC (filing lawsuits against it, drinking too much etc) I was rather surprised to find out that nobody had coined a term for the fear of particle colliders - the gaffe that should be taken care of as soon as possible. The best I could come up with
was Ingenscirculusophobia - which roughly translates from Latin as the fear of huge circular objects. Somehow in the case of a 27km (17mi) circle it seemed appropriate.
