Large Hadron Collider

[m0ds]

The LHC sounds like a bad pun for something about a gigantic hardon, but it's simple machinery and its freaking me out even more than that ever could!!! If you haven't heard about it, hear me out! And if you already know about it I'd love to hear your thoughts too So before you go google it let me tell you a story.

Not so long ago I was able to meet up with an old friend and I've been spending quite some time with her, which is great. One day at her parents house in mid-March she randomly told me about her dad being lazy cos he believes the world is going to end in the next month or two, apparently from reading things in the bible. He plays jazz and doesn't surprise me as being particularly Christian :p But I wasn't questioning that at all. I didn't take much notice and did not think about worrying about another "end of the world" hype.

That was a couple of weeks ago. But a few days ago I then read in the paper about the rising nuclear tension in Korea, which reminded me to worry about some kind of nuclear doomsday going down because of what my friends dad had said :p The article was no more than 40 words and suggested "North Korea will nuke South Korea soon". It was on page 13 or close I let it pass. Yesterday I read an article in the paper about a bunch of Russians hiding underground til sometime in May (as thats when they believe the world will end, again for religious reasons) and said the sky will rain sulfer or something. Intrigued to know how that might feel, I finally decided to check out what the fuck all this random hype and media coverage (or lack there of regarding nuclear race wars) was all about, online. It had just seemed odd to come from a personal friend, to the papers...and before april fools too....meh..

Anyway google revealed May was a particularly popular month of 2008 to be labelled as a possible doomsday. So why the hell is everyone getting paranoid about May, I wondered? For the religious beliefs, I'm under the impresison they're counting on a nuclear holocaust. Some say the anti-christ (who some believe is Putin) will do something and so forth, or Al Q'aeda will. I wasn't willing to accept it but I didn't deny it as something possible, given the fragile stability of the UK's relation with them, N Korea with S Korea, and USA with everyone etc :p It's not fun to think about nukes so I decided to disregard the religious prophecies. There are always religious predictions of great quakes, tidal waves, comets and natural disasters like that, or man-made disasters, like nukes.

But what I also found that makes it interesting is the one thing religion refuses to accept. Science! And thats ok cos not even I understand it But I know a few more terms now I've been googling, lol! Another significant date for some kind of doomsday scenario appears to lie in May also, related to science - its one that has really left me wondering. There is a strong religious focus on May 08 and also another "interesting" topic going 'live' that month which could almost reflect the opposite of a religious doomsday. A scientific one! No, it's not national stephen hawking day

This date lies in the hands of the operation of the "LHC". It's a large scientific experiment to try and answer the deepest questions of our universe, its creation & dark matter. It's labelled as heralding many unexpected, currently unknown answers to our existence. Hmmm! And if that's not slightly violating enough, the machine itself is perfectly capable of producing black holes, something that has never been achieved before. Here's the first I read of it

http://www.xomba.com/may_2008_end_of_the_world

Will May 2008 be the end of the world as we know it? CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research is set to begin testing the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at that time.

Most of this is beyond my comprehension, but basically it is a high energy particle accelerator with a circumference of 16.5 miles. They are hoping to achieve a Higgs bosun or God Particle. This is the only particle that has never been observed. It is the equivalent of the Big Bang or how the universe started.

Um? Well it sounds interesting! But we are reminded:

This type of experiment has been tested before, but never on such a grand scale. Scientists were able to replicate particles at 70% of the speed of light. There are concerns among the physics community that the LHC could result in the destruction of the Earth or entire Universe. The possibility also exists for a black hole to be formed, that doesn't sound much better.

I started to look into the LHC and why people were claiming it was going to destroy the earth, and basically learned that although scientists believe it is harmless to create a mini-black hole because it will simply evaporate very quickly, they cannot prove it. "Hawking radiation" suggests a black hole would evaporate. I don't really understand that part, but I'll come back to it in a bit. I came across a website about the "top ten potential threats" to ending the world in an instant, lol.

http://botw.org/articles/endworld.html

Physicists have long theorized that particle accelerators could destroy the earth. When electric fields are used to accelerate protons they could collide at speed fast enough to create black holes or bits of altered matter. These small black holes would slowly engulf our planet. The pieces of altered matter, called strangeletes, would destroy any ordinary matter they came in contact with, eventually annihilating the entire planet.

Although most scientists assure that none of the particle accelerators being used at the present are strong enough to bring about these events they are unsure of the abilities of the newest accelerator being built. Currently, over two-thousand physicists from thirty-four countries, universities and laboratories are aiding in the construction of The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located near Geneva, Switzerland.

It is scheduled to begin experimentation in May 2008. It is hoped that if black holes are produced they will be small enough to evaporate, but only time will tell.

From there I decided to find ways to "survive" a black hole, as well as reading up on the God particle mentioned earlier, the LHC and all the experiments they plan to investigate and so on. What this suggests, if they are able to re-create the big bang, which could produce a black-hole, would mean opening a completely unseeable dimension up onto our planet, even if for a brief second. Isn't that weird?? Again I thought this is all an elaborate april fool hoax but nope, it seems perfectly genuine  Thats when I started to get worried because of what they might achieve, or simply cause. And if Al Q'aeda aren't stealing nukes I wouldn't be surprised if they're planning to unleash black holes :O

My earlier point about a mini black hole evaporating is that I do not understand how these scientists can firmly believe the matter we're part of is going to be strong enough to resist even the slightest instability in matter on our planet. They can't detect where a black hole is until it causes deconstruction, and all this sort of stuff. They reassure by saying mini black holes are "likely" to have passed across earth and stuff without effect, otherwise we "would have seen the consequences already". The only problem is, I'm not reassured, or convinced Nature has its own way of doing things, not a 17mile long lab.

I don't have much more to say. I don't necessarily want to focus on doomsday here but the thought of what they're trying to achieve and could possibly create/learn/achieve is overwhelming to me. And I'm just not convinced we really need to find this sort of thing out just yet :/ Cos then crazy dictators try & use this advanced science to their benefit 

Oh well. Maybe I'm just paranoid Discuss


More reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider

How to survive a black hole
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0705/0705.1029v1.pdf

Impossible. lets say you do survive tho..
http://library.thinkquest.org/J0112649/black.html

Whats on the other side?
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=348

Hawking radiation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation

Another dimension
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Science/Dimensions-en.html

Who knows where such a discovery could lead!

Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1vKisefsuI

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Sounds kind of like the premise for the movie The Mist.

[PixelPerfect]

That was really interesting read. I don't know what to make of it yet. But here's a little something on the lawsuit filed in Hawaii for putting the LHC on hold and reassessing the safety of the machine.

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/03/27/823924.aspx

There's info about the different kinds of bad scenarios that could happen. All in all it seems that these scenarios are unlikely according to the majority of scientists.

You never know though... Sometime the Earth was considered flat.

[shbaz]

Black holes have event horizons.  Mini black holes have mini-event horizons.  Slashdot had an interesting article posted today about a new record for the smallest black hole in discovery.

Some people thought the atomic bomb would never stop reacting and destroy the Earth.  Most people knew the calculations said otherwise.. which is the same in this case, else they wouldn't do it.  By "not sure" they mean "not 100% sure" because they're scientists dealing with theory and nothing is 100% sure.

We take risks in the name of advancing humanity.  Being on this planet is a risk for more reasons than I care to go into.  By advancing technology we can make it less so.

[Traveler]

Maybe reading this thread will make you less nervous about it:

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=29390.msg375077

[Nine Toes]

Well, this sort of thing makes me very apprehensive (for darn good reasons too).

Something I don't quite understand - This talk of "mini" black holes.

Inside the event horizon, at the center, is a singularity smaller than an atom.  Theoretically, right?  Well, that singularity is actually the "black hole" part of a black hole (it's the part of the black hole that is actually sucking all this stuff in and devouring it), is it not?

Singularities are not tangible, as far as I know.  A singularity is merely a point in space on a 3 dimensional axis.  Which would make it smaller than an atom, a proton, a quark, a gluon, and even a boson.  (A boson being an elementary particle obviously suggests that it's something tangible, something you could potentially hold in your hand).

So, if a black hole is nothing more than a point in space, how is it possible to have something "smaller" than that?  I just don't get it... (I've been reading the wiki article on it, and it's all just registering as scientific gobbledygook)

Anyway - if this experiment ends up being the key to things such as faster-than-light space travel, or inexhaustible energy sources, etc then good.  But if it ends up creating black hole in my back yard, I'm going to be really pissed. 

[SSH]

Maybe its time to take up religion so that after we're all crushed into the size of a small pea by the black hole they create we can party on in heaven...

[Vince Twelve]

So, if a black hole is nothing more than a point in space, how is it possible to have something "smaller" than that?  I just don't get it... (I've been reading the wiki article on it, and it's all just registering as scientific gobbledygook)

"Mini" black holes are referring to the mass, not the volume, afaik.  Mini black holes have still collapsed under their own gravity, but their mass is less than the mass of the sun.

I actually just read recently that they found the smallest black hold on record at 3-point-something the mass of the sun.  And as is tradition on the internet, I can't be bothered to check my facts or search for the news article I'm referencing. 

[Miez]

Jeez, chill out people. This all sounds like when the first trains were invented - that the "awesome speed" at which these contraptions traversed the countryside would give people heart attacks and make cows explode.
I very, VERY much doubt that anything done with the LHC is going to cause the apocalypse. Leave that to modern warfare and gene technology.

[Traveler]

Something I don't quite understand - This talk of "mini" black holes.

"Mini" black holes that will be (supposedly) created in LHC are made up of a few atoms. Even then, it's not very likely that actual black holes will be created, as that would require the use of staggering amounts of energy.

Inside the event horizon, at the center, is a singularity smaller than an atom.  Theoretically, right?  Well, that singularity is actually the "black hole" part of a black hole (it's the part of the black hole that is actually sucking all this stuff in and devouring it), is it not?

No one knows what's inside the event horizon. General relativity predicts that matter within is compressed into 0 volume, but that contradicts quantum mechanics. This simply means that known physics breaks down inside the event horizon. Because of this, it doesn't make much sense to talk about the singularity being smaller than a given particle.

For all practical purposes, it is the size of the event horizon that matters and that has definite extents, which depends on the mass of the black hole: the greater the mass, the bigger the event horizon. So if LHC succeeds in creating a black hole out of a few atoms, the event horizon of that black hole will be very small (much, much smaller than an atom), because its mass is only the mass of those few atoms, but it's density will be enormously high. (That's why it's a black hole.)

Even if it turns out that black holes do not evaporate, it's very unlikely that such a small object would have any effect on us - in all likelyhood, it could fly through you without you ever noticing.

[OneDollar]

Most of my physics lecturers seem pretty excited about CERN and the LHC, and none of them have suggested to us that the world might end because of it. Still, 'physics destroys the earth' is probably not a good line to get more admission fees.

What this suggests, if they are able to re-create the big bang, which could produce a black-hole, would mean opening a completely unseeable dimension up onto our planet, even if for a brief second.

Who wants to be Gordon Freeman?

[Valentine]

Ah science is fun. Let me run through this as far as I understand it.

Now people are saying that “we've never done at these speeds before! Zomgosh!” but just because we're doing things a bit faster doesn't mean we're going to experience completely different effects to what we've seen before. There's quite simply no evidence to expect this random change of behavior people are warning against. Now I guess it's all well and good for scientists to say that, but let me run through what the LHC is actually doing to show you there's no reason to get all panicky.

When we have an unstable particle, it decays pretty rapidly. This is what the LHC is studying â€" unstable particles. However, thanks to Eisteinean physics, we know that there's this curious relationship between space and time, in that the faster we go, the slower time moves for that thing going fast (at least to an outside observer). So let's say we have a particle with a little wristwatch, and then we're standing there with our own wristwatch watching this cute little particle. We stand ‘still' and the particle runs off at two-thirds the speed of light. Because the particle is going so so fast, if only a minute passes on the particle's wristwatch, ten minutes have passed on our own wristwatch. This is what the LHC is going to take advantage of. By speeding the unstable particles up to incredible speeds, they are going to exist for longer before decaying, and therefore allow us to study them for longer.

So â€" where does the reassurance come in. Well, basically â€" from the perspective of the unstable particle, it is still existing for the same amount of time regardless of speed. It had ten seconds to do stuff before, and nothing happened. It will still have ten seconds to do something, and won't do anything this time. We're already doing this around the world. Particle accelerators are being used right now, and we have yet to be swallowed by any artificial black holes.

Now for collisions, we are already getting them to happen, and again none of which, I'm sure you are aware, have swallowed you up. Any blackholes that are formed are termed micro-black holes, and are microscopic - formed because they have a mass greater than their own gravity. The gravity of these black holes comes from a single particle, and is therefore incredibly incredibly weak compared to the mass of the earth, and even to the objects near to the particle. It's because of that weakness that they evaporate so quickly. The black hole isn't going to grow because it isn't able to attract any significant degree of matter towards it â€" that other matter is more attracted to the Earth, to the substance is makes up, and even to other atoms.

Overall, we're increasing speeds here because there is so LITTLE of a reaction. It's almost impossible for us to create ANY measurable effect â€" what we're hoping for is evidence of elementary particles, like the Higgs boson, we're not suddenly going to create a monster black hole and destroy the world. Of course, science doesn't let anyone say it WON'T happen, just that it's incredibly incredibly incredibly unlikely to.

The worst thing about the LHC is that it produces radiation, pure and simple. Its annoying, but that's the problem we have to put up with. If anything is going to go wrong, the worst that will happen is that a section of the collider blows up, but that won't have any effect on anyone more than a twenty five meters from it, it'll just mean it'll cost a hell of a lot to rebuild.

So yeah, this talk about the end of the world and stuff is just a load of rubbish â€" there's no evidence for it happening, and plenty of evidence against it happening. This is just another in the endless run of end of the world fantasies dreamed up by people without any idea how things really work (add in to this category the Mayan calender … all it is doing is turning from December 31st to January 1st, and the anti-Christ :).

And if the world does end, we'll all be dead so no-one can tell me I was wrong.

[Andail]

There is nothing more evil than a bunch of European scientists.

[Huw Dawson]

For the record, "Hawking Radiation" is a reflection of Quantum Physics and Black Holes. The question came about that "If Black Holes absorb everything, how do they emit radiation?". A Quantum fact is that the universe is constantly spawning random positrons and electrons that exist in tandem and exist for the smallest of amount of time possible before rebounding and cancelling out each other. Now, if this is done next to a black hole the electron will escape but the positron will be sucked in. The electron that escapes is the radiation.

Positrons have negative mass.

The overall mass of the black hole is reduced, and this is happening constantly. As such, unless the black hole is absorbing enough mass, it will eventually "shrink" to a point where its gravity is not sufficient to maintain a singularity, and it explodes.

This is the idea of "Hawking Radiation".

If they created a mini black hole, it would be very interesting, but very unlikely and harmless.

- Huw

[Andorxor]

There is nothing more evil than a bunch of European scientists.

Than we shouldn't have too many of them in one room or the density of their evilness will create evil black hole.

[Huw Dawson]

I'm strongly reminded of that Dilbert cartoon with Steven Hawking in, at this precise moment.

- Huw

[Miez]

Positrons have negative mass.

Total mindf*ck. So big balls of positrons repel eachother?

[Ali]

There's info about the different kinds of bad scenarios that could happen. All in all it seems that these scenarios are unlikely according to the majority of scientists.

You never know though... Sometime the Earth was considered flat.

I'm not convinced that was ever very widely believed, but I see your point.

I'm not going to worry too much about this, because it's more exciting than it is scary. Also because there a plenty of certainties worth being afraid of, like famine, war and oppression. For many, the world continuing is likely to be a lot nastier than it ending.

My, that sounded more depressing than I meant it to.

[MrColossal]

I am also nothing but excited about this BUT whenever I read this thread title I read it as:

Large HardOn Collider

And I think we should build this machine.


F...For science!

[Andail]

Eric, are you trying to say that the image of erected penises colliding appeals to you?
If so...A/S/L?