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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."
Correct. No boom today. Boom tomorrow. Always boom tomorrow.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Why would you send death threats to someone you think is going to destroy the world? If he was afraid of dying, he wouldn't be destroying the world, right?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
They will be only sending a beam around the LHC in a single direction at about 7% power. It will be about a month before they send a beam in the other direction and have a collision. I think it is about a year before they will be up to full power.
No possibility of a resonance cascade they said. Put the crystal thing into the spectrometer they said. The whole thing blew up my place of employment and I started Unforeseen Consequences with nothing but a crowbar for a while.
Moral: Keep your crowbars close and your guns closer and don't trust the scientists.
So, since I am neither a hooker nor LSD, I'll have to get my own drinks?
The weirdness has already begun if 9:00 to 18:00 Zurich Time is 2:00 to 10:00 CDT.
We're doomed!! Oh God, I can't die a virgin! Virgins may all go to heaven, but only to get screwed by Muslim terrorists!
You just got troll'd!
I owe far too much money for that to ever happen.
Coming to think of it, maybe that's why it's so hard to detect alien civilisations similar to us in the universe. We only have the tiny window of time between when they discover radio transmission and until they make their LHC and wipe themselves out.
You just got troll'd!
No boom tomorrow either:
"First beam circulated" != "First collisions"
Also, beam will be circulated at injection energy (450GeV) and not accelerated to the design collision energy. Even if they did circulate beam in both directions *and collide them* (a separate activity) the total energy of collision would still be less that half of what the tevatron at Fermilab, USA, has been doing for many years. If *that* were a problem we'd already be
Back in the old days of the cold war, in the schools,for preparation of a nuclear bomb falling, we would get under our desks because they are obviously made of some kind of material that can withstand radiation and a giant percussion wave. I'll bet those desks can withstand the LHC black hole too. Only school children and teachers will be left.
Every time you call tech support, a little kitten dies.
...but what if watching what is going on - changes what happens?
Only if the LHC is propelling cats.
Dr. Egon Spengler: There's something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don't cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.
The Large Hairball Collider?
It's an odd coincidence that Dan Simmons, in his Hyperion Cantos series of books, talks about an event called the "Big Mistake of '08" where humanity creates a tiny black hole during a scientific experiment, eventually leading to the destruction of Earth... Of course he doesn't say which century this was in ;-)
One of the main fearmongers concerning the LHC is Otto Rossler. He's a 68-year-old biochemist whose initial career was respected and conventional, but in recent years has veered into promoting his own "Theory of Everything" that contradicts the Theory of Relativity. According to Rossler, (a) Hawking radiation doesn't exist, and (b) microscopic black holes created by cosmic rays are moving so fast that they pass right through the earth, whereas LHC black holes will be trapped by earth's gravity and destroy the planet.
What's really happening is that Rossler and others like him are using the LHC as a soapbox to promote their particular brands of pseudoscience. From what I've read, any debate with Rossler quickly leads to him promoting his own pet theories, rather than any rational examination of the risks.
If *that* were a problem we'd already be
Oh crap, it was a problem!
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Microscopic black holes would evaporate in a very small amount of time due to Hawking radiation..
Are you willing to gamble the existence of the universe on that untested hypothesis? Yes?
By the way, every biology article gets tagged "whatcouldpossiblygowrong?" An article showing that artificial DNA self-associates was tagged that. No chance of killer viruses from that, yet it got the tag. Here we have a scientific study with some people actually claiming it will end the earth. They may be idiots, but people who worry about DNA strands creating vampires like in I am legend are just as idiotic. What gives?
I personally say it's only because no movies have yet taken the idea of LHC and mangled it into nonsense to use as a plot device the way they've used killer artificial viruses. And that's probably only because "complete oblitheration of the world" is a pretty boring plot.
The fear is that the LHC is doing one thing differently - any black holes created in the upper atmosphere would have a velocity approaching that of light, and pass harmlessly through the earth, grabbing a proton or two on the way. At the LHC, it's possible that some of the holes created would have a much lower velocity - less than escape velocity. Those holes wouldn't just leave earth, they'd stick around.
First, we actually have to be in the right range to create the black holes. This is very, very unlikely - it requires large extra dimensions, something allowed for but not expected in theory.
Then there's Hawking radiation. While there's no reason to believe it doesn't exist (and several to believe it does), it hasn't been experimentally verified. If it doesn't exist, or if a black hole radiates much slower than expected, any created holes could survive long enough to actually absorb more matter.
This PDF has the interesting math behind all of this.
Note: No, I'm not even saying they're right. I'm simply stating what their argument is for it. There's a lot of problems with those arguments, and I'm on the "destroy the world? Yeah, right?" side. I'm actually having an LHC get-together tomorrow night, and plan to have an Mad Scientist "End of the World" party on October 21, when they're having the first high-energy collisions.
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/
garethw
The guy in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt1Yo610lG0 explains it all.
Yes, it is a STARGATE TO HELL ! Doom fans, rejoice ! Happy ! Happy !
Big ba-da-boom
AT&ROFLMAO
Mod the above as +10 Informative since most news outlets completely missed this point in their coverage.
The *actual* doomsday will occur when the first collisions occur in one to two months.
Much cooler than a black hole would be Death By Strangelet
Imagine a road that goes in a circle.
Now, tomorrow, they're going to put ONE CAR on the road
and drive it moderately fast to make sure the road is intact.
Then they will proceed, in future tests, to drive that ONE CAR
faster and faster around the circular road to make sure the road holds up.
On "collision day", the add a SECOND CAR driving in the
OPPOSITE DIRECTION on that circular road.
Then they drive those two cars REALLY REALLY FAST and crash them head-on
into each other.
The point is to try to understand the cars and how they are put together
by analyzing the parts that go flying off in the collision, and the speed
and direction that those parts went flying.