Do you experience déjà vus? I get them quite often though less frequently nowadays. When you see or experience something and think “I’ve experienced this before” even if it never happened, that is called a déjà vu. It has a compelling sense of familiarity, accompanied by a sense of eerieness. Something that your mind can’t explain yet is very sure of.
Like once I met a teacher in the staircase and had a talk with him. Then I had the feeling that I had this experience already. Exactly at this place with the same teacher and the same words exchanged. I was so sure. There are many other instances of déjà vu I have experienced as a child.
While scientists have tried to explain it as a neuronal anomaly, many believe déjà vu to be a pshycic ability. Many have related déjà vu to astral projection or even reincarnation. Time is a dimension too but we can’t time travel. If our minds could sometimes move across time then explaining déjà vu would be quite easy! In the movie Matrix, when Neo (Keanu Reeves) experiences déjà vu in the Matrix world – seeing a black cat crossing a threshold twice over – Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) becomes certain that there has been a change in the coding of Matrix.
70% of the normal population experience déjà vu at least once in their life. My medicine book tells me that people suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy experience déjà vu very often. This probably indicates déjà vu has something to do with how our nerves function in the brain. Some drugs too can initiate this eerie feeling.
The opposite of déjà vu is jamais vu. I have experienced this too few times when I was very young. I kept uttering a word in my mind repeatedly and then started to doubt if the word really existed. A definition of jamais vu will be something like this – a person momentarily doesn’t recognize a word, person, or place that he/she already knows.
An epoch-making moment in the history of science as scientists, armed with the largest atom-smasher, gear up to explore the fundamental nature of the universe. A $10 billion endeavour, 15 years in the making, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider aka LHC is the world’s largest collider, a ring accelerator spanning 27 km, 100 m underground along the Swiss-French border, that will be switched on tomorrow. As the protons collide in the LHC, they will recreate energies and emulate a condition a split-second after the big bang, the colossal explosion that created the universe 14 billion years ago. Thousands of scientists from all over the world will be looking for dark matter particles, new subatomic forces and perhaps extra dimensions of space. The elusive Higgs Boson particle, dubbed the ‘God particle’, might be unveiled as well.
It will still be one month later when the two proton beams travelling in opposite directions at almost the speed of light will collide. Until then, you don’t know if the dream machine of the physicists is really a doomsday machine – whether it will produce an all-encompassing black hole or convert the entire earth into ’strange matter’ – as has been claimed in a lawsuit filed in a Hawaiian court. Read more about the LHC controversy.
CERN has played down the theory of a man-made black hole eating up the earth or that of ’stranglet’ production. According to them, the LHC will only recreate the natural phenomena of cosmic ray collisions under controlled laboratory conditions. They go on saying that any micro black hole, if at all formed, will disintegrate immediately. See The Safety of the LHC.
The operating principle of the Large Hadron Collider is nothing new. Colliders have been working since decades. I have read about them an umpteen number of times in science features and also in the Physics text book Resnick Halliday. A collider is designed to accelerate subatomic particles to a very high kinetic energy and bring them into collision. An electromagnetic field is applied to control the velocity of the fired particles. To make the wires to these large electromagnets superconducting, a very low temperature is essential. So there are elaborate cooling arrangements to maintain a very low temperature (something to the tune of minus 271 degrees). The high energy impact transforms the colliding particles to other particles, that is to say, newer particles from which physicists hope to gain newer insights. These new particles created have a very brief lifespan. To detect them you need super-sensitive & highly sophisticated detectors. These elaborate arrangements make the construction of a collider such a lengthy and expensive process. There are already several colliders esp. the Fermilab collider in the US which has so far failed to dig out Higgs Bosons.
What the biggest scientific experiment till date is all about? Kate McAlpine, a Michigan State University graduate at CERN, has found an innovative way to explain that – a video where she herself raps and dances in the tunnels and caverns of the LHC. The Large Hadron Rap video has drawn millions of views on youtube. Upon wide public interest, Kate McAlpine has put up the original mp3, lyrics, and vocals at this link.
Angels & Demons connection: Even if you ain’t a sucker for science news like me, you might as well recall ‘CERN’ if you read Dan Brown! I suddenly remembered this – the picture of Robert Langdon walking along the LHC tunnel flashed in my subconscious, then looked up Google and found yes, I was right. (Credit goes to Dan Brown for his pictographic writing, I remember most of the novel so well even now.) Googling also revealed that the antimatter bomb theory propounded in A&D was more of a fiction than anything and had been dismissed by CERN – see Spotlight: Angels and Demons.
Bong connection: The elusive Higgs-Boson belongs to the family of boson particles which are named after the noted Bengali scientist Satyendranath Bose.
Indian-born New York University professor Srinivasa S.R. Varadhan was awarded the Abel Prize in Mathematics. The award, considered to be the Nobel Prize of Mathematics, for “his fundamental contributions to probability theory”. Varadhan had done his Ph. D from ISI Calcutta and already has many awards in his sleeve including the Birkhoff Prize (1994), the [...]