Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most important philosophers of the Twentieth Century, basically said that humans, no matter how hard we try, can’t understand our universe because we’re a part of it.
The human brain was created by and exists within this universe, so we shouldn’t expect it to be able to comprehend it—that’s what Wittgenstein said (if I understand him correctly). It’s kind of like expecting a football sitting on the turf to explain the game of football. Can a part describe the whole?
But we try. Just this week, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced that they have observed a new particle that helps explain how matter is held together.
Located on the French-Swiss border near Geneva, the LHC is the Super Bowl of physics experiments. Over 500 feet underground and 17 miles long, the LHC is a huge tunnel that researchers have been using since 2009 to bash particles together at incredibly high speeds and see what happens.
Without getting too techy, researchers are smashing subatomic particles together to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang and try to understand fundamental questions of physics and our universe.
Evidently it’s working. The BBC is reporting this morning that researchers have observed a new particle—Chi_b (3P)—that may help explain things.
“It’s also interesting for what it tells us about the forces that hold the quark and the anti-quark together—the strong nuclear force,” LHC researcher Roger Jones told the BBC. “And that’s the same force that holds, for instance, the atomic nucleus together with its protons and the neutrons.”
It’s interesting for us at Plum to watch this kind of process. It’s the same sort of step-by-step advancement we make for our IVR products—all the hard work, the small and large breakthroughs. Except those guys are working on the biggest problem there is—our existence.
So I guess we have to ask ourselves (as Wittgenstein probably would)…If we come to understand the science behind our entire universe, will we then be able to explain our existence? Or will we still just be dimples on the surface of the football?
