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Large Hadron Collider Goes Live September 10th
Naznarreb writes "CERN announced today that the first attempt to circulate a beam through the Large Hadron Collider will be on September 10th, 2008. You can read the press release here. They also announced the event will be webcast live. According to the release, they're just planning to run a few tests laps, not smash any particles, so the world won't be ending quite yet." And despite that September 10th date, according to the BBC, "On 9 August, protons will be piped through LHC magnets for the first time."
No. Cool down. The reason that everyone has been waiting for the last couple of months is for the system to cool to less than 2 K. That is what is limiting the operation of the complete LHC.
Looks like 9 September will be a good day to charge up my HEV suit and sharpen my crowbar...
I'll keep my towel handy
-- All this knowledge is giving me a raging brainer.
HTTP 599
Service Permanently Unavailable
The server you are trying to contact has crossed the event horizon of a black hole.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
it would be destroyed almost immediately due to Hawking radiation.
Awesome. I always knew Stephen Hawking was a badass, but now I find out he's a superhero with the power to destroy black holes!
I can see it now: thousands of people panic through the streets, while Stephen Hawking slowly wheels himself into a phone booth, only to fly out a second later and fly to the black hole, destroying it instantly with his Hawking radiation eye-beams! That's going to be sooo cool!
I must admit, his disguise is ingenious. I never suspected he was anything other than a mild-mannered physicist.
A red crowbar has been sent to CERN in anticipation of the LHC particle accelerator going online.
http://www.destructoid.com/reddit-sends-crowbar-to-scientists-to-protect-against-headcrabs-98281.phtml
Darn the LHC is only number eight on the list. http://www.livescience.com/technology/destroy_earth_mp-1.html
Sucked into a microscopic black hole
You will need: a microscopic black hole. Note that black holes are not eternal, they evaporate due to Hawking radiation. For your average black hole this takes an unimaginable amount of time, but for really small ones it could happen almost instantaneously, as evaporation time is dependent on mass. Therefore you microscopic black hole must have greater than a certain threshold mass, roughly equal to the mass of Mount Everest. Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader. [I love that part].
Method: simply place your black hole on the surface of the Earth and wait. Black holes are of such high density that they pass through ordinary matter like a stone through the air. [Yeah, so then how will I place it *on* the Earth. Lousy instructions.] The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the center of the Earth and all the way through to the other side: then, it'll oscillate back, over and over like a matter-absorbing pendulum. Eventually it will come to rest at the core, having absorbed enough matter to slow it down. Then you just need to wait, while it sits and consumes matter until the whole Earth is gone.
Highly, highly unlikely. But not impossible.
Earth's final resting place: a singularity of almost zero size, which will then proceed to happily orbit the Sun as normal.
Source: "The Dark Side Of The Sun," by Terry Pratchett. It is true that the microscopic black hole idea is an age-old science fiction mainstay which predates Pratchett by a long time, he was my original source for the idea, so that's what I'm putting.
If nothing comes from this demonstration but a black hole it will definitely suck.
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
Your statement is true even if they never turn on the LHC.
"Two degrees Kelvin" is actually improper terminology. Kelvin does not use the degree simple. You simply say "Two Kelvin."
On another hope, I really hope you weren't joking with that. If so, then I just got whooshed!
Yeah. He looks totally different without his glasses. You can't even recognize him.
Yes, I'll probably get modded troll or something for this, but it needs saying.
There's many comments in here about "oh, what about Sept. 11... couldn't they pick a better day?" and the like.
NEWS FLASH: The rest of the world does NOT come to a screeching halt every Sept. 11th. All points of business are NOT put on hold on that one day of the year. The rest of the world has moved on, if they even stopped to begin with. GET OVER IT!
LHC isn't even located in the USA for christ sakes.
Yes, the Sept. 11 events were sad, but seriously... stop criticizing all events taking place somewhere on earth on or around that date.
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
I can see it now: thousands of people panic through the streets, while Stephen Hawking slowly wheels himself into a phone booth, only to fly out a second later and fly to the black hole, destroying it instantly with his Hawking radiation eye-beams! That's going to be sooo cool!
The image is funnier to me if he never gets out of his wheelchair. He slowly wheels up, has his machine say "Take this, you bastard", and then the Hawking Radiation spews forth!
The enemies of Democracy are
Kingons and Queons are believed to travel faster than the speed of light, but I hear it's quite difficult to harness their power.
Could you imagine what it would be like to be on the ISS when the earth is destroyed by a LHC mbh.
The earth would fold up, only a 1% consumption would be needed to make it impossible to land on the earth and survive, but if the earth all went in a few hours or less. wow. And with the angular momemtum of the earth, the mbh would have to rotate on the earth's axis and the mbh would send its radiation beams away from the iss so the iss could be survivable from that prospective. Also, the aero drag would be gone and so orbital reboost would not be needed. I wonder how long they could survive? Also, since the mass of the earth/mbh doesn't change, all those nasty time-drag effects won't happen at the orbital distance of the iss.
It would make a nice sci-fi short story noir if a multi-year survival could be speculated.
Regards.
So probably not enough time to find the nearest woman and convince her you're a virgin
I'm sure you won't have to do much convincing.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
>Such as yourself?
I slept through middle school, high school, undergrad chemistry and physics, slept through my masters, and am sleeping on the job at my university environmental research gig.
Any questions?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
A black hole with the mass of the Earth has, at one Earth-radius, a gravitational attraction of 1g. (In other words, if you were on the far side of the moon, and the Earth suddenly turned into a black hole, you wouldn't notice.) Closer, it would be much higher. Half an earth radius from the black hole it'd be 4g, a quarter of an earth radius it'd be 8g, etc --- one kilometre away it'd be 4 million g, and one metre away it'd be 3x10^14 g. That's gonna hurt.
So if somehow you were to magically create the 5x10^41 Joules of energy necessary to create a black hole the size of the Earth, on the Earth, I suspect we'd probably know immediately, subject to light speed limits, as the direction of down shifts abruptly followed a few seconds later by the disintegration of the planet and collapse into a accretion disc of white hot plasma. That is, those parts of the Earth that are not blasted outwards by the collapse event, which is what astrophysicists would call 'violent'.
(Of course, *now* I realise that you were actually originally talking about the end result after the consumption of the earth by a tiny black hole, but I've done all the maths now, dammit. So I'm going to post anyway. Besides, once the tiny black hole reaches about .1 earth mass it's still going to be pretty spectacular.)
Yes, how can I be more like you?