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Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Generates a 'Mini-Big Bang'
buildslave writes "The Large Hadron Collider has successfully created a 'mini-Big Bang' by smashing together lead ions instead of protons. The scientists working at the enormous machine on the Franco-Swiss border achieved the unique conditions on 7 November. The experiment created temperatures a million times hotter than the center of the Sun."
The output energy probably wouldn't have exceeded the input energy. No chain reaction or anything.
I'd imagine a mass the size of two lead ions at a trillion degrees could only maybe bring a gallon of room temperature water up a degree or two. They are quite small.
Oh, that is FAR above the temperatures needed for controlled fusion.
We don't have any trouble creating the necessary temperature for controlled fusion. The part we aren't able to do is the "controlled" bit - in a way that allows a net positive energy return.
I'm guessing this collision released maybe a few kcal of energy (which is HUGE for two atom-sized masses, but otherwise on-par with a candle), but it probably consumed the resources from half of a power plant in the process.
The LHC isn't about energy generation - it is about generating huge concentrations of energy in an extremely small volume of space.
The big bang doesn't talk about the creation event. It discusses the expansion following soon after that event...
The 'big bang' theory is that the universe began as the appearance of a 'singularity' approximately 13.7 billion years ago that then rapidly expanded into the universe that we see today. According to the theory, neither 'mass' nor 'space' nor 'time' existed prior to the singularity.
Steven W. Hawking, Roger Penrose, "The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse and Cosmology," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, series A, 314 (1970) pp. 529-548.
I'd imagine a mass the size of two lead ions at a trillion degrees could only maybe bring a gallon of room temperature water up a degree or two. They are quite small.
Just to keep things in context, they actually shot a rather large number of lead ions at each other in the hopes of getting two to collide.
There's a huge amount of energy zipping around, it's just that the odds of it all releasing at once approaches zero.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I thought religious fundamentalists are merely a subset of anti-science loons.
You do realize that the one who originally theorized the Big Bang was a Catholic Priest, right?
You could even call him the "Father" of the Big Bang.
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