Elon Musk is a science-driven business leader, interested particularly in tech with the potential to transform humanity. He loves to push the limits of innovation and is undeterred by the criticism that sometimes accompanies his ideas.
As CEO of Tesla (TSLA), he's dedicated to converting the world to a mode of transport compatible with protecting the environment and fighting climate change.
And he has set other missions for himself. One -- Neuralink -- is to build a machine in which we can download our memories and personalities. The other, SpaceX, is aiming to conquer the planet Mars.
"This will be Mars one day," the world's richest man posted on Twitter on Aug. 12 with a photo of the red planet.
The next day he posted a message saying he hoped that in 20 years, a city would be built on Mars and require no outside help -- in particular food brought from Earth -- to survive.
"I hope there is a self-sustaining city on Mars in 20 years!" Musk wrote.
Musk Says He Can Be Trusted
The posts drew a lot of comments from Twitter users. Some posts asked him, for example, what the main obstacle preventing humans from living on Mars today is. The tech mogul didn't respond.
But in June Musk had said: "Making life multiplanetary expands the scope & scale of consciousness. It also enables us to backup the biosphere, protecting all life as we know it from a calamity on Earth. Humanity is life’s steward, as no other species can transport life to Mars. We can’t let them down."
According to Musk, Mars is humanity's destiny. So it's a serious understatement to say that Musk, whose SpaceX rocket-tech company has helped launch space tourism, is determined to bring humans to Mars as soon as possible.
Musk’s scientific ambitions may now have taken a turn toward quantum physics. He just asked for access to a technology that some critics and scientists call "demonic": a particle collider.
"Please let me use the CERN large hadron collider," the billionaire tweeted on a Aug. 21.
The billionaire tweeted an image of a black skull (that of the devil?) and two images of the collider at two different angles. At the bottom of the image Musk inscribed:
"I am normal and can be trusted with a demonic technology unlike anything the world has ever seen."
What Does Musk Have in Mind?
Musk doesn't say what he wants to do with the collider and why he wants access to this technology, which sits at the center of quantum physics.
CERN stands for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (the European Council for Nuclear Research), which is a laboratory for particle physics located near Geneva. Its research helps us to understand the laws that governed the functioning of the universe in the first moments of life.
In July 2012, CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, a particle whose existence had been speculated about in 1964 by three researchers: two Belgians, François Englert and Robert Brout, and then independently by Peter Higgs of Scotland. (History has retained only the one name.)
To summarize its function, this particle explains why things have mass. The Higgs boson is considered the missing link in physics.
CERN's critics fear that its research will create a black hole, thereby destroying the Earth. This is the thesis developed by the Italian physicist Francesco Calogero. And this in turn is the source of the concern about a "demonic" technology.
The Large Hadron Collider is a CERN particle accelerator. It was relaunched in early July after a lag that began at the end of its second round of experiments in 2018. Since then, engineers have been working hard to prepare it for its third round.
Physicists hope that this relaunch of collider experiments will enable them to answer the questions they still have about the universe. They hope to achieve new discoveries and advances in cosmological research.
Particle physics describes the infinitely small elements and what happens inside the fundamental building blocks that make up atoms, such as elementary particles: electrons, photons, quarks, bosons and the forces with which they interact.
