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LHC Success!
Tomahawk writes "It worked! The LHC was turned on this morning and has been shown to have worked. Engineers cheered as the proton particles completed their first circuit of the underground ring which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
(And we're all still alive, too!)" Here is a picture from the control room which I'm sure makes sense to someone that isn't me.
When I was an undergraduate studying mathematics one of the most intriguing comments made by a professor was
Cutting edge mathematics takes about 50 years to find its way into physics, from there it takes about 25 years to find its way into engineering.
With the advent of the LHC and other amazing advances, like easy access to substantial computing power, do you think that this still holds true? By this, I mean do you think that life cycle times will shorten, or will they remain the same because even though these advances are being made, they are at higher, or very specific level, and as such, they will not be able to be developed into applications as quickly?
Thoughts?
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
True true. I know there have been several instances like this before. And it seems like each time something like this comes up, there are people with "strong evidence". I'm just saying that it seems like we don't really learn from history like they say we do.
It's pretty obvious you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about
In the first place, our current understanding is that black holes DO dissipate, through Hawking Radiation. Tiny black holes fade away almost instantaneously.
In the second place, tiny black holes are formed all the time. When interstellar dust hits the atmosphere, the resulting energy discharge can form tiny black holes, and fairly often. Most of them dissipate harmlessly.
Wait, there's more! Some black holes DO form when they hit the atmosphere and survive. Know what happens to them? Well, first consider how small a chunk of mass dense enough to be considered a black hole has to be when it's composed of the equivalent of a few protons. We are talking sub-electron size here. These black holes sink to the center of the Earth, but are so small they don't interact with any atoms on the way down. They sit at the center of the Earth, absorbing a new particle every few thousand years.
Events with the power of the LHC happen all the time at the edges of the atmosphere, and if they really had a reasonable capacity to cause a catastrophic event, it would have happened naturally many times over already.
That said, the night before collisions start, I'm having an End of the Universe party.
We haven't, but the universe causes such high-energy interactions to happen constantly without destroying itself.
The nuke-might-ignite-the-atmosphere thing is something of a special case because they ONLY had raw theory to base it on. They were virtually certain it wouldn't happen, but since humanity had never caused an energetic fission event before they had no definitive experimental evidence to back that up. The LHC by contrast is building on decades of advanced nuclear / particle physics work, to test the specifics of detailed theories. We have a very clear idea about what could happen, and the evidence that it will be completely safe is overwhelming. Due to the very low mass of the particles, the energy released in a 5 TeV collision will "only" be about that of 2 freight trains running into each other, which is certainly energetic but perfectly controllable. As one LHC scientist put it, the risk of you spontaneously evaporating due to random quantum events is much higher than the LHC somehow killing you.