Big Bang at the atomic lab after scientists get their maths wrong

via Lew Rockwell

April 8, 2007
Big Bang at the atomic lab after scientists get their maths wrong
Jonathan Leake, Science Editor

A £2 billion project to answer some of the biggest mysteries of the universe has been delayed by months after scientists building it made basic errors in their mathematical calculations.
The mistakes led to an explosion deep in the tunnel at the Cern particle accelerator complex near Geneva in Switzerland. It lifted a 20-ton magnet off its mountings, filling a tunnel with helium gas and forcing an evacuation.

It means that 24 magnets located all around the 17-mile circular accelerator must now be stripped down and repaired or upgraded. The failure is a huge embarrassment for Fermilab, the American national physics laboratory that built the magnets and the anchor system that secured them to the machine.

It appears Fermilab made elementary mistakes in the design of the magnets and their anchors that made them insecure once the system was operational.

Last week an apparently furious and embarrassed Pier Oddone, director of Fermilab, wrote to his staff saying they had caused “a pratfall on the world stage”. He said: “We are dumb-founded that we missed some very simple balance of forces. Not only was it missed in the engineering design but also in the four engineering reviews carried out between 1998 and 2002 before launching the construction of the magnets.”

The machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), aims to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang, when the universe is thought to have exploded into existence about 14 billion years ago. However, the November start-up may now have to be delayed until next spring.

Dr Lyn Evans, who leads the accelerator construction project at Cern, the European organisation for nuclear research, said the explosion had been potentially very dangerous.

“There was a hell of a bang, the tunnel housing the machine filled with helium and dust and we had to call in the fire brigade to evacuate the place,” he said. “The people working on the test were frightened to death but they were all in a safe place so no-one was hurt.” An investigation by Cern researchers found “fundamental” flaws that caused the explosion, close to the CMS detector, one of the LHC’s most important experiments.

The accelerator is designed to smash together protons, a kind of sub-atomic particle, at near light speed. The hope is that such collisions will generate exotic new particles — especially the so-called Higgs boson which, theorists predict, could help explain key properties of matter, such as how it acquires mass and, hence, weight.

The LHC itself comprises two pipes, each containing a beam of protons travelling at near-light speed that are steered around the circular tunnel by powerful magnets. Such magnets are “superconducting” meaning they and the whole LHC are cooled to below -268C, using pipes filled with liquid helium.

The two proton beams travel in opposite directions but, at various points around the ring, their pipes merge, allowing the protons in each beam to collide.

However, since the thickness of each beam is less than that of a human hair, they have to be focused. This is the task of a second set of magnets, and it is these that were under test at the time of the explosion.

Coincidentally, Fermilab stands to gain most from delays at Cern. Its researchers also operate a rival but less powerful particle accelerator, the Tevatron.

Fermilab staff are pushing the Tevatron to ever-higher energies hoping that they might find the Higgs boson before the LHC switches on. An LHC researcher said: “Ironically, this delay could be all they need.”

Can liberalism be salvaged?

Wolfe's "Natural Law Liberalism"

Ryan Anderson has a review (subscribers only) of Chris Wolfe's new book, Natural Law Liberalism, in National Review. Here is an excerpt from the review:

Central to Western political liberalism is the notion that disagreement can be resolved through common deliberation ­ and that representative constitutional democracy is the best institution for such deliberation. This makes us think that any kind of clash can be solved through rational discussion of the truths we share. At the same time, however, our modern system is founded on skepticism about the ability of people and their governments to define and enforce a universal vision of the good life. This makes us think that there aren’t any real truths to be shared.

It is in response to such worries that Christopher Wolfe has written his new book, Natural Law Liberalism. Wolfe is a Marquette University political scientist who focused his early work on constitutional interpretation and judicial activism. He founded the American Public Philosophy Institute to support the efforts of such thinkers as Robert P. George, Russell Hittinger, and Hadley Arkes, who have been working to rearticulate the natural-law foundations of political life. Natural Law Liberalism is Wolfe’s contribution to the effort.

By liberalism, Wolfe means the whole range of modern political thought, from the early Enlightenment through the American Founding ­ the philosophical theory of government that emphasizes human equality, personal liberty, individual rights, participatory government, and the rule of law. And natural law, as Wolfe conceives it, is the long Western tradition of reflection on the nature of human flourishing and the rational principles that can guide human action and choice. His thesis is simple: If political liberalism is to justify itself at home and abroad, it must return to the classical tradition of Western thought and embrace natural-law theory as the account of its foundations.

So a "liberal" community needs to follow natural law and natural justice? Or is Professor Wolfe trying to do more than this? I would be interested in reading his take on liberalism, and what he takes the first principles of liberalism to be--alas, it's $75! Perhaps something I can order from Barnes and Noble, with its 10% off coupon.

So governments and legislation need to be guided by a proper and full understanding of the human good. This is true for any government... but is it really liberalism if the Natural Law becomes the admitted foundation of government? Would the liberal theorists of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries recognize it as such? Some of the American founding fathers recognized that virtue was necessary for good government and for the citizens -- but how can one bring about virtue if liberalism does not accept the traditional (i.e. Aquinas's) understanding of the purposes of law, and the necessity of tradition, custom, and discipline/education to bring virtue about?

The greatest weakness of natural law theorists who try to reconcile NL with liberalism (most of whom are Catholic) is they fail to recognize that size is a problem. Liberalism is tied to the rist of the nation-state, and to the historical forces behind it. More once I am able to read the book...

the book (published by Cambridge University Press) -- the publisher's description:

Political philosophy and natural law theory are not contradictory, but - properly understood - mutually reinforcing. Contemporary liberalism (as represented by Rawls, Guttman and Thompson, Dworkin, Raz, and Macedo) rejects natural law and seeks to diminish its historical contribution to the liberal political tradition, but it is only one, defective variant of liberalism. A careful analysis of the history of liberalism, identifying its core principles, and a similar examination of classical natural law theory (as represented by Thomas Aquinas and his intellectual descendants), show that a natural law liberalism is possible and desirable. Natural law theory embraces the key principles of liberalism, and it also provides balance in resisting some of its problematic tendencies. Natural law liberalism is the soundest basis for American public philosophy, and it is a potentially more attractive and persuasive form of liberalism for nations that have tended to resist it.
• Unique in proposing a form of liberalism rooted in natural law theory
• Offers a relatively non-technical description of natural law theory intended to be compatible with contemporary forms of natural law theory
• Describes and defends a form of liberalism compatible with traditional morality and religion

Contents
Part I. Contemporary Liberalism: 1. Contemporary liberal exclusionism I: John Rawls’s antiperfectionist liberalism; 2. Contemporary liberal exclusionism II: Rawls, Macedo, and ‘neutral’ liberal public reason; 3. Contemporary liberal exclusionism III: Gutmann and Thompson on ‘reciprocity’; 4. Contemporary liberalism and autonomy I: Ronald Dworkin on paternalism; 5. Contemporary liberalism and autonomy II: Joseph Raz on trust and citizenship; 6. ‘Offensive liberalism’: Macedo and ‘liberal education’; Part II. Liberalism and Natural Law: 7. Understanding liberalism: a broader vision; 8. Understanding natural law; 9. Liberalism and natural law; 10. ‘Cashing out’ natural law liberalism: the case of religious liberty; 11. A natural law public philosophy.

Links
Christopher Wolfe (Thomas International)
American Public Philosophy Institute (Marquette)
From Constitutional Interpretation to Judicial Activism: The ...

Shoot!

Missed this today! Only found out about it while going through Mirror of Justice.

On Monday, April 9th, Professor Robert P. George of Princeton University will be giving the 2007 John Dewey Lecture in Philosophy of Law at Harvard University. The lecture, entitled "Natural Law," will be held at 5:00 p.m. in Austin East Hall at Harvard Law School. A reception will follow. All are welcome.