God is sabotaging the Large Hadron Collider

Helium leakages, power outages and year-long magnet repairs must make Large Hadron Collider (LHC) the world’s most costly and ill-fated experiment.

Now, University of Copenhagen physicist Holger Bech Nielsen claims that the machine’s run of bad luck may be down to a ‘back-to-the-future’ effect, whereby the machine is doomed to failure by its own future.

This is according to the British news website Timesonline.co.uk.

Rife with doomsday theories

God shuffles the cards for CERN

»Go in to the reception at Niels Bohr, and wait for them to tell you that I am always late.«

This was the e-mail instruction from Holger Bech Nielsen, Professor of Physics at the Niels Bohr Institute, a Danish household name and the man behind the so-called 'God's will’ formula. A formula that introduces predetermination into the world of high energy physics and blames the Almighty for the misfortunes of the costly and ill-fated Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of CERN in Switzerland.

As we go to press, the LHC has yet to find the elusive Higgs Boson particle.

Art and physics collide at Niels Bohr

Hundreds of LED bulbs on the outside of Nils Bohr Institute (NBI) in Blegdamsvej will transmit live signals from particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider physics experiment in CERN, Switzerland.

See pictures from the Colliderscope opening event here.

The new art installation, called NBI Colliderscope, is the work of artists Christian Skeel and Morten Skriver, in collaboration with Niels Bohr researchers Clive Ellegaard and Troels C. Petersen.

Muslim PhD student works harder during Ramadan

University of Copenhagen oceanography researcher Muchammad Al Azhar from Jakarta, Indonesia, is a practising Muslim. Like millions of others he started the Ramadan month of fasting on 11 August.

During the period of fasting he will not eat or drink anything at all from dawn to dusk.

This lack of food and drink affects Muchammad’s working day, although the effects are not too dramatic, he says.

Read an article about practising Muslim students in Copenhagen here.

More productive

Where the art is

Rushing to your lecture hall at 13 minutes past the hour with a steaming latte cup in hand, the rich variety of artistic offerings at the University of Copenhagen campuses may well have escaped your notice.

The works of art on display on campus a somewhat overlooked aspect of the University environment, blending into the background as, quite literally, part of the furniture.

Film: Red lights in the sky

When a weather phenomenon has a otherworldly name like ‘Red sprites’ you would expect it to be something special. And by all accounts, Red Sprites do not disappoint.

They are a recently discovered form of atmospheric lightning and their discovery is so important that one researcher exclaimed it was as if Biology had just suddenly discovered a new human body part.

On Monday you can see a film about the Red Sprites and hear a lecture by the film’s creator Peter McLeish.

See more about the event here.

Von Trier: Antichrist »a kind of therapy«

In a recent interview, eccentric Danish film maker Lars Von Trier, the man behind the intense and macabre film Antichrist, revealed that a severe depression drove his creative process while writing the script.

The film was shown at a special screening at the Film House (Filmhuset) on Gothersgade on Friday, as part of a conference held by the Faculty of Humanities’ Department of Media, Cognition and Communication.