Quote:Well, I am still sitting here waiting for the inspector to show up, and thus still trying to catch up on this week's blogs, and this story is a humdinger of a whopper doozie, if true. It was shared by M.D., with our dep gratitude, and, as the headline observes, comes from my alma mater, the University of Oxford:

Researchers generate black hole ‘plasma fireballs’ on Earth

What I want to draw attention to for the purpose of today's high octane speculation is not so much the concentration on black holes and singularities, and so on, but this:

Quote:Black holes and neutron stars are the most compact objects in the universe. Around these extreme astrophysical environments exist plasmas, the fourth fundamental state of matter alongside solids, liquids, and gases. The intense gravity of these dense objects pulls in nearby matter and also causes them to shoot out powerful jets of plasma, mainly made of pairs of electrons and their antimatter counterpart, positrons. While these jets are often seen in space, creating them in a laboratory has proved highly challenging so far.

Now, for the first time, an international team of scientists has successfully created high-density plasma beams in the lab containing around 10 trillion electron-positron pairs. Such a large number means that the beam behaves as a true plasma (with wave-like activity) and not just a collection of particles.
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‘The laboratory generation of plasma “fireballs” composed of matter, antimatter, and photons is a research goal at the forefront of high-energy-density science,’ says lead author Charles Arrowsmith, from the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford. ‘But the experimental difficulty of producing electron-positron pairs in sufficiently high numbers has, to this point, limited our understanding to purely theoretical studies.’


Along with researchers from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Harwell, the group designed a novel experiment harnessing the HiRadMat facility at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerator at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland.
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Essentially, the beam generated at CERN had enough particles to start behaving like a true astrophysical plasma around a black hole. (emphasis added)

Now I find all of this extremely interesting and intriguing for a number of reasons. Firstly, in my book The Third Way, I noted that when CERN's Large Hadron Collider first came on line, a number of people around the world expressed concerns that it would really be used to create and research suingularities, like quark-gluon plasmas and black holes and so on. At the time, this was roundly denounced and rejected. Now, it appears that the goal has finally tacitly been admitted.

The second thing that now appears to be admitted - and again I have speculated about this in connection with CERN before as well - that another goal of the project is to be able to create anti-matter in large amounts, and to perfect the means of its storage and  manipulation. In short, I've always suspected that the true purpose of CERN was military in nature, and not simply for "pure science." For those who may have forgotten or may not remember, a matter-antimatter reaction is a total annihilation reaction, it releases "gimongous" amounts of energy, and there's little to no "residual stuff" left over.

Now what's interesting here, as I pointed out in my recent book The Demon in the Ekur, Angels, Demons, Plasmas, Patristics, and Pyramids, is that plasmas have a unique membrane-like structure that can actually function as a means of keeping anti-matter and matter separated and contained, a possibility that was first pointed out by the Nobel laureate Swedish plasma physicist Dr. Hannes Alfven, and which was elaborated by his student, Dr. Anthony Peratt. To put the significance of this point rather differently, let us ask a basic question: if one wanted to weaponize matter-antimatter reactions, what basic steps in the technology tree would be necessary? And the answer is (1) a source for massive amounts of antimatter, (2) a means of storing and manipulating it, and keeping it out of contact with matter until the right moment: enter plasmas, and their charge membranes.  Indeed, a plasma could conceivably be used to carry that matter-antimatter to a target, and to be "detonated" there via some process that would collapse that membrane. (And if you've really been paying attention, try an electro-laser.)  And that would, indeed, be a "thunderbolt of the Gods," one that could leave a vast planetary scar on the surface of Mars, or, perhaps, even blow up an entire planet.

In that respect, recall that the late US Naval Observatory astrophysicist, Dr. Tom van Flandern, proposed that a planet in our own solar system exploded aeons ago. When it came to proposing a mechanism capable of doing that, Van Flandern proposed that somehow, in the interior or the planet, a mass of antimatter had somehow managed to accumulate and remain contained, until the containment broke down and... KABOOM, the planet exploded. Might he have been thinking of plasmas in a planetary interior? Very possibly. It is also worth noting that Dr. van Flandern also had difficulties with his various proposed models, and eventually, and reluctantly proposed "deliberate action" or even a "technological mishap" as the reason for the planet's explosion.


Perhaps, in trying to divine the past, Dr. van Flandern had managed to peer into present secrets, and prophecy a grim future. In any case, howsoever one may interpret his prescience, this announcement seems to me to have about it the characteristics of a message, and the message is We can do this, we've taken the first steps. So who is the message for? Russia? China?  It seems to be a rather hamfisted message to send just for invading the Ukraine...

...or the message could be intended for "someone else"...

See you on the flip side...