cosmology

Over at WUWT someone made a comment:

NZ Willy February 21, 2016 at 10:18 am

This is just the climate equivalent of astronomy’s “dark matter”. The technique is, when evidence refutes your theory, don’t change the theory, but instead announce a new kind of phenomenon — previously unheard of and scientifically unmodelled — and nest it into your theory and proclaim that it makes your theory even stronger! My BS meter is broken now from overloading.

Agreed. Background radiation too flat? The universe suddenly inflated for no reason to flatten it out. Galaxies spin too fast? Must be dark matter. Universe receding too quickly? Must be dark energy. What are these things? How do they fit into the standard particle model (itself a massive parameter-fixing exercise)? No idea. But guess what! IT’S TRUE! There was inflation, there’s dark matter, dark energy! Aren’t cosmologists wonderful! /sarc

From Computerworld:

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider succeeded today in smashing two particle beams into each other at an energy level three and a half times greater than ever achieved before.

As a physics enthusiast, I normally just love any new investigation of our wonderful universe, but here for once find myself in disagreement with a physics experiment. I have already written about the danger of running this machine at all, a mistake which I believe can be put down to the inability of the human mind to conceive the risk in extremely improbable, but vastly immense, danger. People just can't internalise the size of the danger of destroying the entire planet. Odds against it, which admittedly are small, something like winning a lottery, simply don't become worth it at this scale of damage. However, I've already said all that, so let me say something different.

I am going to make a forecast: They will not discover the Higgs boson.