Wednesday, December 05, 2007

L3 Ching

So I'm glancing at upcoming releases in iTunes and I stumble on this:
But then I say to myself: "That spooky octagonal symbol in back looks familiar..." A little perusing the CERN websites yield this event display from the L3 experiment, formerly of LEP (and which now houses ALICE at the LHC):
The octagon in this image is a schematic of the famous L3 muon system. My first thought is: Wu Tang owes Sam Ting some royalty money (could this ever help AMS get airborne, maybe?). My second thought is: I've seen the Wu Tang symbol before. And my third thought is: I Ching:
And I nearly fell out of my chair - even the L3 inner detector is matched with the Yin Yang. To assuage myself that my current reading (Illuminatus! Trilogy -- goofy, but a blast) isn't wrecking my mind, I show a colleague the I Ching diagram. His first response: "L3". So I am still asking myself: is this an accident (likely, but b-o-r-i-n-g), or was the I Ching a design template for the detector, consciously or not (with eight "thunder" trigrams...less likely, but amusing to consider)? Anyone have a good answer?

Anyway, from iTunes to I Ching in two moves. Not bad for an hour's procrastination.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Im sure it's all part of the "Angels and Demons" Vatican/antimatter conspiracy at CERN. Ask Dan Brown.

Anonymous said...

I doubt there is a correlation between the I Ching and the L3 at LEP. I suspect that the Wu Tang Clan may have just been watching LOST or stumbled upon something else based on the I Ching

Sincerely,
Mr.X

Anonymous said...

Oh my god it's a stop sign.