Full moon and LHC
Published by admin January 31st, 2008 in Physics, Doctors of Philosophy, NewtonI was reading the Scientific American Physics issue today referenced here. The article about LHC makes the claim on the sidebar1 that at full Moon the ground at LHC is lifted 25 centimeters and the circumference increases 1 mm and that physicists must allocate for this change in their reduction of data. This is another physics urban legend. The same thing had been said for LIGO. What happens is that “theoretically” if we believe lunatic physicists obsessed with Newtonian occult then in an Alice in Wonderland universe the ground will be lifted by the occult powers of full Moon. In reality this does not happen. Tides are very complicated and depend on geography and even on winds. But since Newton computed lunar mass from tides (no matter that he got it hundred per cent wrong) physicists still perpetuate this myth to save Newton’s authority. This is the same kind of urban legend that without General Relativity GPS would not work. To an outside observer physics looks like ancestor worship full of mythology and miracles perpetuated by the faithful.
- Only in the print edition. [↩]
There’s a string theory joke about the effect of the moon on LHC at hep-ph/9707508:
“In spite of what doubters often say, there is experimental support for string theory from accelerator experiments. Superstrings predicted gravity in 1974,[70] and LEP accelerator physicists detected tidal forces in 1993.[71] What more empirical evidence could one demand?”
Reference [71] is: L. Arnaudon, et al., 1993 IEEE Particle Accelerator Conference: Proceedings, p. 44.
Another reference to the tidal effects on accelerators, and also the gravitational effect of the water level in a nearby lake, is hep-ex/9810035 .
Thanks for the references. First I agree that the first reference must be a joke since tides are observed with naked eye without needing LEP to measure it.
I forgot most of what I knew about tides but looking at the plot at
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-ex/pdf/9810/9810035v1.pdf
as far as I understand the plot shows 6 hour variation of tides it does not show that tides are tied to the phases of the moon.
September 1, 1993 was full Moon, October 11, 1993 was new Moon. Maximums are about the same too.
I understand that tides move Earth’s crust and that moves the beam and it must be corrected. This is fine. But I don’t see a correlation between the phases of the moon and the beam. Furthermore, I don’t believe that tides are caused by the occult Newtonian force.
The joke in the first post is a snide reference to the fact that string theorists claim that string theory predicts gravitation (which gravitation actually had been known long before string theory), and that string theory will someday be used to calculate accelerator physics (though it’s never happened before, and a lot of people believe it will never happen).
Yes. I also predicted string theorists will appropriate the Cavendish experiment and G and claim that Cavendish experiment was the first measurement of string constant. I don’t know the current name of the string constant though. A Google search for “string constant” mostly reveals computer science meaning.