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LHC Flips On Tomorrow
BTJunkie writes "The Large Hadron Collider, the worlds most expensive science experiment, is set to be turned on tomorrow. We've discussed this multiple times already. A small group of people believe our world will be sucked into extinction (some have even sent death threats). The majority of us, however, won't be losing any sleep tonight."
Reader WillRobinson notes that CERN researchers declared the final synchronization test a success and says, "The first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC will be made this Wednesday, Sept. 10 at the injection energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV). The start up time will be between (9:00 to 18:00 Zurich Time) (2:00 to 10:00 CDT) with live webcasts provided at webcast.cern.ch."
The naysayers retort is that no one ever has seen Hawking radiation. My retort is that we are afraid that a black hole, which is only a theoretical construct that requires that certain constructs go to infinity, is not being evaporated by Hawking radiation, which coincidentally is another theoretical construct which requires theoretical virtual particles to theoretically become real. If one fanciful theoretical object cannot be eliminated by another fanciful theoretical object, then all my education through bad science fiction is for naught. In the end, right before we are destroyed, we can take solace in knowing two things. First, that black holes are real. Second, that Hawking radiation is not. Sometimes scientific proof comes at a great price.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Insightful?
Logical fallacy is fallacious.
A threatens B because A believes B's experiments will destroy the world. B believes this is not the case.
There is no indication that B does not fear death.
B most likely falls in line with the general stance on death - B probably doesn't want to die.
It would take an absurdly long time for it to get to a macroscopic scale. Just because it's a black hole doesn't mean it's going to just suck everything up. In fact, if it were a charged, stable, non-massive black hole, it can go for quite some time without absorbing matter, simply because of how weak gravity is compared to the other forces. The gravity of a single proton is still going very weak compared to that of its charge.
This is really the big problem here: we like to imagine black holes as object that suck everything in, but that's only true of black holes that have star-level masses. A black hole sounds impressive until you realize it could weigh as much as a proton. At that scale, it's gravitational pull isn't really going to be big enough to be a big deal on the femtoscale. And at that collapsed size, there is no reason that it will go and contact anything it can suck in.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/