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Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Generates a 'Mini-Big Bang'

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-do-that-when-i-eat-chinese dept.

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."

32 of 570 comments (clear)

  1. Science Journalism by Sonny+Yatsen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So, is a mini-big bang just a bang, then?

    I hate this constant need for science journalists to oversell and over-hype an outstanding achievement with misleading hyperbole. They didn't create mini big bangs. They smashed lead ions to try to recreate the conditions that existed shortly after the big bang. It's already an impressive enough achievement without cheapening it with sensationalist BS.

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    1. Re:Science Journalism by groslyunderpaid · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Not necessarily. I am a religious fundamentalist, and science is all well and good in my book, to a point. And by to a point, I mean "this is what we've been able to prove thus far".
       
      Really though, not trying to troll. Just saying those two groups are not necessarily mutually inclusive, though sometimes that is the case.

    2. Re:Science Journalism by X0563511 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Frankly I don't give a shit who gets pissed off. The objective is scientific understanding, not pissing people off or not.

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    3. Re:Science Journalism by Dr.Boje · · Score: 4, Funny

      You are dealing with people that mostly wouldn't remember what an "ion" is. When you say "smashing iron", they think of banging two iron bars together.

      Those are the kind of people we don't want coming to Slashdot anymore.

    4. Re:Science Journalism by querist · · Score: 4, Funny

      But it wasn't that great, apparently. Eccentrica Gallumbits said that Zaphod Beeblebrox was "the best bang since the big one."

    5. Re:Science Journalism by Zeek40 · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Just out of curiosity, at what point do you draw the line? Because I only know one person who describes herself as a 'christian fundamentalist' and she refuses to believe any science that proves that the earth is more than ~6000 years old. When I explained to her that simply refusing that fact throws out almost our entire understanding of the universe around us, from the distance of the stars to why the atom's we're composed of don't just fall apart, her response was akin to sticking one's fingers in their ears and screaming "i can't hear you" over and over again.

      She didn't think that she was anti-science, she just thought that she could cherry pick facts from the bible and set up special cases in which the physical laws of nature no longer apply.

    6. Re:Science Journalism by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I believe you have that reversed. I've met plenty of religious fundamentalists who weren't anti-science loons... Can't say I've met / heard of any anti-science loons who are not religious fundamentalists.

    7. Re:Science Journalism by daid303 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Frankly I don't give a shit who gets pissed off. The objective is scientific understanding, not pissing people off or not.

      It's just a very nice side-effect.

    8. Re:Science Journalism by Logic+and+Reason · · Score: 4, Insightful

      God made the universe 6000 years ago as if it were made much longer ago.

      That contradicts the idea that God does not deceive, which most Christians believe.

    9. Re:Science Journalism by jgagnon · · Score: 5, Funny

      You've never heard of a Prius? :p

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    10. Re:Science Journalism by joeyblades · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So your premise is that religion causes people to commit horrible acts? Is it not just possible that humans commit horrible acts all on their own and some merely use religion to justify their actions?

      Most religious people have never commited a horrible act... I think this alone refutes your premise.

      However, as further contra-evidence, I can think of many seriously horrible acts that were not done in the name of religion... the Holocaust, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, Rwanda, 9/11/2001, (in)human medical experimentation through the ages... the list goes on.

      Let's face it. Humans have always and will continue to commit horrible acts and they will try to rationalize some justification for it, be it religion, or politics, or scientific advancement... If you believe that religion causes people to do bad things, then you really don't understand people... or religion.

    11. Re:Science Journalism by ArcherB · · Score: 4, Informative

      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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    12. Re:Science Journalism by BobMcD · · Score: 4, Interesting

      No, I think religion is the *prime* motive for a lot of shit people does, not a "mere justification".

      If you believe someone can become a suicide terrorist without religion, then you really don't understand people... or religion.

      It wouldn't follow, though, to attack the Twin Towers. What sort of religious icon were they? To say that 9/11 was a religious attack, rather than a political one, you'd need to demonstrate how that religion sought to further it's ends through the attack. Has the falling of the towers made Islam stronger, or weaker, or was there no change?

      Please do explain how this works, because from where I sit it seems entirely political in nature, with a religious wrapping - which is just what the Parent is suggesting.

    13. Re:Science Journalism by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's people's morals - often based on or at least supported by what you blithely dismiss as "fiction" - that stop us from doing those sorts of things.

      Those of us that aren't sociopaths don't need religion to keep us from inflicting pain and suffering upon others. Those who are sociopaths use religion as an excuse as often as it prevents them from harming others.

    14. Re:Science Journalism by chrb · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Please do explain how this works, because from where I sit it seems entirely political in nature, with a religious wrapping - which is just what the Parent is suggesting.

      You are both right. The majority of people in the world are taught from birth to believe in a God, and that it is right to follow the teachings of the Holy men, including going to war. Some of the Holy men are religious fundamentalists, and they will demand war against those who follow a different religion. They will justify the war with reference to the Holy scriptures, and this will provide a self-reinforcing story that the people will follow (self-reinforcing because, as a result of the violence. they can refer to new acts of savagery that their opponent has carried out). However, the religious leaders are also rational, and will not usually carry out actions that will weaken their own power base or result in their own destruction. For example, the Iranian religious leaders will not directly attack the U.S. or Israel, as this would ensure their destruction. The violence is geo-political in nature, but in order to justify and motivate the population it is necessary to create a religious narrative that they can follow.

      It wouldn't follow, though, to attack the Twin Towers. What sort of religious icon were they?

      The goals of the leadership of Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood are geo-political: resistance against the House of Saud and it's U.S. backed dictatorship being the most obvious. There is a great amount of social injustice in Saudi Arabia, resulting from a huge inequality in the distribution of wealth - millions of ordinary people live in abject poverty, whilst a few thousand people in the royal family control trillions of dollars in personal wealth. This leads to a society in which corruption is the norm, and where the wealthy can literally "get away with murder". It is not difficult to see why ordinary people might want to replace the existing system with something that seems a little fairer. The Islamists offer them a future governance based on what they perceive to be a better system, where the rules are supposed to be applied equally regardless of wealth or position in society. Throw into this the fact that the U.S. is a major ally of the House of Saud, supplies a huge amount of military and intelligence hardware, and at one point had 10,000 troops stationed there, and it is not difficult to see how the resentment shifts from the House of Saud and onto the U.S.

      The average citizen of these countries is poorly educated, and often illiterate. Justifying and motivating them towards acts of violence through geo-politics is hard - how do you convince a man to commit suicide, or otherwise take enormous personal risks, in order to destabilise the governing regime? A rational man will usually believe that his own death is not justified except in exceptional circumstances, and overthrowing his government is not usually one of those. The concept of "life after death with big rewards" is essential to the narrative that enables self-sacrifice towards the attainment of geo-political goals.

      So, people attack targets like the Twin Towers because they observe massive social injustice in their home land. Their religious leaders tell them that this injustice is the fault of people outside of their social group, and that God wants them to make the world a better place, and that when they die they will receive the reward of an eternal life. They are personally motivated by religion, and by a sense that the world that they are fighting against is unjust. However, the Twin Towers is chosen as a target because it is a symbol of the injustice; this is not about "glorifying" a religion, it is about striking back against an "evil empire" that is seen as being intimately linked with the social problems of the population as a whole.

  2. Mini - Big ? by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 4, Funny

    Wouldn't a mini big bang just be a moderate bang?

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    1. Re:Mini - Big ? by RevWaldo · · Score: 5, Funny

      Actually the official sizes are Short Bang, Tall Bang, Grande Bang, and Vente Bang.

      .

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      Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
    2. Re:Mini - Big ? by SETIGuy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's time axis is perpendicular to ours. From our point of view the new universe existed for an infinitesimal time. I don't think there's any way to tell how long it existed from its point of view.

      Please don't mod this insightful, I'm trying to be funny.

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  3. Just you wait... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now, if we can just wait a few billion years, a suitably intelligent species should evolve inside the newly created universe and build a Very Very Very Small Hadron Collider(VVVSHC) in order to investigate the conditions of their early universe....

    1. Re:Just you wait... by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Or it could had its own relatavistic principles, where our mini Big Bang might have lasted mere seconds or fractions thereof - if it did in fact recreate the universe properly down to scale, then life and intelligence could have evolved, and died out in those mere seconds.

  4. Re:Next step... by imamac · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Last I checked they weren't mutually exclusive.

  5. Re:Sooo..... by omnichad · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:'alternative' summary by sconeu · · Score: 4, Funny

    Is that what they call "sexing-up" the story?

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  7. Re:Next step... by bittles · · Score: 5, Funny

    to understand recursion you must understand recursion

  8. Not a mini big bang... by dtjohnson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The title is misleading. The LHC did not create a mini 'big bang' but created a miniature of the conditions that might have existed shortly AFTER the big bang. The 'big bang' was the event that created all mass, space, and time in the entire universe in a single instant approximately 13.7 billion years ago. The LHC collision of lead ions did not create any mass, space, or time but did create a "hot dense soup of quarks and gluons known as a quark-gluon plasma" that might have existed after the 'big bang' event.

  9. Re:Am I dead? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Nah, it's just monday...

  10. Re:We're still here by ColdWetDog · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

    R. A. Heinlein

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  11. Pah! by Cloud+K · · Score: 5, Funny

    The experiment created temperatures a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun

    NVidia achieved that years ago.

  12. If we do it all together? by bradley13 · · Score: 5, Funny

    And if we do it all together, is it a gang bang?

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  13. Re:Sooo..... by NotBornYesterday · · Score: 4, Funny

    Freeon is the open source version of Freon, and is more properly called GNU/Freeon.

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    I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
  14. Re:Next step... by Hotawa+Hawk-eye · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What if there is a God, and he isn't happy about us playing with creation?

    Then He/She/It/They shouldn't have created us with a brain that was capable of designing and a body capable of executing those experiments, or He/She/It/They should have kept an eye on us and smacked our hand if we tried. IMO deadbeat deities shouldn't get to wander back into our lives after a long absence without any clear communication with us and immediately get to dictate what we can and cannot do.

  15. Re:Sooo..... by An+ominous+Cow+art · · Score: 4, Funny

    That's what the Free Mesons want you to believe.