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Large Hadron Collider Sparks 'Doomsday' Lawsuit
smooth wombat writes "In what can only be considered a bizarre court case, a former nuclear safety officer and others are suing the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation and CERN to stop the use of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) until its safety is reassessed. The plaintiffs cite three possible 'doomsday' scenarios which might occur if the LHC becomes operational: the creation of microscopic black holes which would grow and swallow matter, the creation of strangelets which, if they touch other matter, would convert that matter into strangelets or the creation of magnetic monopoles which could start a chain reaction and convert atoms to other forms of matter. CERN will hold a public open house meeting on April 6 with word having been spread to some researchers to be prepared to answer questions on microscopic black holes and strangelets if asked."
OMG! John Titor's story is true!
Are they serious? They make it sound like a Pandora's Box that could destroy the whole planet, or solar system.
The rest of it just sounds so bizarre it's unreal. The fact that it is people on the inside saying it is somewhat concerning. I don't even know what to think, but those "headlines" are truly spectacular.
Captain Zapp Brannigan: We'll just set a new course for that empty region over there, near that blackish, holeish thing.
Large "Hardon" Collider Sparks 'Doomsday' Lawsuit ? I was gonna say, must have been a pretty big woody.
Warning: Corny karma killing post above.
xkcd
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I think they're more afraid it will create dinosaurs.
portal storms incoming?
The things that they've said they are concerned about sound like science fiction fare. Is there any real evidence that these issues are actually founded in anything more substantial than overactive imaginations?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I smell FUD. It says in the article that most scientists dismiss the whole doomsday machine theory.
I make websites and stuff. Buy one.
So what if it creates microscopic black holes? They'd dissipate in a fraction of a second. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation
And the only way to stop it is to detonate a nuclear bomb and scorch off our atmosphere...
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/solarsystem/2006_mag_recon.html
I havent seen any massive blackholes emerge and gobble up the sun or solar system. How the hell would the puny LHC be able to do it?
The jerks suing are just trying to make a name for themselves.
They went over *that* before they started building the thing. The LHC isn't going to do anything that hasn't been happening in the upper atmosphere for billions of years. We can't hope to make anything like the Oh My God particle (that one had as much kinetic energy as a thrown tennis ball in a single particle).
Until we can do something that nature isn't doing all the time, we don't need to worry about anything happening that hasn't already happened.
Hold on, haven't we been bombarded by even higher energy particles from space for billions of years now without us, or for that matter the world (as in the rest of all visible matter) turning into a black hole?
This is like suing a medium doing a seance because it might let loose a demon on the world. Let's hope in this instance the court actually listens to the science involved.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
What happens if an escaping convict accidentally wanders into the collider, gains super powers, and tries to take over the world?
...they wouldn't be around to complain about it, so what's the issue?
Of course it means we'd all die without actually seeing Duke Nukem Forever (DNF - hmm...)
The Mothership
Well -they were afraid when they detonated the first above ground nuke as well -thought they might torch the atmosphere, but they did it anyway -better dead than.......?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat's_Cradle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-nine
I'm just sayin'
that strangelets already are infecting the planet. We should take this seriously and stop the threat now. Begin with passing a law that prohibits miniture blackholes, strangelets and other earth threatening things, then we will be protected by the law.
We finally come up with a solution that will stop the Iraq war once and for all, and now they are trying to stop it. Do these people love war or something?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
there's never any attempt at understanding the physics of any of this, it's just a nice way to scare people who don't know any better. never mind the fact that cosmic rays hit the atmosphere all the time with at least the amount of energy the LHC is going for- you'd think that over billions of years if there was ever a time for strangelets and blackholes to kill us all it would have happened by now.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I think we can all agree that even if it does end the world it would be an even greater crime to build a machine that big and then not turn it on. I would rather be converted into strangelets than living in THAT world.
I work in the building where the LHC is housed and I can tell you that there is no danger at all. Seriously, this is just a bunch of fear, uncerta
If it works but does nothing like the worriers claim, then it will be a great success. If it works but does everything that the worriers claim, then nobody will have to worry about paying lawyer fees.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
A nice percent of what we know didnt come from calculating that something should happen and that it happens actually, but from where something happens when it "shouldnt". Are we killing the experimental method here?
There is a good wikipedia section on this with plenty of references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Safety_concerns
Can we have the "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense" tag? I've been concerned about the effects of building larger and larger supercolliders on my planet for years now. The whole point of building these things and playing with them is that WE DON'T KNOW exactly what's going to happen when we fire them up, and we learn a lot when we do. I'm all for research, but could we at least stick these things out in space where they are less likely to destroy the entire planet when something unexpected happens? (How about one of the earth-sun LaGrange points? Or maybe Mars is more practical?) Am I the only person that thinks that replicating conditions from the first couple nanoseconds of the universe on the surface of our only planet without actually knowing what's going to happen first is a bad thing? Frankly I think we've been lucky so far, and we need to stop playing Russian Roulette without even knowing the rules.
Knowledge != Intelligence
When Columbus left to accidentally find a new continent, he was sure to sail off the edge of the world. Or come back with unearthly monsters chasing him down. Where are all the zombie-apocalypse theories? Or the gate-to-hell theories we normally see related to this stuff in games, books and movies?
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
I can't count the number of times I've made a code change that I thought was completely safe, only to have something go wrong. It's the whole reason why enterprise type system have upgrade plans, and changes are first tried on an test system -- just in case.
In IT terms, our planet is a production system, and pushing the limits and testing the API's fault tolerance on the one system that absolutely must keep running correctly is a bad idea. Just like upgrading some random userspace daemon should not ever panic the operating system, there's no way to know that we won't trigger something that all our math and physics says should be impossible.
We don't know everything about physics, and so we should not be doing these experiments on a live production system... we should do them on a test system, like the moon for instance.
if a wikipedia entry says they're safe, that's good enough for me. The one truth in the universe is that everything in wikipedia is 100% iron-clad correct.
for giving me something interesting to look up.
However - to prevent them from spontaneously mutating into something horrible - I suggest we shoot them now. By their own reasoning they should commit suicide to save the world.
-- Put crudely, the world is an extremely large problem instance. (Russel/Norvig Artificial Intelligence)
(see today's xkcd to understand ;-)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16322014.700-a-black-hole-ate-my-planet.html
"Within 24 hours, the laboratory issued a rebuttal: the risk of such a catastrophe was essentially zero"
Just to preface this; I'm a 3ed year undergrad student in physics on track to get a PhD in high energy physics. That being said, I spoke with my professor about this, he explained to me that the formation of world swallowing black holes is so small is negligible. He explained to me (if I remember correctly) that high energy cosmic rays have been bombarding the Earth for billions of years, at much higher energies than the LHC could ever produce. If these world-ending things were to form they would have already, long before humans were around and we wouldn't be here to study these fascinating phenomenon.
Doom doom do-doom doom do-doom doom doom! Doom doom doom! Doom! Doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom! Doom doom dooooom! Dooom! Doom do-doom doom do-doom doom do-do-doom doom! Doom doom doom! Doom! Doom do-doom doom do-doom. Doomy doomy doomy doom! Doom! Doom dee-doom doom dee-doom doom! Doomy doomy doomy doom! Doom doom do-doom! Doom dee-doom doom dee-doom! Doom doom doom! The end.
Will they be distributing them at the open house meeting? Perhaps that will calm those worried about the doomsday scenarios.
Could this explain why we haven't found the universe teeming with extra terrestrial life? Every civilization becomes more and more advanced, then starts doing more and more powerful experiments, and thinks, "the chance of destroying our planet is really slight... we're perfectly safe going ahead with this." Then, poof!
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
As you sow so shall you reap.
After reading the tenth or twentieth scientific article that interviewed people working on the LHC, that includes some wild speculation about remote possibilities that might come to pass when it comes online... this surprises me not at all. I understand being a bit sensationalist to make a more entertaining article. I understand hyping the potential a bit to help keep that government funding coming in. Still, black holes, strangelets, cascading subatomic events, time travelers finding the earliest point to return to... it was a bit much. Maybe you get promoted in experimental physics by making waves and smoking pot with the boss. The you want your name in a magazine so you spin some half-assed idea as though it was a real possibility. The only problem is, some people listened and are now worried.
This is why the Manhattan project was top-secret: two out of six physicists think it might destroy the planet... okay those are good odds, let's try it.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/solarsystem/2006_mag_recon.html
So is that idiot going to sue the Sun too?
My Christian faith makes me just shrug this off, and say "go ahead" to the scientists. As a Protestant, I believe that the fate of mankind and the Earth is in God's hands, not our own, and that God would never allow His plan to be stopped by human efforts, including scientific experiments.
Part of what enabled the explosion of science in Christian Europe was Reformed Protestant theology. Reformed Protestants reject concepts like luck, chance and superstition on the theological grounds that the represent restrictions on God's sovereignty.
Last time a bunch of lawyers and politicians tried to legislate the value of pi, they got 3.2.
I remember hearing the same kind of dooms day predictions about RHIC at Brookhaven national labs. Also it was said that some scientists predicted the first atomic bomb would ignite the atmosphere destroying the planet. At any rate none of those doomsday predictions occurred and RHIC has been operating since 2000.
But in the 80s, most scientists dismissed global warming.
(I'm not making the case for the end of the world; I'd have to learn the math and get evil lackeys.)
By rejection of luck and chance, I am referring to the Reformed belief that nothing happens randomly. It happens because God has either ordained it, or allowed it. There is nothing that fails to go through that review process.
That's natural and this is man made.
Deleted
I would worry more about pigeons. http://xkcd.com/401/
...the average person will see this, think "Oh, well, it's a nuclear safety officer making these claims", and completely buy the entire swath of drivel. Come on, people, it's only quantum mechanics, it's not that hard!
Linacs?
Clearly they do, and clearly they don't (look closely). A shame, and for me more worrisome than theoretical black hole doom...
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
Hey, it could happen!
I read Usenet for the articles.
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0089869/
How could a tiny black hole engender a positive feedback loop? I'm not even speaking of Hawking's radiation here; but how would a few g big blackhole do anything? Its mass being tiny, it's not going to have much gravity at all, so it's not going to attract anything to grow. At most will behave like a heavy particle. Big black holes suck up stuff because their gravity overcomes all other forces, but here that can't be the case.
Clearly, they have mistaken the catchy name for the definition.
While this is the first I've heard of lawsuits, the subject of a possible catastrophe due to a new particle accelerator is not a new idea. This has actually been a cycle that's happened a couple of times, IIRC, usually when someone mentions the possibility of black holes (or even AdS-CFT black hole analogues) being created in a new particle accelerator. Scientists have actually thought about this and published a number of papers on the topic. Here are two that came up easily via Google Scholar:
The latter is freely available on the arXiv. From the conclusion:
In short, similar events occur naturally due to highly energetic cosmic rays, so, even if we assume we know almost nothing about the physics of the hypothetical catastrophic event, we can infer from teh fact we're still here that such a catastrophe is very unlikely. Based on this conclusion, and the fairly wide acceptance of that conclusion amongst experts, I think it's safe to say this lawsuit is without merit.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
I meant to write "a few micrograms", but this braindead pice of shit slashdot can't parse UTF-8 for mu god damn it.
It's been done http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrice_Upon_a_Time before...
The plaintiffs cite three possible 'doomsday' scenarios which might occur if the LHC becomes operational: the creation of microscopic black holes which would grow and swallow matter, the creation of strangelets which, if they touch other matter, would convert that matter into strangelets or the creation of magnetic monopoles which could start a chain reaction and convert atoms to other forms of matter.
It was a stupid flick with Adrian Paul and what's-her-name from Stargate SG-1 and a completely wasted Ben Kingsley. Netflix should have warned me how stupid it was.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I remember reading a Sci-Fi novel a few years ago where a fusion generator ended up creating microscopic black holes and threatening the earth (fusion from compressing deuterium pellets with lasers). The reason, in the novel, for the black holes not disapearing in a fraction of a second is that the Hawking Radiation was non-linear (in the novel) and as such the black holes lasted long enough to start growing.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Can you imagine a more interesting article? Who's going to be the first to write a novel based on that premise! Micro Black holes! Strangelets! What in the hell have those physicists been smoking!
Here there be MONSTERS!
and just forget the whole thing.
Luddites!
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Good gracious! I just hope it doesn't get into the wrrong hands.
Much of Lexx series 4 had a back story like that. (snip)in the fourth season of the Sci-Fi TV series Lexx, a mad scientist developes a machine to detect and measure the Higgs boson. The result of the experiment causes a massive singularity to form, threatening to destroy the Earth.(/snip)
Still, great publicity for the hadron, at least people will be watching the experiments with great attention, nothing like a "scientists might destroy the planet to solve lunch money argument" headline to promote paper sales.
gorg will be rubbing two sticks together next wednesday. He hopes to create a sustainable heat source.
Mrog, who new gorg as a child, is trying to stop it claiming this 'fire' may ravage the cave.
Next up, a balanced report on why the wheel should be avoid at all cost due to it's risk.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
THIS is what happens when you turn it on!
P.S. Xkcd may be super-awesome, but this post is in no way meant to endorse the irradiating of little birds or helicopters...
... tomorrow it's the mad grad student!
Ethan "Bubblegum" Tate: We need some kind of Doomsday device to create an implosion like that.
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Doomsday device? Aha! Now the ball's in Farnsworth's court.
[Pulls on a lever; a platform appears with several Doomsday devices]
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: I suppose I can part with one and still be feared.
I drink to make other people interesting!
Frankly, when I hear such statements, I feel like I'm being told in a condascending way to "don't worry about it, we know what we're doing!" I don't know what "essentially zero" really means... What could happen in that 0.00000000000000000001% of "cases"? I'm guessing these 2 guys do know something of real concern...
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
I can't see any reason this same research can't be done through prayer.
Just tell the critics they are not Atomic Playboys....
"The bomb will not start a chain-reaction in the water converting it all to gas and letting the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom.
It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole.
It will not destroy gravity.
I am not an atomic playboy, as one of my critics labeled me, exploding these bombs to satisfy my personal whim."
Vice Admiral W.H.P. Blandy, Commander Joint Task Force One, Operation Crossroads
I so read that as "Large Hard on"
Yeah I know off-topic mod me down. But it was funny....
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
This is old news, came up during the design phase of the LHC. I heard a simple common sense based answer:
If high energy particle accelerators could create particles that could destroy the Earth, then you would see this effect all over the universe. Why, you ask? Because there are natural accelerators everywhere, many of energy much higher than anything we could hope to build on the Earth's surface
I can't believe this is STILL getting modded FUNNY. It's not anymore, kay?
That's OK, if a scientist gets a black hole in his chest and roams the city sucking up everything, Booster Gold will save us...
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
> What happens if an escaping convict accidentally wanders into the collider, gains super powers, and tries to take over the world?
Huh? That makes no sense at all!
Bush didn't get any super powers.
Its only a tiny little type-13 planet... Its doomed anyway.
Anybody got a giant bug we can ride away on?
Maybe the rarity of intelligent life in the universe does not owe to infrequent arisal. What if the structure of the universe contains a built-in pitfall: the scientific understanding required to build large colliders is far less than that required to anticipate the lethal consequences their operation. Thus, progression of scientific understanding among all technically advanced species leads to self-extermination.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
But it's nice to know our tin-foil-hat people have kindred spirits out in the world...
This theory provides a compelling explanation for why, despite the inevitability provided by immense timescales, we have yet to observe alien visitors; the physics of our universe tends to eliminate those species that investigate the sort of physics that lead to interstellar spacecraft. Thus, the only long-lived species one may expect to discover in the universe are those that do not employ high energy physics which, naturally, precludes all efforts at detection.
It is also possible that I've been working on makefiles for too many hours and no longer merit your attention. You are to be forgiven; you didn't know that when you started reading.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
If a strangelet chain reaction were possible, then it wouldn't stop at earth, right? So why haven't we detected any strangelet stars? Heck if one of them went nova, we should be seeing strangelet galaxies, no?
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Yes, this nuclear safety officer should get more credibility than others outside the LHC team. Here's why: random Joe Schmoe from Vermont or some random state has no experience, no education in this area etc. His credibility is neutral, as would be that of any member of the general public. The nuclear safety officer may not have any more educational experience than Joe Schmoe, but he works on the LHC, and is therefore in a position to hear things that some random member of the public may not be exposed to. Therefore, we have to give him somewhat higher credibility, and at least listen to his concerns and ask where he got them from. Could be he overheard the head scientist talking about it, or saw a report on the subject. He has access to much more information than a random individual (especially since scientists are in the business of being open and often don't secure their research as heavilly as, say, the military might)
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
I'm just waiting till the nearest farmer sues them, claiming that those little black holes are why his hens stopped laying eggs.
If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?
- Albert Einstein
Show up in a wheelchair, dark glasses and a right arm with a mind of its own, und begin to tell zem how ve thought it vas a gut idea und ve haf a plan to repopulate ze earth!
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
The studies I talked about in the parent make almost no assumption about what the catastrophe might be or how it would work. If you want to get into the physics of the specific things people are worried about, then there are even more reasons to think it's not a significant danger. There was a report about the possible disaster scenarios for RHIC that should mostly apply to the LHC, and here's a paper discussing the possibilities for the LHC. Finally, it looks like Wikipedia has a pretty decent discussion with references.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Not this collection of morons again. They wandered about the high energy physics landscape nattering on about 'black hole signatures' after the Brookhaven collider made what *appears* to be quark gluon plasma. As I understand it, there is a fellow who is just bad at math and wants to keep his grant money coming.
Fortunately, court documents have probably not spelled the word properly. You see, for the US Government, "Nukular" is the legal spelling of the word. And the documents will be tossed out.
One theory for this is that after a certain point, civilisations will always wipe themselves out. So we never get to hear from aliens with millions of years of scientifc progress under their belts, because they never get to exist.
So every so often we do something which has a 0.1% chance of screwing civilisation. Keep taking those chances for long enough, sooner or later it's GAME OVER
I may be wrong here but wasn't Homer a Safety Officer for a nuclear power plant ? What is he doing working at CERN ?
Would those be strange hardons or charm hardons?
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Good news is, this could usher in a new age of science. Bad news is it could kill us all.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
The first one was a B movie that was on scifi
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433883/
For sure they should turn the damn thing on, but I'd be more worried for the people working near the LHC than anything else. I bet there will be some very interesting accidents due to, for example, the GIANT magnets they have to direct the particles around the collider. If those things aren't well shielded...
Try searching Google Scholar for "large hardon collider." You might be surprised.
You may be thinking of the novel "Earth," by David Brin, which includes artifical black holes threatening the Earth as a portion of the plot.
Everyone knows Bruce Banner used his superpowers to stop people taking over the world. Besides, Strangelets are just highly parallelized Doctor Stranges, using Linux threadlets, and everyone knows Doctor Strange is one of the Good Guys.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
these are all mythical objects
1) Microscopic black holes require a matter density higher than elementary particles possess. Ergo, once the microscopic black hole tries to swallow an elementary particle, the elementary particle swallows it, making it no longer a black hole, but just part of the particle's matter, with a true radius larger than its schwarzchild radius. Black Hole Down.
2) Strangelets? Don't exist. Don't even have a decent theoretical underpinning. You might as well be worried about the production of caloric or magic.
3) Magnetic monopoles also don't exist. Magnetism is a description of the curvature of electric flux. Imagining a magnetic monopole is like imagining a left with no right, or an up with no down.
And, honestly, these people have no sense of adventure. The universe will end some day. Why be so arrogant as to insist that it be after you die, solo, from something less interesting?
Life imitates art. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hole_Man. --Woof!
If you don't have one, you're not going to find it funny.
Thanks! You just gave me an idea for my next film!
I hate printers.
I found this on Wikipedia (so it must be true). "What came later to be known as "The Black Mesa Incident" was triggered by a seemingly innocuous and routine experiment into teleportation. As part of the Anomalous Materials team in Sector C of the facility, research associate Gordon Freeman introduced a crystalline specimen..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mesa_Research_Facility
Large Hardon Collider...
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
snip: In 1933, Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd had proposed that if any neutron-driven process released more neutrons than those required to start it, an expanding nuclear chain reaction might result. Chain reactions were familiar as a phenomenon from chemistry (where they typically caused explosions and other run-away reactions), but Szilárd was proposing them for a nuclear reaction, for the first time. However, Szilárd had proposed to look for such reactions in the lighter atoms, and nothing of the sort was found. Upon experimentation shortly after the uranium fission discovery, Szilárd found that the fission of uranium released two or more neutrons on average, and immediately realized that a nuclear chain reaction by this mechanism was possible in theory. Szilárd kept this secret at first because he feared its use as a weapon by fascist governments. He convinced others to do so, but identical results were soon published by the Joliot-Curie group, to his great dismay.
If there was any likelyhood of civilisations wiping themselves from existance with the creation of microscopic black holes, then you would expect the universe to be full of black holes where each subsequent civilisation had extinguished itself.
Now take a look into the night sky... How many black holes do you see?
None!
So obviously, this is completely safe...
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
I'm fascinated by the LHC and can't wait to see it started up.
Most likely all that will happen is we will learn some new useful info about physics. The doom-sayers will then find something else to waste people's time about.
Consider if things actually DO go wrong and it swallows up the earth. So what? Nobody will be left to regret it anyway. So let 'er rip.
I am going to wait for the porn version of this experiment.
The DVD will be called:
Large Hardon Experiment Goes Interracial!
Creates black holes and fills them with loads of quarks!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
We have no idea whether the laws of physics will remain constant from one second to the next, let alone what the outcome of a given experiment will be. However, the popular consensus is that things will carry on much as they were. For things we don't understand, we look to experts. Most of those experts work at CERN, and unlike the Manhattan project, it isn't classified - wouldn't you expect one of those thousands of people to make some sort of noise if they thought there was a risk of something going wrong?
xterm -n 8
http://xkcd.com/164/
One of the premises of Intelligent Design, as described in "The Privileged Planet", is that God/whatever not only planned for intelligent beings, but planned for them to explore their universe. The book talks about our ideal placement in the milky way for observation, yet with sufficient protection from gamma bursts, the fortuitous placement of the moon allowing solar eclipses to reveal the corona, etc. A Bible passage would be Proverbs, "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, and the glory of kings to search out a matter." Part of trusting God in this viewpoint is assuming that, barring deliberate or negligent self destruction, the next discovery won't destroy us. Although each advance in physics brings more and more dangerous knowledge to light, we will be able cope technically. (Moral failings are another matter.)
I never thought I'd SEE a resonance cascade, let alone create one!
The experts say it's a 1 in 50 million possibility of something "bad" happening. At most. And these guys don't mess around. They'll take the zaniest theory they can find. And still the best they can come up with is 1/50,000,000. I think we're pretty frickin' safe.
Plus it's in Switzerland, when have they ever done anything that's been considered a threat?
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18925423.600-three-cosmic-enigmas-one-audacious-answer.html
IBM doesn't play chess with the Universe.
Jackson cited the example of Paul Dixon, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii at Hilo who has been saying for more than a decade that experiments at Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator are in danger of touching off an artificial supernova
They are using a *psychologist's* arguments? Psychologist, physicist... I guess they can be hard to tell apart... if you are horribly dyslexic...
Uh... if this was possible, our planet would never have existed. Cosmic rays whack our atmosphere all the time with far more energy than the LHC could hope to generate. Even if this causes a momentary microscopic black hole, it obviously doesn't matter, since we're still here.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
They're all afraid this thing will prove, once and for all, that there is no god.
(sorry, been hanging around 4chan too much)
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Such a dissaster would go a long way in explaining the Fermi Paradox. We don't run into aliens because they all destroy themselves soon after they form.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
From the article:"Smashing protons together at high enough energies could create new combinations of quarks, the particles that protons are made of.."
Protons are meant to be with electrons not with each other. The want to create gaylets! Those gay particles are not the "God particle" they are the "Sin particle"! OMG!
We physicists enjoy watching the public squirm as we go around proclaiming that we can destroy the world at any time. We know that none of this stuff is going to happen, but when journalists overhear us joking around they take things a little too seriously and let their minds wander to the headlines that sell best.
In other words, the experts already know that these concerns are unfounded. The people who are concerned don't actually know the physics behind these doomsday scenarios and why they can not happen.
I really hope we find a magnetic monopole at LHC (I have no idea how we would actually detect it, the doomsday story is just FUD). It won't do anything, but the existence of a magnetic monopole explains the quantization of electric charge (which is fairly important). I also hope we see some deviations in the standard model at the higher luminosity runs.
Let's take bets on it.
I'll good for about $100K that it will not destroy the earth. Any takers?
I ran this past some friends a bit smarter about this sort of stuff then I am, below is their responses. Duh-didn't they ask this question when they started work on the LHC? And what about the center of the sun? Don't see any strangelets there.....
Sandya Narayanswami, PhD --------------------- Does this come with an Earth-back guarantee?
The first scenario is absurd, since black holes are not physically
possible. It is as if he were claiming that faeries and demons would be
produced in the collisions. The next two may also be on a par with the
faeries, I'm not entirely sure. If any of them were true, then
high-energy, heavy-nucleus cosmic rays should have long since destroyed
all the stars and planets in the Universe.
Forrest Bishop
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Karma whore that I am, I am posting anonymously:
We haven't approached God status yet, not even close. In the ability of man to learn we are so far from the truth we don't understand yet what we are talking about.
If they turned this on today, it is going to make no impact on our tommorow. We are about to learn something new, granted, but there is nothing that we can do without us going "uhhhh, is it safe for us to turn this on?" before we step over the threshold.
I wish, I truly wish man kind was at that point, but with everything we are doing (Including, and especially the US here) I find that so far from believable it's not even funny.
Maybe this is my belief in a higher being or otherwise, we can't fuck up that bad. Not yet.
Seriously, lets hope that the 'Large Hardon Collider' is all that it was dicked up to be.
Say what you will, but look back at the development of the nuclear bomb. At that time they didn't know if a nuclear blast would burn up the atmosphere. But they exploded it just the same.
Sure, the LHC doesn't many things that don't occur in nature on a daily basis. But think of stupid mundane items for us, things like plastics. They don't occur in nature. There are thousands of things that we invent here that never occur in nature by itself.
Who is to say that we won't create something that annihilates us? And looking at the atom bomb, do we really want to trust that they wouldn't put our existence in jeopardy? Is it that funny, to want to err on the side of caution, no matter how stupendously small the chances are of something going wrong?
I just finished reading Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman, great book, excellent sf. The central plot hinges on a similar idea:
SPOILER AHEAD
There's a giant accelerator being built around Jupiter, that will simulate the first .01 second of the universe... only the central characters figure out that it won't be just a simulation, but a new one, expanding and overwriting this part of this one.
There are end-of-world religious nuts who find that out and strive to make sure it happens. Much mayhem and a touch of soldier cyberpunk. Fun stuff and excellent speculation, especially the other part about what it's liked to be jacked in with other people.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I'm suing the Jews to stop them going back to Israel. Have they not read Revelations?
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
"""
Walter Wagner graduated UC Berkeley with a Minor in Physics, and a Major in Biology. Later, he discovered a novel particle in a balloon-borne cosmic ray detector, initially identified as a magnetic monopole. Though its identity remains uncertain, it is definitely not within the standard repertoire of known particles. After a three-year break from science to attend law school, Dr. Wagner resumed work in Physics and Biology at the US Veterans Administration Medical Center in San Francisco, working in Nuclear Medicine and Health Physics. He then embarked on teaching Science and Mathematics, from grade school to college. Dr. Wagner developed a botanical garden in Hawaii, and continues involvement with several professional associations, including Health Physics Society and Society of Nuclear Medicine.
"""
So, this is a guy who discovered a magnetic monopole (which would theoretically tear the universe apart, right?) and works at a VA med center? He only has a minor in physics? The "nuclear safety blah blah" in this case means nuclear medicine, as in the guy who makes sure no one mishandles the radioactive dye they use at every hospital in the US.
Some expert. Now give us yours: What qualifies you to judge this mans' credentials?
You can't take the sky from me...
I just looked back and realized there's a typo (from pasting) in the parent. It should read 10^9 (as in 1 billion not 109) years.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Umm... people have had the same concerns about Fermilab and other accelerators and nothing has happened. There is no real scientific grounds to these ideas and certainly not enough to stop the march of scientific progress.
... though it is somewhat funny to me sometimes that I spent so much time getting that degree ;) )
Interesting note, some people thought the A-bomb would ignite the entire atmosphere or perhaps cause a chain reaction and destroy the earth death star style (but without the death star). Well, guess what, the government went ahead and secretly did that anyway. Believe me, if anyone in the know really believed that the LHC might blow up the planet it would get a lot more funding and be controlled by the military.
p.s. I have a Ph.D. in particle physics (not a joke
I notice from TFA the lawsuit has been filed in Hawaii, as CERN is in Europe surely even a succesful lawsuit could simply be ignored?
I was under the impression that whilst the US has helped develop the LHC it doesn't actually own it and as such has no control over deciding whether it's allowed to start and stop. Is there something vital the US still brings to the project that could be used to prevent the project starting should the lawsuit be a success?
I was going to make a comment about how it seems typically American to try and create a lawsuit to shut down something they have no right to try and shutdown (see things like the recent Wikileaks domain fiasco) but in all honesty I'm not sure abuse of the court system is really much less in many European countries now, the only difference being the European countries at least tend to make the sensible judgement on the case even if the case itself is idiotic. With again for example the Wikileaks case the judgement was just simply stupid and the fact the judge had to backtrack so quickly only emphasised the level of idiocy that can occur in some courts. At least cases like this were thrown out in British courts for example:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7243656.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7292657.stm
Hopefully (un)common sense will similarly prevail and save the day.
Large Hadron Collider... I think you can guess how I read this at first.
another example of unfounded worrying. back when the first large power stations were being built, someone had the idea that the electro magnetic fields would reduce/eliminate/ or reverse the earth's magnetic field. So generators had to be constructed in pairs, one spinning clockwise the other, counterclockwise. Seems silly but people were actually so concerned that this was done. The theories weren't all there yet, so any dumb possibility was taken seriously.
thousands of power plants later, we know that a small(when compared to the earth) magnetic field will not reverse the planet's poles.
They're using a very talented team of scientists to work with the machine. I hear the guy who's doing the honour of throwing the main switch is some guy called "Gordon Freeman". I'm sure things will be just fine.
Hey, now that's an interesting looking crab. OH SHI
at each power step up. This has been common practice as each new experiment is designed. I agree that there is no risk with the LHC. The cosmic events that have been recorded are higher energy than the LHC will produce, but I do believe that strange matter is possible; there is some evidence of degenerate stellar objects at density ranges that imply quark stars. This stuff probably can't exist outside the core of a neutron star, but for all we know every planet where intelligent life preceded us is a little ball of strange quarks now. The best course of action is to take a realistic look at possible problems that could arise when a new accelerator with increased energy output is brought on line.
Curiosity Kills.
A murder committed using a Microscopic Black Hole.
This scientific team was orbiting Mars, and their power source on the space craft was using some kind of high energy collisions which had accidentally created a Microscopic Black Hole. It was being held in the spacecraft because of the high energy magnets. These two scientists had been going at it the whole long trip and a bit of the space crazies came over one of the scientists. He called his colleague to an area 'below' the Microscopic Black Hole (you know, underneath the magnets with the gravity well of Mars underneath him.)
The mad scientist let the magnets go and the MBH went through the ship, through the scientist's head, and out of the ship to the center of Mars. The tidal forces of the MBH tore apart the ill-fated scientist as surely as a bullet travelling through the body. But there was no evidence of anything. The mad scientist got away with it. And he doomed Mars to boot.
They should make a CSI based on that.
Can you imagine if said swarthy savants were merely passing wind from the comfort of a secondhand recliner in their parents' basement whilst their pudgy, cheese doodle-encrusted digits do all the heavy lifting of the week?
Who's scruffy-looking?!
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Just before they flip the switch someone says.
Prepare for unforeseen consequences, Eli.
Oh well, in any case that theory must explain the SETI project results. The minute a society creates a machine capable of the magnetic flux density necessary to be noticed by an alternate extra-planetary society everything just goes FOOP (thats "poof" spelled backwards, since it is an implosion after all). But the bigger question here is would it make a noise since nobody would be around to hear it? Any decent theory should make predictions!
Said professor Pthogh, waving his tentacle at the viewtank, "is your only warning that within its orbit lies a planetary mass black hole. These are the greatest finds you can hope for in your quest for relics of alien intelligence. Eventually this invisible beast will de-orbit and devour its parent star, becoming indistinguishable from the billions of other sun-massed black holes in the universe. Until then it serves as a marker that an intelligent race grew up here, lived, learned, and died.
Within or near the stellar system that is home to one of these, relics of a civilization are always found. They litter the surface of airless moons; they orbit the star independently; probes are often found heading out of the system. We have found several thousand so far.
Those of you in Sacred Studies program will learn further of the terrible experiments that cause this phenomena. Speculation by the population in general on the subject is, er, discouraged."
"This one though is special though." Professor Pthogh looked again at the tank, his voice taking a more somber tone. "This one is ours."
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere routinely have higher energy than anything the LHC can achieve. So if high-energy particle collisions are going to produce strangelets and black holes, we've already been doomed for around four billion years.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
You have hit the nail on the head, as Jesus put it, "Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day [is] the evil thereof." But that does not excuse lack of prudence when you do have knowledge of consequences, Proverbs 27:12, "A prudent [man] foresees evil [and] hides himself; The simple pass on [and] are punished."
I'm very much pro-science, but there can't be a blithe assumption that everything we do is risk-free.
The trust God approach actually does not deny risk. It just says that "all things work together for good to them that love God" in the end. Kind of like the Princess Bride where the hero endures incredible hardship and pain before riding off into the sunset with his true love.
Nevermind the physics what exactly does this US court expect to happen if they rule against it and we totally ignore the ruling, which is what will happen, and we go ahead anyway? It will make the US courts look pretty silly.
Imagine a double helix. One string represents the strong force ,the other represents the weak. The area inside the double helix is the fabric of space-time. If you seperate the strings by pulling on them the fabic of space-time will fold over itself forming a doughnut shape (black hole),once that starts its all over. This is why every galaxy has a black hole in its center, probably started by a not so advanced society. DONT CROSS THE STREAMS
What does a strangelet look like from far away? Does it emit anything that we can detect, and so see its presence? I'm not sure anyone knows the answer to that, since we've never really positively observed stable strangelets of this kind.
Hey, maybe that's where all that dark matter comes from.
Not long after the experiments began, however, there was... an 'incident'... and since that time, the following protocol has been observed:
... every 108 minutes, the button must be pushed. From the moment the alarm sounds, you will have 4 minutes to enter the code into the microcomputer processor... * ...duction into the program. When the alarm sounds, either you or your partner must input the code. It is highly recommended that you and your partner take alternating shifts. In this manner you will both stay as fresh and alert... * ...most importance, that when the alarm sounds, the code be entered correctly and in a timely fashion.
Maybe it's just me, but that one about magnetic monopoles sounds a little too much like Season #2 of "Lost". I'm pretty sure I saw the other two scenarios as Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. But perhaps their fears can be assuaged regarding magnetic monopoles if we build a bunker with a flip-clock and Apple II+.
Seriously though, last I checked, if monopoles exist at all, they are so massive they cannot possibly be uncovered in any particle accelerator we could hope to build in the foreseeable future.
On behalf of the DeGroots, Alvar Hanso, and all of us at the DHARMA Initiative, thank you, namaste, and... good luck.
I mean, since know one knows what's going to happen, that must mean there is a chance the Large Hadron Collider could just spontaneously create some banana splits, right?
Yumm. . .
Supposedly, 13.61-13.85 billion years ago, there wasn't much of anything of anything like what we know, then there was a Big Bang...who knows the last time (or universe) these LHC people turned this thing on?
Check out Jack McDevitt's Odyssey - moonriders blast the noob humans' new space-borne linac, presumably to keep the primates from destroying the known universe. Actually a nice read, good hard sci-fi.
What a colorful, charming way to end the whole shebang!
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I don't think that the timing of this lawsuit is purely coincidental because the fact that this generates black-holes and disrupts the fabric of space-time contradicts the agenda of some shadow governments.
It has already been shown that colliding particles at high speeds opens a portal to Xen, thereby angering Microsoft.
This is a conspiracy!
As how Hawking Radiation works (if it indeed even exists) is still entirely conjectural at this point, it's a little presumptuous to say you can use it to prove the safety of the thing that is designed to test for it. Sheesh.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
What does matter absorption do to the momentum of a black hole? I'd think instinctively it would work like an elastic collision, but on the other hand the whole exciting thing about black holes is that physics kind of breaks down beyond that event horizon. Do any physicists know whether fancy astronomy has answered this question, or are we still operating essentially on conjecture?
And to preempt any possible troll mods, I'm not offering this as a hinting doomsday problem with the LHC, I'm simply legitimately curious.
Any thoughts?
Relax I just want some peanuts.
This is what COULD happen:
There is a 10^-40 chance that the collider produces a black hole that will destroy the earth. Just to show you what that looks like - it's a 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance. I'm not sure how small the chance has to be before you should be allowed to risk the future of the human race, but the odds are pretty good that we'll be safe. You're more likely to be killed by terrorists in a foreign country, struck by lightening twice at the same place, and then killed (yea, again) again by a rare disease that causes your organs to turn to bone than to create a earth-destroying black hole.
But, for the record - if it DID create a black hole that ate the earth:
It's incredible density causes it to fall through the ground like a bowling ball falling from the sky. It falls all the way to the center of the earth, consuming everything in its path, and continues moving until it reaches the other side. It will then change directions and do it all over again going the other way.
This will continue until it has consumed so much of the earth's mass into a very small point that it gets too heavy and sits right in the middle of the earth, eventually sucking everything else into its core. Life as we know it will be reduced into something slightly bigger than a single mathematical point. If you thought getting all those clowns in such a small car was impressive, wait until you see this! (Note, you probably won't see it since the light around you will be being sucked into the black hole. Also, your eyes will be being sucked into the black hole along with the rest of you).
So if it DOES happen - you better be comfortable with being VERY close with those around you.
or else!
Not bad, but are we really sure we've gotten to the very bottom when it comes to elementary particles? I mean, it's not like we haven't been wrong before when we've declared hitting the basement.
And also, how can the mass of an elementary particle change? The whole point of elementary particles is that they are homogeneous. So are you saying that the particles will accelerate? Because there's no other way for an elementary particle to absorb the mass. We don't have "plump" quarks or neutrons or something.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
Now this nuclear safety officer is just being silly. If high energy particles could really create black holes which would swallow up the Earth, wouldn't it have happened already? We are constantly being bombarded by high energy particles. The fact that we are still here makes it hard to believe any little experiments we do here will destroy the Earth or more.
No one seems to have noticed yet that a US district court has zero jurisdiction over a facility that's located in France and Switzerland ?.
...
:)
Worst case they can tell the US that they can't participate - Whooo!!!! - most of the US's contribution will have been spent already and there'll be all this spare time now for the rest of the world
I fail to see how CERN cares
Scientists are adventurous. If you gave them a phenomenon that actually had a real chance of disintegrating the planet, someone would eventually do it. Because there was a good chance it would not, and they wanted to investigate the phenomenon.
A bit like people eating fugu. A little nibble. A little nibble further. I can't feel my lips anymore, but I want to nibble a little closer anyway.
God created all life, ET's included, 6,000 years ago. The light just hasn't had enough time to reach us from the nearest neighbor. Give it another few hundred years.
(for the humor impaired, I am joking)
My point is, there's no way a micro black hole would accumulate mass, even withoiut hawking's radiation, because it's event horizon would be smaller in size than it's component particles anyway, and therefore the strong nuclear force would win every time.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
And that has never happened before ! Science never made a faulty prediction
Heh
I remember Arthur C Clarke suggesting that some supernove could be industrial acidents.
Very intregueing
Kind of what I'm thinking. Even if Hawking radiation doesn't, even a single U238 atom is a really small target. I mean, part of the reason for the size of the high-energy research tools is due to the trouble we have hitting such small targets. How much mass is a black hole with an event horizon even as large as a single proton going to have, and how often is such a black hole, drifting loose, going to bring it's event horizon into contact with particles it can "swallow"?
I suppose I could search the web for it, but if the event horizon is smaller than a proton, what happens when a proton comes in contact with it? Does it absorb some of the proton's strings, and let the rest loose?
Guess I should go look something up, here.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
"If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who." --Bokonon
Unforeseen Consequences
but time travel too: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19726421.700-2008-does-time-travel-start-here.html
So we may survive the singularity only to be enslaved by giant intelligent wasps from the future. Nice.
The real problem is that the experiment to discover the Higg's boson will create the Higg's field which produced the present universe. It inflated it to its present size at an almost infinite rate from its original size after the big bang. This will blast the present universe into identical elementary particles. Then the new universe will proceed according to the laws of nature until we do this again 13.5 billion years from now.
You mean like:
"Erm, do we still have radio contact with home? I think I saw Earth just flick out."
"No. Funny, I can see stars behind where it used to be. This can't be good."
"Wait, we're still orbitting *SOMETHING*."
Actually, I think there may be enough collateral radiation from transforming this much mass into a black hole to make life quite uncomfortable in most of this solar system.
This is PRECISELY the kind of shit that should be a part of the "Moonbase" we should be building.
I'd prefer to watch the Langoliers from a distance. Sheesh. Could you imagine the show? Better then any ole' Lunar Eclipse, hands down.
Clearly the same can be said about these theories. While the risks involved are greater than that of the Pac Man theory, they are probably smaller than, say, the risk that any of the scientists involved will die in a car accident tomorrow, and possibly smaller than the risk that they will ALL die in simultaneous, unrelated car accidents on the same minute of the same hour tomorrow. But even if they all did, in what is undoubtedly another statistical near-impossibility, in the end we would have lost a bunch of scientists, not the entire human race and the planet to boot.
This is why the expected value of the loss, not the probability alone, should be the relevant measure here. The expected loss is the probability of the loss times the value of the loss. There are very few ways we can endanger the entire planet in a catastrophically irreversible way. If this astoundingly improbable event should come to be, we'd lose the human race, the animal kingdom, and the Earth. While the value of all that is almost too large to ponder, it exists and it is finite.
The point here is that it's too easy to throw one's arms in the air and dismiss this risk assessment because the probability of the loss is inconceivably small and the value of the loss is inconceivably high. Very very small numbers multiplied by very very large numbers can yield very accessible and understandable numbers. As far as I know, the expected loss could be 1 cent, or $1 million trillion dollars. After reading TFA and a couple of related sites, I can plug some wild numerical guesses for these two factors and get either result.
Which is why we also need to look at the benefit half of the equation:
(net expected value of the LHC) = (probability of scientific discoveries) x (value of discoveries) - (probability of black hole swallowing earth) x (value of the earth)
The left side is easier to quantify, but not by much. I'm pretty sure that even the most optimistic scientist, the one most willing to bet the farm on this will come up with a number smaller than $1 million trillion dollars, so a risk evaluation is order. IMHO, it would be reasonable to spend as much as 10% or more of the total budget of the LHC in coming up with the most accurate possible risk assessment. Now intuitively, I'm sure the actual risk assessment budget was much smaller than that - orders of magnitude smaller.
Which brings me to the truly scary side of all this: the inevitable difference between the social expected value of the scientific discoveries ("social" meaning to the entire human race, which is betting the farm on all this no matter what the probabilities are) and their private value to the scientists involved, the scientific community at large, and the particular politicians and bureaucrats associated with the project. These are classic externalities in economics: the managers at the upstream factory that's polluting the river have to drink the polluted water as well, but the private benefit they derive from polluting outweighs their share of the social cost, so the decision to pollute brings a net private benefit to them. Now I don't mean to offend the scientific community with that example: scientists aren't evil and certainly aren't on the same moral ground as polluters. But they're certainly more gung-ho about scientific experiments and their benefits than laymans are, or in other words are generally predisposed to overvalue the
I just went over to wikipedia and looked around for formulae and masses and radii.
2Gm/C^2 or something like that.
(HEY! plug "proton mass" into google and see what comes out!)
Exercised my rusty mental processes and, if we can trust wikipedia and my math:
The limit horizon of a U238 atom is 5.86875420167021e-46 m.
This compares to its radius of 15 femtometers, or 1.5e-14 m.
This also compares to the radius of a proton, about 1.6e-15 m, and the radius of an electron, roughly 2.8e-15 m.
which makes me wonder what happens when a black hole the mass of a U238 atom comes in contact with an atomic particle. What are the odds against it actually coming close enough to any of the quarks to eat one, and can it eat one? Would it eat, maybe, one of the component strings, and let the rest of the strings loose?
How much mass do they assume these micro-black holes are going to develop?
Hmm. Could dark matter be clouds of free micro black holes?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I do wonder if some people have done the exercise of trying to think of a way to use the LHC to destroy the world.
That's kinda how we do security testing in IT, after all.
And a fun exercise, to boot!
expandfairuse.org
That was a joke. HA-HA! Fat Chance.
...now if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to my job at the Aperture Science Enrichment Center.
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
Oh no! How would we solve all those logarithmic equations then?!
my question is about blackholes:
... 1'000 km/h .. which is the speed at which
... but what is with blackholes? wouldn't "freshly" created black-holes, just
do black holes orbit?
exmaple, we have two stars, that orbit each other, a so-called binary
star system.
both stars orbit and aren't at a fixed position.
now one start turns into a black-hole ("gedanken experiment").
does the star that turned into a blackhole, still orbit the other star, or does it stop moving
in relation to the other star?
a blackhole "eats everything". nothing comes out of it. so even space-time just drops into the
blackhole. how can a blackole then "know" about the shape of space-time "outside itself", e.g.
how can it interact with a warped space-time (gravity-pull from nearby star)?
so if a black-hole is it's own absolute fixed point, wouldn't even a mini blackhole stay absolutly
at the point it was created?
this would mean, that at the point of creation in the LHC, the blackhole would just "stay there",
while the collision chamber would pass by at
a given point on the surface of the earth travels?
newton laws says, that any mass is at rest, or continues in a straight line, if no outside force
acts upon it
"stay-put" absolutly at place of birth, while the rest of the univers, or for that matter our
milky way galaxy just, zip past it?
second question (what if): maybe, the creation of some "exotic matter" in the LHC, will be
on a doomsday scale, but not in a negative manner? maybe thru the creation of such dense
energy amount, humanity will create a "nortpole", but in time-space that might endure forever.
so to speak a "graffiti" in space-time. nothing more. maybe usefull for navigation of communication or time-keeping?
this would then be a "creation-device", not a "destruction-device", like the world "doomsday" implies?
thanks! = ]
I just calculated the event horizon for a micro black hole the mass of a U238 atom. (Got the formulae and stuff from wikipedia.)
If I got the math right, it's 5.87e-46 m.
A neutron is around 1.6e-15 m.
What are the odds of such a small hole actually coming into contact with anything? Even if it does, how does it "swallow" anything? At best, it might make a quark evaporate into its component strings, minus a string, maybe, every now and then.
Even a black hole of a full gram is going to have an event horizon around 1.49e-24 m, which is still a billionth of the size of a neutron.
If jupiter suddenly turned into a black hole, it would be about 3 km in diameter (if I calculated correctly). That's an awfully small thing to try to hit the sun with, and it has orbital velocity and all. The only effect on its moons would be that the explosions of the gasses that weren't pulled under the event horizon would likely push them away from Jupiter. If the moons's orbits turned elliptical enough to bring them under the event horizon, yeah, they would fall in. And the gasses released in the explosions would alter the orbit of Jupiter. But would it hit any other planets? Would it hit the sun? Massive, yes, but volume-wise, smaller than the moons of Mars. Well, yeah, if it got close to the earth, even as close as the moon, it could cause earthquakes and such. Just like a micro-black hole might hit another electron and cause it to evaporate into quarks and strings.
But in order for the Jupiter black hole to absorb the sun, it has to hit the sun, and that's fairly long odds. If it does, in a million years or so, eat the sun, the sun is still just a small star, and the resulting black hole about the radius of the earth. Back off to the scope of the solar system, and that's just one sun dying a rather unusual death. Maybe it accelerates in a different direction than it should have because of some jet stream produced by the collapse. But the overall effect on the galaxy is not significantly different than the sun dying as a brown dwarf in a few billion years. Shoot, if Jupiter suddenly turned into a black hole today, the odds of it coming close enough to cause earthquakes and such are still not such that we would be worried for several centuries.
Anyway, to put this into perspective, a few really tiny black holes running loose around the earth is like a few suns the size of jupiter running around loose in the galaxy. And we, compared to the micro-black holes, are bigger than the largest structures observed in the known universe. Or, let's say, what if there were millions of earth-sized black holes loose in the galaxy already? Would we even notice on our scale, much less would it make any difference in the large scope of the cluster of galaxies our galaxy is part of?
I mean, for all we could care, an electron might suddenly turn into a micro black hole, and it still has to get out of orbit and way down to the surface of the nucleus to do any damage, and when it gets there it's way, way, way, less than a billionth the size of the neutron. Quite likely, even moving slow, it would drift right through the neutron without touching any of the component quarks in any way. I'm not talking about even roulette table odds, and not even lottery odds. And it has to eat how many of those quarks before it amasses even a gram?
I'm ranting. I need to put the kids to bed.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
This is far from being the most interesting part of this matter, but the LHC is in Europe and the lawsuit has been filed in Hawaii's U.S. District Court. What could that court do to stop the LHC from being switch on?
This kind of concern isn't something new. When the first tests of the Hydrogen bomb were conducted (early 1950's) there were some worried scientists (can't remember who) thinking that detonating an hydrogen bomb in Earth's atmosphere **could** initiate a chain reaction involving atmospheric nitrogen that would propagate through the entire world...
My sig is better than your sig.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farnsworth_Parabox
Farnsworth: Yes, it's the apocalypse alright. I always thought I'd have a hand in it.
The Best Disaster movies usually do start with some sort of fear in the public consiousness. What will the title be, I wonder? How about, "The Hadron door to Hell!"?. Yes, that would be good.
Blondes have more fun. But Brunettes remember it the next day.
this article would actually be interesting if it had the actual complaint...
This sort of case would be truly groundbreaking if it was actually given due process. Unlike the vast majority of cases, a judge and jury would need YEARS of education to even understand the questions before the court. The alternative would be a bunch of jurors expecting Geordi LaForge to be called to the stand (and not understanding why he would not be the best choice even if he existed as a real person). Simply bringing in expert witnesses wouldn't help much. Most of what they might say might as well be in a foreign language. It would come down to a personality contest rather than judgeing based on the science.
That is, The guy that said 'blah blah blah, it's all OK" seemed friendlier than the guy that said "blah blah blah, we're all gonna die".
By far the most likely outcome is that the judge will shoot it down because he can't imagine how to move forward with it without some very uncomfortable questions coming up.
OK, now I'm worried...
What about the suns cosmic rays impacting the atmosphere are happening in a much less matter dense environment than that of the surface of the earth? Could it be that a micro black hole is much less likely to evaporate in the presence more more matter?
I don't believe you, I'm here for a seat on the secret spaceship.
But those ISS dudes are going to be pissed that, whilst they were once astronauts, the closest they can get to being CERN scientists is being Nuclear Safety Officers ... damn!
God had to restore the universe from a backup and then tweak the laws of physics to prevent a repeat. I understand he was pissed.
In this very good book, 'Einsteins Bridge' it is explained that the worst has already happened, we just don't know about it.
http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Bridge-John-Cramer/dp/0380788314
Part of what we don't know is that our universe was rebooted to a point 17 years in the past the last time we messed around with these things and even worse outcomes could happen if we do it again.
Yeah, it's Sci-Fi, but I believe every word of it.
If 'the people' in Amendment 2 are 'the state' then Amendments 1, 2, 4, 9, and 10 benefit the state, not you.
Sounds great! You should be able to have a script ready within a few days. And since a seed of fear has now been inserted into the collective mindset of the general populace, the likely upsurge in popularity for the movie is almost guaranteed. I suggest a title like, "The Hadron Highway to Hell!". Pretty Catchy, huh?
Of course you will give me a percentage cut for the idea, right? Like I wuddn't want to have to sue you for my intellectual property, ya know.
This reminds me of the bets the folks at the Manhattan Project made about the results of the Trinity test.
You should see the television series "THE OUTER LIMITS" & the episode "The Final Exam"...
I state this, because that episode's premise IS nearly exactly what you are stating!
(I just HOPE that it is NOT correct as to WHY WE FEEL "ALONE" (or, that we seem to be, as far as "intelligent life" etc. et al))
I.E.-> Nobody makes it very far once 'cold fusion' is discovered, per the Sci-Fi series episode of the return of the 1960's series "The OUTER LIMITS" (albeit in the mid-to-late 1990's). Your premise is much the same here imo...
APK
If black holes produced by LHC expanded to the size that they could actually swallow Earth, wouldn't it be pointless to sue?
Hooray for the followers of scientism -- they will always come up with a way!
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
The entire project should be put on hold until we have absolute knowledge that this will not adversely affect the global climate. We can not take a chance that these experiments will raise the temperature even more.
... was actually a poor sod of a civilization that turned on its own Large Hadron Collider for the first time.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Mod parent up - no wait! He's already got 5 mod points! If anyone gets 6 or more Slashdot will turn into a Brown Hole and destroy everything!
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
Thrice upon a Time by James P. Hogan had the mini black holes, fabulously written
I'm pulling my hair out on which one slammed transuranics together to make universes.
Another had a scene where a single massive black whole was created, to protect the facility from an angry mom a General ordered a gasoline spray and ignition, a sort of linear FAE to kill the protestors, blew his brains out after.
Name more SciFi stories please.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Lets say for argument RISK = DAMAGE x LIKELYHOOD. Also let us assume that either of these doomsday scenarios whatever their likeyhood that the result would be very very bad in fact that the DAMAGE = INFINITE. Given infinite damage then even if LIKEYHOOD = VERY SMALL when that small number is multiplied by infinity the risk is infinite. Therefore any activity that might completely destory all known life in the cosmos is IN FACT a unreasonable risk. Where's the debate? It would be hubris to think that the pursuit of knowedge is worth risking not having anyone around to contemplate it.
Just to make the point perfectly clear:
Wagner ("Homer") does not and has never worked for CERN.
The nut job lives in Hawaii, and has probably never even been to Europe. Let him tend his botanical garden and let's hope he gets convicted for his identity theft.
Sure, blame the countries involved in the research. But what if it is those American parts used in the project that fail? ;)
P.S. CERN employs people from every country in the world, however Europeans might be in the majority.
It's a very good question that has been asked and answered over and over again in the news. Obviously no US court has the power to do anything in Europe. It's a waste of time and has no hope.
Maybe I missed it here, but I would like to point out that an SF writer got that point exactly in "Thrice Upon a Time" from the mid 1980's. And a few decades earlier, a different famous SF writer, whose name escapes me, had a short story with the same theme. What is interesting is that he placed the story on Mars.