Large Hadron Collider

uhhh what? the whole point is to collide the particles...

"The LHC physics program is mainly based on proton-proton collisions. However, shorter running periods, typically one month per year, with heavy-ion collisions are included in the programme." - source

"Two beams of subatomic particles called 'hadrons' – either protons or lead ions – will travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world will analyse the particles created in the collisions using special detectors in a number of experiments dedicated to the LHC." - source2

And there is a danger of more than just a sensor getting damged happening. Even scientists working on the project have said there is a extremely remote possibility of micro black holes forming and joining with each other which could create larger black holes. Agreed they say that the chances are ridiculously small, but they are there. And what they are basing these estimates on is Hawkings Radiation which has never been tested or observed.

So basically, they don't know, and that's dangerous.
 
Ours state has been pushed up against a pretty good size blackhole of nothingness for a lot of years. If that one isn't powerful enough to suck up Texas, I'm not worried about a couple mini-holes over in europe.
 
i really dont understand the point of all this...why is it so important that we know all of this stuff and spend all of this moeny to do so...
 
Math Mudrat & Suckapuncha, forgive my stupid sentence. I had a point but it is lost to even me now.

General35, discovery leads industry. Relevence in the coming decades is determined by the science of today. The US is no longer a manufacturing country. We are apparently no longer a science country either. It makes you wonder what our role will be 50 years from now.
 
"unknown threats" = people scared of discovery

The dangers here have already been evaluated by people in a far better place to understand them. The reason why anyone knows what "micro blackholes" or "Strangelets" are, is because these people have aready considered the "threats". The thought that a botanist with an undergraduate minor in physics would understand the risks better, is laughable.
 
Sucka, I can't tell how you mean it but when you throw out phrases like "your beloved and trusted physicists" and "arrogance and ignorance", you make me think I've pissed you off. If that is the case, please let me know and I'll promise to try to tone it down.

I'll grant that physicists associated with the project are invested in its completion. That said, we aren't talking about cost overruns, skimming a little off the top or potentially poisoning a water supply, we are talking about the end of all life as we know it. It is hard to not be on the "don't destroy the earth" team.

The argument I have against the "the experts can't be trusted" logic is that if you have to be an expert to quantify the risk and experts can't be trusted... then what do you do? Who educates the laymen and once they are educated... then aren't they experts now as well?

If cosmic rays can turn into blackholes AND blackholes don't evaporate THEN then some percentage of all cosmic rays must result in blackholes. Since incalculable cosmic rays are cast off by stars every minute and stars have been burning for billions of years... then there should be an overwhelming number of blackholes in the universe travelling at near c speeds, each growing with every photon/particle/molecule it encounters. Those early microblackholes would have grown in size considerably and would be trailing wakes of dust parsecs long. We simply don't observe a universe which looks like this.

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While we wait, I recommend a good SF read from 1980 "Thrice Upon a Time":The Link

And to a lesser extent on the subject the Hugo Award winning "Hyperion":The Link
The Poet's Tale: "Hyperion Cantos"
 
at mia:no i wasn't pissed off or anything, sorry i gave that impression. Bad choice of words on my part, that's all. Again, sorry if I seemed to be attacking you.

I get carried away sometimes and I was just trying to say that it really gets to me when people just believe anything someone in a white coat with Ph.D. at the end of their name throws to them. Now you seem to have done the research and made your own estimations in conjunction with the physicists who have reported and are working on the project, which I respect. but unfortunately, most people aren't like that. The majority of the people I meet daily will pretty much believe anything someone tells them. (I know from experience as I used to work in tech support and would tell people some pretty crazy **** and they would eat it up).

And just to be clear, I understand how small the possibility, based on theoretical research, it is that the Earth will be destroyed. And I understand that I do daily tasks with greater risk. But those risks are limited to myself. This risk is worldwide, so I think despite the ridiculously small possibilities, it needs to be weighed and calculated much more carefully then some mundane, everyday task.

I just feel like the scientists are so eager to get this ball rolling, that they may be misrepresenting issues that the layperson would not understand, because really, who is going to challenge them? And maybe it isn't even intentional. Maybe they are just so excited about their new toy, and maybe getting the chance to prove all these theories correct, that they just feel that there is no possibility of anything going wrong.

My statement of ignorance and arrogance was directed to the scientists, and not you. I read articles and look at research all the time where scientists will state something as fact, only to disprove it a couple of weeks, months, or years later. Scientists constantly tell us things like they are the truth, and then they turn out not to be. So it makes me uneasy when they are going to fool around with something they don't fully understand, but act as if they know how the universe was created and how it works. No matter how many theories based on how much evidence you collect, they don't KNOW how old the universe is, how it was formed, or how it maintains itself. For instance, they are trying to create dark matter, which may not even exist. Maybe there is no dark matter, maybe our laws of gravity that we can observe aren't the same in other parts of the universe. But if you try telling that to a physicist that subscribes to the current, popular model of the universe, they will tell you all day that you are wrong and not even consider Newtonian Laws to not be applicable all over the universe. And that kind of arrogance is dangerous. And not admitting your own ignorance is dangerous. So scientists who are afraid to admit they don't know something, and just say, "Don't worry, everything will work just as planned.", worry me.



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While there's a lot more to it than this simple math, of course, you have to realize that this activity better be 6.6 billion times safer (if not more) than whatever I do on a daily basis in order to be as safe as my activities.

Destroying the Earth would immediately kill that many people as well as eliminate the chance for future people to live. My daily activities might kill me.
 
Sucka, I just keep coming back the fact that the universe creates particles with more than 300,000,000 times the energy that the LHC is capable of producing, and wonder what the big deal is. We have measured cosmic rays (through their collisions) with the mass of a proton that have the kinetic energy of a tennis ball going 180 miles an hour. We are talking about particles that are going so near the speed of light that after billions of years they'd only be a few feet behind a photon from the same event. The difference in energy between high energy cosmic rays we've detected and the LHC at full power is unimaginably greater than the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it. And this is only counting the cosmic rays we've measured, who knows what's rained on the Earth that we haven't measured?

It is one thing to be wary when someone tells you, "you're safe". It is quite another when an entire field of study tells you resoundingly, "you're safe". We are talking about thousands of people representing countless countries, universities and enterprises who are all telling you, "it's safe". I refuse to believe that any significant portion of this group are prepared to roll the dice on all of civilization. It is hard not to overestimate the concerns when a level of expertise is required to even understand them... but there is a difference between caution and paranoia.

As to the other, Sucka, I wasn't offended in the slightest. That said, I am told that I frequently make people feel like I'm talking down to them. It is a trait I am not proud of, so I was just being cautious that wasn't acting like a douche. Thanks for the feedback.
 
Huck, the LHC at optimal power will produce reactions of about 0.0000056% as energetic as the naturally produced collisions we've already observed. Again, noting that observation only sets the lower limit of what nature is able to do, and that we really haven't been looking for very long or with much thoroughness.

The LHC allows us to control collisions to better study them, but it doesn't come close to what is nearly constantly bombarding astronauts in space, or what has possibly has collided with you personally in your lifetime.
 
The statement that a non-evaporating microblackhole at relative rest to earth is more dangerous than, a non-evaporating microblackhole at near c speeds is only valid if you assume that the earth is the ONLY place in the cosmos that microblackholes can be created. If that is not the case, and why would it be, then some percentage of the cosmic rays we are bombarded with would in fact ALREADY be microblackholes.

As these microblackholes passed through any massive object two things would happen. First, the blackhole would grow expontentially as it added to its mass, since more mass equals greater surface area which means more interaction which means more mass... like a snowball rolling down a mountian, but faster. Second, the blackhole would still have to follow spacetime which would slow its progress as it encounters other massive objects. The slower relative speed would allow it to feed from a larger proximity, allowing it to grow even faster. The sum result, after no less than 13.7 billion years of even a small percentage of cosmic rays turning into nonevaporating blackholes, there would be a massive population of free floating small-to-mid size blackholes bombarding our planet, each leaving an exponentally larger exit wound in the earth, subtly changing our orbital path and trailing parsecs of debris in its wake. And this is only the high energy cosmic rays.

Lower energy cosmic rays, like those from our sun, would yeild a similar energy to what we will see from the LHC. These particles hit us far more often and sometimes do not escape our gravity well after the collision. The point being, our planet and atmosphere see LHC equivalent reactions and much much greater all the time. We would have noticed blackholes far before now if this were the case.
 
Why worry?? President Bush knows all about super massive black holes (let alone the puny ones), he is surrounded with strangelets all the time! I'm sure he'll issue a fatwa to the X'es of evil in Geneva and save us all.
 
From the abstract of the CERN report you posted:

"We find no basis for any conceivable threat"

I really don't want to be a douche, but you are cherry picking physics here. I think it's great that you read a few popular articles on physics and got riled up about blach holes and ****, but when you look at actual physics papers, peer-reviewed, and written by physicists (not journalists), the conclusion is that there is identically ZERO threat.

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