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New Heavy Ion Collider could "destroy the earth"
Sith Lord Jesus writes "According to an article in the London Sunday Times, a new nuclear accelerator designed to recreate the Big Bang might possibly--*possibly*--cause the earth to "disappear in the twinkling of an eye." Oops. " This reminds me of the some the fears that the folks in the Manhatten Project had-almost zero chance of anything occuring, but the notion of creating a black hole on the surface of the Earth is a strangely appealing one, from a sheer comedic value POV.
So I think I know what I'm talking about.
--Bob
Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Take anything that a physicist named "Bob" says with a grain of salt. If the guy thinks that there is actually some General named "Failure" reading his hard drive and doesn't recognize it as an ERROR CODE then he is NOT a physicist. Maybe a wannabe like the majority of the people on this newsgroup but definately not a real one.
I, however, am a REAL physicist and I know lots of things about strange corks. They infect anything that comes into contact with them much like a virus. The infected corks in turn infect others until ALL of the stuff in the universe is strange. This has all happened before and it will all happen again. Ever been to SanFransisco or Puyallup? If so then you know what I'm talking about.
I seem to remember that quarks don't even exist except in groups of twos or threes. Whenever you seperate a group of them (proton, etc), each seperate quark will create another one to latch on to it (bad oversimplistic terms, probably). So an isolated quark won't really be isolated.
If that's the case, I'd assume that the new mass comes from the energy that was put into seperating them in the first place, but it's been a while, and I really don't remember for sure. Anyone who knows their stuff want to clear this up?
Anyone who's played Half-Life knows exactly what playing with strange particles can cause.
Guess I'd better dig out the old crowbar.
The whole thing is based on quite an esoteric theory by Witten in 1984. (Probably, everyone regards it as esoteric, including Witten.)
The assumption is that "our" world is not the real ground state of hadronic matter; it might be something else where strange quarks are just as light as the other quarks; this vast increase in phase space would effectively lower ground state energy. Just kinda the same effect that happens when you open an undercooled bottle of mineral water: it instantly freezes all through.
The first time I heard this theory was in 1983,
when I was starting as a graduate student in
physics. I got such a kick out of it I told
everybody I thought I could scare. Since then,
I've seen demonstrators picketing just about
every particle accelerator I've been to, in two
continents. The mechanism keeps changing to apply
to the lab being picketed, but the outcome is
always the same: the Universe is doomed!
I remember about 6-7 years ago, some guy was
camping outside Fermilab, distributing leaflets
to cars entering the site, trying to warn the
world how the proton-antiproton collider would
create a black hole that would swallow everything
(now, what does this remind me of?) The world
failed to pay sufficient attention, the
temperature hit 100 F that summer in Illinois,
and he left in disgust ("Go ahead, destroy the
Universe - see if I care"). There are limits to
what one can do to save the world in spite of
itself.
It looks like the tabloids are running out of
royal scandals - everybody is dead, divorced,
or behaving themselves. Time to branch out into
science?
No, there is not a better use of money.
First of all, far, far money is spent on finding cures for horrible diseases than on high energy physics. For twenty years, the fight against horrible diseases like AIDS has soaked up research money like you wouln't believe (I think it may have been nealy 1/2 the NIH budget at one point). Personally, I don't see that we are too much better off.
As for what is learned as a result of these high energy experiments, just in the last few years we have learned that the neutrino has mass, the standard model is insufficient, we are beginning to study asymetries such as CP violation (which will explain why the universe exists), why things have mass (or at least we will have found this in the next few years with the discovery of the Higgs bosons). We know that Einstein's theories of gravitation are incomplete. I could give you an incredible list of what these experiments have and will bring to mathematics, physics and astronomy in the future.
If however, you are not interested in any of that, surely these things are important for their technological spinoffs. High energy experiments...
brought us the world wide web. Web commerce soon will exceed the money spent on high energy physics.
is the largest application of superconducting technology anywhere. Were it not for such experiments, we would not currently have superconductor based products, like MRIs.
Particle accelerators are now often used as treatment for certain cancers and blindness. Funny to think it, but these days every major hospital in the country has a particle accelerator.
Particle accelerators and storage rings are currently used as a source for x-ray or neutron studies of materials. They are used by virtually every company that makes something, from GM to Intel.
High energy physics pushes the limits of computation, finds better algorithms, expands clustering and distributed computing technologies. The fastest computer in the world is currently used for nuclear computations.
The demands of detectors push the limits of silicon and nano technologies. Curretly they are building silicon devices many times smaller than places like Intel even have the technology to do. They pioneer the use of other materials such as synthetic diamond for semiconductor devices (which are functional at far higher temperatures than silicon).
These are just the examples that come to mind off of the top of my head.
In short, in addition to their value to science, these high energy experiments push the envelope of every technology they use. The spin offs of these experiments alone are many times greater than their cost.
Answers to pressing scientific questions. Big, big, big technological spinoffs. You would be very hard pressed to find any better use of the money or manpower. I'd say that the fight against "horrible diseases" is a bigger waste of everyone's resources, but who knows, one day it might produce results, or at least make some progress that would make it worth the time and money.
So they won't say it "can't" happen, since you can't say that about anything. If you solve the quantum mechanics of picking my nose there is a nonzero probability that I will create Dark Matter which will cause the subsequent distintigration of my nose, me, and the alpha quadrant. That is what our probibalistic universe means. There is just about a nonzero probability of anything.
Back in the 70s when the first recombinant DNA experiments were taking place, there was a public outcry, mainly a result of politicians stirring up people for political reasons. They dragged a bunch of biologists into court and asked them the probability of creating dangerous organisms, as some scientists had suggested. Of course, the biologists who were about to do the experiments had carefully researched this possibility and come to the conclusion that it was extraordinary- but of course, not nonzero. When they testified, they were repeatedly asked if such a thing could never happen. They had to answer no, of course not, there is always a probability of anything happening.
Well, the experiments were banned for several years. No one in the world had any problems with inadvertant creation of dangerous organisms, and now recombinant dna experiements are commenplace. But think of the progress that was lost!
Remember that scientists are people too, and don't want the earth to collapse any more than you do. Saying that something has a small probability is about the safest assurance you can hope for, at least from a real scientist. Articles like this that attempt to use scare-mongering to whip up readership, at the expense of science, are very dangerous for everyone.
I guess if you lived in the stone age you would be opposed to fire ?
If someone had asked 70 years ago what quantum teory was good for. No one could probably give him an answer. But look now we have computers.
No this is the one known as the worst movie ever made. Created by Ed Wood.
It was about grave robbers from outher space, who resurrected the dead.
Yes, but the grave robbers from space were coming to stop us from developing soem weapon which could ignite the entire universe...
Not so with dust.
Nonsense. This project could well prove to destroy not just humanity, but the world!
Yeah. Except it wasn't funny.
I thought Plan 9 was from Bell Labs.
For those of you who've read Dan Simmons' Hyperion...
Great. We're gonna get the earth sucked into a black hole, and we don't even have the Hawking drive yet.
--
The capitalization is part of their style. The first little bit of each article is capitalized. Read some more articles at the site.
In this modern age, leading causes of premature death still include poor sanitation, bad nutrition and diseases with cures. We know how to fix them. Just provide decent sewage systems, better diets and basic medicine. Those tasks do not constitute interesting puzzles, however, and they do not help the wealthy, lazy, fat Westerners who already have easy access to good water, good food and good medicine.
Someone brought up medical research. It gets big money. The push for making older tried and proven treatments widely available is small, though.
Hmm maybe we are listening on the wrong band totally with SETI. Any sufficiently advanced civilisation might be communicating/broadcasting using modulated gravity waves. Therefore we should be submitting any results from that detector to SETI@Home to analyze...
Posted by SmashPHASE:
Maybe a couple of million years ago, a scientist
made the same mistake... who knows
Posted by SmashPHASE:
"Trust me, I know what I'm doing..."
Posted by alanut:
Ah - the so called unexexplained Gamma Ray Events are whole civilizations flashing from existence when they tried the same experiment. Unfortunately , the twinkling of an eye leaves little time for an escape plan like Jor-el provided for his son on Krypton.
Reminds me of a quote from some field commander in the US civil war: :)
.wav of that quote...
"At this range they couldn't hit an elephant!" Those were his last words.
I like this one:
"The world is not going to explode. The pacific ocean is not going to evaporate. I am not an atomic playboy."
--Some high-rank naval officer, on the nuclear tests on a US-depopulated island.
I'd LOVE a
--Threed
Gravity is not polar and there is no (known) means of shielding it.
I thought two particles, gravitons and anti-gravitons, are expected to exist, each with an opposite gravitational "pole". The existence of these quantum particles is vital for exotic matter (and consequently, fun things like exploiting wormholes and warp drives). Right?
I think it would be quite a nice death. Should be quite fast.
Actually, entering a black hole would be anything but a fast death. Time slows as you approach the singularity. I think it's possible you'd just be falling for an eternity (or so it would seem to you).
He's really not far off.
The agricultural industry is pretty messed up. There is not any good control over Monsanto and the like who are cramming new genes into plants as fast as they can.
The genes in the altered plants cross with wild-types. The recommendation is to keep a "buffer" zone of empty land around the modified plants. Yeah, like any farmer is going to leave several fields clear because it might have an impact on surrounding wild-types.
That really bad part, however, is things like:
1. All those genetic crops have some kind of antibiotic resistance gene (used in the laboratory to select for transgenics). Eat enough of the crop and eventually you're going to get bacteria in your gut with the resistance, too.
2. They're inserting genes which cause constitutive expression of pesticides. This will breed resistance in under 5 years. It's just idiotic. And, of course, these pesticides they're inserting are natural pesticides (various enzymes) which are the kind used by organic farmers. Organic farmers will not have viable pesticides for much longer. There are other options, such as breeding insects to eat the problem insects, but it's complicated and expensive.
Summary: The agricultural industry is short-sighted, dangerous, and not under any real governmental regulation. The USDA is a joke, and the FDA usually doesn't get involved (too busy with the drugs).
The whole industry is running on the assumption that science will fix the problems they're creating faster than the farmers can make new problems. It will collapse eventually.
Joe Haldeman (who also wrote Forever War) wrote a book Forever Peace, which had the premise that scientists were building a huge collider in the orbit of Jupiter to study and recreate the big bang, but, as it turns out, would actually create a new big bang, destroying life, the universe and everything.
Anyways, I find it interesting that the news story and a recent sci fi novel have the same premise.
s/foolhearty/foolhardy/
Also, I haven't read the article yet, but this sounds highly theoretical to me. Do you know what a black hole is? It's a tightly-packed core of super-dense matter that becomes a massive gravity well, sucking in matter because of its extremely strong gravitational field. However, the only way I've ever heard of to create a REAL black hole is the collapse of a star. Maybe it's just me... but I'm not going to get too worked up over this.
Besides, I know I'd rather know that we were trying to learn and improve ourselves, rather than hide our heads in the dirt and chalk all the mysteries of our world/galaxy/universe/whatever to religious things.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Sorry, but I have a hard time believing that some guy in the sky magically made things. I tend to believe in things that can be proven (i.e., science). And, at least scientific theories have some basis in fact.
... [work of] fiction ..." -- Janeane Garafolo (paraphrased)
Besides, if religion is so sacred, how come it's been changed with the passage of time to accomodate what were (at the time) non-Christian beliefs? At least when scientific views change, it's an attempt to make things make more sense.
"Religion is the opiate of the masses." -- Karl Marx
"... the Bible is a
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
There is a nonzero chance that YOU do not exist.
:)
Well, there goes "cogito, ergo sum", I guess. If I don't exist, I guess that would explain a lot of things... and at least make the fucked-up-edness of this world a little easier to believe.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Well, every atom in the known universe is nuclear in nature. Each one has a nucleus with electrons in perpetual orbit around it. Maybe for the clueless masses it strikes fear, but for me, it's just like, gee, ya don't say?
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
that was pretty funny, though I'm not sure you meant it as a joke(sounded like it). If you want "real" news, watch some CBN. Yeah, right.
Damn that was funny.
You were joking, right?
Dig that funky chain reaction shit.
--
Marc A. Lepage
Software Developer
If you're thinking of the Tunguska explosion, it's been known for a while now that it was an asteroid that exploded entering the atmosphere, not a black hole or anything that rare. And it wasn't shit size of a weak nuke, it knocked down hundreds of square miles of trees and the shock wave set off seismographs on the oposite side of the earth.
Gregory Benford's Cosm (published 1998) involved the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider's creation of a micro-universe. A pretty good novel, if you like hard-SF. I wouldn't expect of cinematic version, though.
The Vogons will beat them to it.
No sig. Go away.
Just because its in "The Science of Star Trek" or whatever that silly book is, doesn't mean its scientific fact.
There is no good quantum theory of gravity, at least there wasn't a few years ago, and I'd think I would've read something about that. Gravity still isn't well understood.
Either way the original premise of this thread was just plain wrong too, that the size of a black hole would affect its ability to "suck" in matter. AFAIK there's no theory that they'd be charged entities, so you'd have gravity pulling stuff towards it, and nothing pushing it away. The only hope in that case was that it for some unknown reason passed out of the range of the matter in the earth quickly, or it evaporated faster than it was initially able to suck in the energy.
I mentioned in another post the book Cosm, which is a fictional story on this exact topic. One idea in there was that the mass of the object in question kept growing because they didn't realize it was there and shut the collider down immediately. There's no reason that wouldn't be the case.
The point, however, is that the science that predicts that a black hole could occur is the bad science.
This story has been reported over and over and over in the last few years, all having to do with the accellerator on Long Island. Its bad science, no better than other bad science like the breast implant issues, cancer from high-tension power lines or any other anti-science drivel that seems to be produced in such mass quantities. Reactions more powerful than the ones they're talking about happen all the time in the upper atmosphere. If the possibility was anything more than infintesimal, we wouldn't exist. The fact that we DO exist is proof that even should such a reaction happen, its probably not stable, or is quickly counteracted by some other reaction.
On a side note though, there was a book that came out a year or two ago, Cosm that dealt specifically with these issues at that specific accellerator I think. Its sci-fi, but I thought it was entertaining. Worth reading if you can get it at the library. Hell, its Gregory Benford, so you can't go THAT wrong.
So we might not even notice for a long time. The total effect of gravity at the surface of the Earth would still be 1G. This would decrease slowly as the core was consumed because our distance from that matter would be increasing a little bit.
The problem with your argument is that there are some types of research companies just won't do. No company will try to discover the laws which govern electrons or strange matter because their is no economic advantage here. Any significant applications will be so far down the line that patents would expire and it is doubtful that you could patent a law of nature.
Hence any research done in fundamental physics by a company is dollar for dollar research done for their competitors. Hence EVERY company would freeload and no research would be done. Even IBM once doing far more basic research than almost every other company has realized it isn't paying off and is requiring their vaunted scientists to become engineers and make useful products.
Only the government through mandatory taxation can resolve the defection problem. Hence fundamental physics is something which MUST be government funded.
Peter
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
It's called "Hole Man" (as someone else already pointed out) and he won a Hugo for it, which he found suprising:
That's from a collection of short stories of his called N-Space--highly recommended.
Notice how the journalist capitalizes NUCLEAR. Just meant to stir up fear with those not in-the-know. All particle accelerators deal with some sort of nuclear particle.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush
You're just afriad of what you don't know. Speaking of, they aren't trying to create a universe...
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush
The money put into scientific research is miniscule, compared to everything else, especially offensive/defensive forces (echelon, the military, etc) Last time I checked, US gov't funding of scientific research was shrinking.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush
I think we should be safe as long as nobody discovers a switch on the accelerator labeled "magic" & "more magic", decides it's a silly joke, and flips the switch... :-)
There was a study comparing people living beneath powerlines and people living away from power lines and the first group had more cancer. A little more (like 1%) but more still.
So what happened because of this? Nothing! Smoking is still a lot more dangerous and living in a city with smog is more dangerous..
But not everything is "bad science".
BTW. what breast cancer issues?
--
Pirkka
How do collisions with an energy greater than the equivalent of two gold nuclei bumping into each other at 99.9% of the speed of light at an angle of 180 degrees occur naturally? Please enlighten me, as I know very little about cosmic radiation.
Well it's not _solaroid bomb_ but i guess that well be seeing a sqare space ship land on the earth. They will start raising the dead and march them at us and then rot them in front of our eyez to prove their awsome powers then they will try to tell us that this research will have to stop or we will destroy the whole universe. In the end some people find their sqare ship and go inside. There they find a table with some old radio equipment and two aliens. The aliens boast about their tecnological superiority... BLAM! they shoot the aliens then there is some moral crap in the end.
We all saw that movie didin't we? |)
FRA: STFU GTFO
I'll pay upp i promise! |)
FRA: STFU GTFO
Sounds like a good way to make people more interested sub-atomic physics to me..
'There is a small possibility we'll destory the earth in the blink of an eye.' makes for a pretty amazing press release... The fact that it's technically true makes it even better.
I often wonder why they don't take a 'lead into gold' angle with this stuff.. It's 'possible' isn't it? Bet you'd get some funding for your behind then..
Never!! Prepare the escape pod, Maximillian!
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
yes please -don't screw up MY universe,ok? go nuke some other universe
---
Perhaps this is because Ozone if ignited will detonate.
It turns out that the concetration in the atmosphere is not sufficient to do this.
Bob wrote:
:)
So I think I know what I'm talking about.
--Bob
Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
An AC wrote:
Take anything that a physicist named "Bob" says with a grain of salt. If the guy thinks that there is actually some General named "Failure" reading his hard drive and doesn't recognize it as an ERROR CODE then he is NOT a physicist. Maybe a wannabe like the majority of the people on this newsgroup but definately not a real one.
humor, n, 2: the trait of appreciating (and being able to express) the humorous; "she didn't appreciate my humor;" "you can't survive in the army without a sense of humor" [syn: humour, sense of humor, sense of humour]
sarcasm, n: witty language used to convey insults or scorn; "he used sarcasm to upset his opponent;" "irony is wasted on the stupid" [syn: irony, satire, caustic remark]
Read these definitions. It might help you understand. Next, this is a forum, not a newsgroup. Newsgroups are kept on NNTP news servers.
Why must a physicist be computer literate? I realize it's a stretch to say no computing skills are required, but not all physicists write their own analysys tools, y'know.
Y'know, I think the last example in sarcasm's definition is quite fitting here.
Read my stuff.
Obviously there's no danger of anything catastrophic happening.
The controversey certainly did bring a lot of attention to the project, though, didn't it? I wonder if they have a really slick publicist, or just lucked out.
With threats of science funding cuts, this sort of thing is getting more frequent.
Burning nitrogen requires more energy than it gives (the triple bond is pretty strong). IIRC, the question was whether a nitrogen fusion reaction was sustainable in the atmosphere. It turned out not to be, so we had the nuclear arms race instead.
2 dashes and a space, or just 2 dashes?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against this sort of research, but couldn't all this money and manpower be better used???
No, not really. That's 350 million pounds. Million, not billion or trillion. With the world population just having passed 6 billion--on friday, IIRC--that's not enough money to achieve anything significant. If this money were devoted to social causes, it would effectively disappear. It would make no measurable difference. Being used where it is, it is moving us further along the path to understanding the universe. What we understand, we can manipulate beneficially. The potential benefit to every human is much greater this way.
--
-- Out of cheese error! Redo from start.
For those on the Western side of the Pond, you should know that British newspapers are not exactly attentive to accuracy. Credible British journalists usually end up working for the BBC, leaving the Sunday Times and other papers with a beggar's choice of researchers.
This is the same British newspaper that published the Israeli "ethnic bullet" story because they found one such story in Hebrew and apparently didn't know the Hebrew phrase for "science fiction".
See here.
sounds like someone read gregory benford's recent book, cosm, and got scared. in cosm, they didn't make a black hole with RHIC, though, but a mini-universe. the only person who got fragged was a grad student who stood too close when the mini-universe underwent recombination.
tim
hiding in shadows / i hear you coming closer / you will explode soon -- a quake haiku
I believe the concern was that the tremendous heat could bring atmospheric nitrogen to it's burning point. Since the atmosphere is only 25% oxygen, a nitrogen fire could consume all oxygen fairly quickly. However, i don't know if burning nitrogen produces enough heat to keep the reaction going, which may explain why it hasn't happened.
But hey, if it did, would it make nitrous oxide? We'd all die laughing our fool heads off.
I just read "On the Beach", which is about how people face the extinction of the species, in an event that is still far more likely to occur (an atmosphere full of radioactive dust after full-on nuclear war). In this book, i think Albania starts the last war, and the Chinese and the Russians both used Cobalt bombs.
mahlen
If God had not given us sticky tape, it would have been necessary to invent it.
And he was telling *me* to obtain a clue... yesh.
--
You know, the thing that has always facinating me about nature is it's incredible logic. The most facinating thing to me, is that the world functions at all. Now, I don't know what these physicists are arguing about, or how it could destroy the planet, but I find the entire idea foolhearty, and I'll tell you why -
;)
(as I recall), in quantum physics, the probability of *anything* simply vanishing without a trace, for no known reason is a non-zero percentage. It's admittedly very small, but not non-zero. It's the same here. I could fart, and rearrange the quarks around me into some heretofore unknown configuration, and oblitherate the planet.So the solution is that I should never fart (and neither should anybody else!). Heh.
Seriously, we're in far more danger of our government deciding to do some "nuclear testing" on foreign soil and starting WWIII (thus ending the world), than we are of a bunch of physicists doing it.
Besides... it's the job of evil overlords and certain north-american based governments to cause the destruction of mankind - not a bunch of physicists. Everybody who reads comic books knows that.
--
So let's build an infinite improbability drive ;-)
before and go to the restaurant at the end of
the universe
So January 1st, y2k, we won't need to worry about computer failures - they're putting this thing in full swing.
I believe that would be January 1, 2001.
The following sentence is true.
The previous sentence is false.
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
Just to make things clear, I'm a grad student in physics, working on the BaBar experiment (at SLAC in SanFran). My analysis involves kaons, which are bound states of strange quarks and up/down quarks. And yes, physics has produced many, many kaons over the years. So I think I know what I'm talking about.
--Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
I think it would be quite a nice death.
Should be quite fast.
The moderators have missed this post's irony.
It is not redundant, it is insightful. It cannot possibly matter if an experiment annihilates all humanity in an instant, because no one will care, because there will be no one to care.
Why not now? Minus the greasy junk food, so you can live to keep doing these things. (Why anyone would want to kick off the end of their life with a bag of fritos is beyond me)
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
There is a nonzero chance this article doesn't actually exist, but was caused by random fluctuations on your connection.
There is a nonzero chance that YOU do not exist.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
It's my default post level. Get enough 2's and you stay there. Sometimes it dips back down. Presumably it works in the other direction too.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Once created, the metastable vacuum would spread out at the speed of light, eventually deflating the entire Universe. Puts little piddly concerns like the Earth into perspective, huh?
Still, I'm not loosing any sleep. If there were any real chance of this happening, odds are it would have happened millennia ago. Personally, I can't wait until this thing starts producing data. Science rocks.
Just because we have a theory of everything doesn't mean that anything useful can be computed using it. Just look at QCD. We have all these great theories about quarks, but nuclear engineers can't use them because they are so ridiculously complicated. The engineers use the "fictional" pion exchange model. Just goes to show you. The answer to life, the universe, and everything may be more complicated then you'd have hoped. God didn't neccessarily make the universe so that it would be easy to calculate.
Gavin E. Gleason
1. Comments are moderated. Why submitted stories aren't? :) ;)
2. Someone played too much Half-Life...
3. Strangely enough but in one point this story has a tiny grain of logic inside
4. Don't play with matches
As an aside, the Louvre uses a particle accelerator to study paintings without visibly damaging them.
They place the painting infront of a target and fire particles through the painting, and by capturing what comes out the other side they are able to determine the materials used in the paint without removing more than a few molicules of it.
This is vitally important research, if you expect to preserve art for the future. Before they started using the particle accelerator, they were forced to take scrapings of the paintings for chemical analysis - always visibly damaging the painting.
If you don't know what they made it out of, you don't know how you should gauge the humidity in it's area, what temperatures might damage it, whether you should encase it in glass or let it breathe.
I don't need to talk to anybody who doesn't think history is important to society.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
I don't have statistics, although the 2-3 trillion sounds about right. However, I do think we'd be a lot better without welfare.
Think about it this way: Welfare is a subsidy on being unemployed. Simple economics tells you that this will increase the number people unemployed. This is why the Welfare rolls have been steadily expanding, and why poverty has not been eradicated by the Welfare stat, but has expanded.
There are other problems too. Obviously, the money is one problem. Governments in general spend about twice as much to do the same job as the private sector does. The welfare program is riddled with waste and corruption. Also, a private charity organization would have much more incentive to get people off of the dole and onto jobs. So in fact the cost would be a lot less than half what the government spends.
The basic problem is that charity has come to be seen as an entitlement of the poor rather than a gift from those who pay for it. People who felt that they are simply demanding their rights are much less likely to do anything to get a job. There should be a social stigma about living at the expense of others.
So yes, people do lose their jobs and need help, but the private sector does a much better job in that roll. Government welfare has perverted charity into a tax-financed industry.
I know this is an unorthodox position, but ack yourself this: the government in the 60's initiated a "War on Poverty" with the stated goal of eradicating poverty. Today we have more poverty then ever, despite rapidly growing wealth. Clearly something is not working. Government welfare is part of the problem, not the solution.
So long as you live in a Capitalist society, private industry has no incentive to eliminate unemployment, as unemployment is used as a threat to keep workers in line.
Um... "private industry" is not a single monolithic organization. Individual companies will hire qualified workers and pay them enough to hold on to them. Different companies compete to hold those workers, and offer to pay them more to attract them. So you're just wrong: private industry does not cause unemployment. In fact, right now, the unemployment rate is practically zero. The 5% who are not working are mostly between jobs or are seasonal workers. Anyone with any skills at all has no trouble finding a job.
What causes the unemployment is primarily the government. Things like minimum wages, Welfare, labor regulations, etc. Without these, the markmet would adjust so that pretty much anyone could get a job and support himself. If you don't believe me, ask yourself why almost everyone gets payed more than the minimum wage? Has the "downward spiral" not completed yet? Wages are currently increasing.
So I think you're just confused. Without capitalism, we would all be back to the middle ages, working at manual labor tasks and giving our meager surpluses to our fuedal lords. Capitalism has liberated the common man.
Do you feel that only the corporations deserve government subsidy?
I don't think anyone deserves subsidies. I'd cut back corporate welfare just as quickly as social welfare. I find it interesting that everyone assumes that if you are against government subsidies for the poor, then you must be in favor of government subsidies for the rich. That's nonsense. I don't think the government should subsidize anyone.
you're forgetting that PU is an EXTREMELY dense element. 72 pounds of it is hardly anything
As I remember reading the earth supposedly collided with a primordial black hole (mass of about a mountain) in 1904, and the results were merely less than a very week nuclear explosion, blew down a few miles of trees. Nobody knew what it was until 30 years later or so.
So I'm not too worried about a black hole with the mass of a few sub-atomic particles.
What do you think they just did?
I'm afraid not. This fact does cause things like the Earth's ocean tides, but it does not account for planetary rotation. The forces from the sun, say, that would cause a perfectly rigid planet to rotate in one direction are exactly cancelled by the forces that would cause it to rotate in the other. Since no body is perfectly rigid, these tidal forces actually do slowly change to rate of rotation to bring it closer to once an orbit.
In fact though, most planets and moons rotate much faster than this, and the reason is that the dust and gas that they formed out of happened to have a non-zero angular momentum. Of course this angular momentum will also change over time as the result of collisions with other bodies.
The question of exactly where all of these insanely high energy particle come from is a deep mystery. Proposed answers include: Gamma Ray Bursts, Active Galactic Nuclei, interactions involving Magnetic Monopoles or Cosmic Strings, the decays of super-massive relics from the big bang, etc. For more info on these rare events, see the Pierre Auger Observatory website at www.auger.org.
Now 2.5*10^7 TeV sounds like an incredible ammount of energy compared to the .1 TeV/nucleon of RHIC, but since the cosmic rays are hitting essentially stationary nuclei in the Earth's atmosphere as opposed to the head-on collisions of RHIC, most of the energy just goes into the kinetic energy of the collision debris rather than into producing interesting physics. The relevant figure is the center of mass energy of the cosmic ray and target nucleus system. It turns out that this is equal to sqrt(2*m*E), where m is the mass of the target and E is the mass of the cosmic ray. Supposing that the target is a Nitrogen nucleus, we get sqrt(2*.014 TeV*2.5*10^7 TeV) or roughly 10^6 TeV. The corresponding figure for RHIC 2*(200 nucleons)*(100 GeV/nucleon)=4*10^4 TeV. The cosmic ray events win, but only by a bit more than an order of magnitude. (Note that this is all very much "back of the napkin" calculation, and may not be exactly right, but it's close.)
That was fun, but what does it all mean? Well, from the RHIC documentation, I figure that RHIC will have roughly 10^15 bunch crossings in each full year of collision running. Assuming that there is less than one collision per beam crossing (it makes it much easier to figure out what's going on in each collision), RHIC will produce an order of magnitude fewer collisions, with an order of magnitude lower energy density than these cosmic rays that bombard the Earth naturally. While a more careful analysis may change some of these numbers by a bit, it seems pretty unlikely that RHIC will destroy the Earth, when all of these cosmic ray collisions obviously haven't.
How do you know the big bang wasn't the response to God's decision to create the universe.
No, they'll shoot a copy of NT into space where
some alien will pick it up and infect his home
planet.
In Arthur C Clarke's final sequel to 2001:A Space Odyssey he suggests (with tongue firmly in cheek) that most observed supernovae are caused by industrial accidents like this; specifically, accelerator experiments that reach the energy density threshold which releases the zero point energy of the vacuum. This is supposed to cause inflation of a new spacetime domain (i.e. create a baby universe).
The same theme was explored, with non-catastrophic results, in Greg Benford's Cosm. IIRC, in that book the collider used was the same one at Brookhaven mentioned in the above article.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
[Black holes]... *do* have gravitational attraction, of course, but we're talking about a miniscule mass. Any singularity with this mass will be indescribably small, and even if it survives Hawking radiation it will only rarely hit a proton or electron just right to effect capture. I'm reminded of Rutherford's experiments shooting electrons at gold foil -- and in that case the few bounces where due to an electrostatic force many orders of magnitude stronger than gravity.
You're wrong about that because the analogy that guides you is inappropriate.
The intensity of an unshielded electromagnetic field does, like gravity, fall off in proportion to the square of the distance from the source.
However the gold nuclei at which Rutherford was firing his helium nuclei were not unshielded. The repulsive effect of the target protons was attenuated by the enveloping electron cloud (or 'shell' as he saw it). An alpha particle completely outside of the electron cloud would, on average, feel no net repulsion at all.
Gravity is not polar and there is no (known) means of shielding it. Consequently, any small black hole exerts a small but finite attaction upon every particle in the universe; and for any particle whose relative motion does not exceed the escape velocity for the gravitational field at its own position, it is only a matter of time before its centre of mass coincides with that of the black hole.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I'm really not worried about the risk posed by a microscopic black hole burning out in a tiny flash of gamma radiation lasting a millionth of a second.
I am however concerned about what happens when these colliders finally reach what they call the 'Grand Unification' energy.
A popular suite of cosmological theories has it that at certain very high temperatures, spacetime flips over into other metastable states in which the four physical forces attain the same values and become merged. The highest of these temperatures corresponds to the earliest epoch of the big bang, in which conditions it is thought that there is only one physical force.
If that wasn't bad enough, the inflationary theories suggest that at some critical point during this process the affected volume of spacetime undergoes a runaway expansion or 'inflation' which creates matter out of nothing just like droplets of moisture condensing out of humid air, as it expands and cools.
This is supposedly how our own Universe formed from an infinitesimal speck of hot nothingness. So, if we do ever manage to recreate in our colliders the energy density that prevailed at time T=0, it's quite possible that mini black holes will be the least of our worries. What would be the local effect of a new big bang in an Earthbound collider?
In his novel Cosm, Gregory Benford suggests that all Universes are created this way, like children born from a parent. That even our own universe was caused by someone's physics experiment (and that someone isn't necessarily much more technologically advanced then we are).
He also suggests that creating a baby universe in this way won't hurt. In his story, the baby was connected to the parent via a relatively big but stable wormhole, and its expansion did not disturb our local spacetime.
That was just a story device though. Wormholes are generally thought to be both very small and also hightly unstable (i.e. short lived).
What would be the energy release from a collapsing wormhole pinched off from a baby universe even if the universe's expansion didn't itself disturb the local domain?
Is somebody going to tell us or do we have to do the experiment?
As a lot of people have mentioned in jest, including (elsewhere) Arthur C Clarke, maybe this is why you don't see too many other advanced civilisations out there cluttering up the airwaves. The final experiment is just too easy to do.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I thought two particles, gravitons and anti-gravitons, are expected to exist, each with an opposite gravitational "pole". The existence of these quantum particles is vital for exotic matter (and consequently, fun things like exploiting wormholes and warp drives). Right?
Well now, that would be nice. However, neither exotic matter nor wormholes nor warp drives are known to exist. Also, there is no comprehensive gravitational theory, whether GR or QM-based, which requires antigravitons and which has also been backed up by observational data.
So for the moment at least, the things of which you speak belong solely to the domain of science fiction. Unfortunately.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Yes, it was Niven, in a story called "The Hole Man". It's available in the collection "N Space". The person in question died due to peritonitis from the tidal effects of a molecule-sized black hole passing through him.
I'm not sure how I feel about the words "cheap pulp science fiction" and "Larry Niven" being discussed in the same topic. Granted, not everything he's written has been great, but at the same time, some of it has been.
pooptruck
Plutonium is not the most toxic substance known to man. There are many biological toxins that are much more dangerous. There is a paper on the subject here, written by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It contains actual scientific facts, not eco-loonie propaganda as propagated by Helen Caldicott and Karl Grossman.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
If it was accurate, it wouldn't be much of a movie:
:)
Scientist 1: Okay, so let's start this...
Brilliant yet psycho scientist: NO YOU'LL FORM A BLACK HOLE!
Scientist 2: Be quiet psycho! Let's start..
Scientist 1: Okay, all readings normal. OH SHI...
*POOF*
Fin
Now, how could that possibly be exciting?
If we haven't met face to face with other ;) This could be the
intelligent beings because they made one of
these things first.
scientific achievment that starts the
endgame. Spooky eh?
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Or was that some kind of Cobalt bomb or something? It was actually called "Cobalt Sodium G", and it was a part of the Doomsday Device that the Russians were building in the 1960s...
--
My recent experiences with the UK's alleged quality press is
that it has gone the way of the British popular press: tabloid
journalism full of sensationnalism, exaggerations and the like.
Take this article with a pinch of salt. It wouldn't be surprising
if they had grossly distorted what the scientists have said.
How do collisions with an energy greater than the equivalent of two gold nuclei bumping into each other at 99.9% of the speed of light at an angle of 180 degrees occur naturally? Please enlighten me, as I know very little about cosmic radiation.
:)
I don't either, really, but the energies of some cosmic rays are just insane. The introduction to the RHIC documentation gives an upper bound for the beam energies of 100 GeV/nucleon. Cosmic rays have been seen with energies in excess of 100TeV (1000 times larger).
These are very rare, of course, but we certainly see several every year. This is why studying cosmic rays is still a useful thing, even though we have these amazing accelerators.
Why the hell do they want to recreate the creation of the universe anyway?
They're not trying to create a new big bang; there's not even a prevailing theory on 'why' the big bang happened in the first place, or what took place in the first (miniscule) fraction of a second. However, a lot of theories, both cosmological models and GUTs (Grand Unified Theories) depend on what happened in the high-energy conditions that existed only in that first second, during which -- for instance -- our basic forces congealed out of the morass. So, recreate the high-energy conditions, and you can investigate the theories experimentally.
That said, recreating big bang conditions isn't even the primary aim of most accelerators; the high-energy conditions required to isolate particles simply happen to be the exception rather than the rule in the universe today, while the big bang was one circumstance in which they were the rule.
-spc
Well! I'd just like to add that IF the world does disappear in a puff of nothingness, then at the VERY least we should get nominated for THE GALACTIC DARWIN AWARD.
For service to the evolution of beings everywhere..
-- mind over pixel
Does this mean he's no longer the 'Unquestioned' lord of the internet? I've been waiting for someone to take him down - it seemed so easy. Just question him...
...suckling from the sweet amnion of life...
Read David Brin's "Earth". A good book that involves the life and times of Earth in the early 21st century. Also explains fairly well synthetic black holes, how they're contained, and a great new science called 'Cavitronics'.
It also has an interesting theory (that I've seen in other science fiction) on the creation of the universe.
...suckling from the sweet amnion of life...
Yes, time slows down, when you compare what you experienced to what the outside world experienced. You would only notice the change in time if you were able to exit the black hole, and check out the universe. You'd notice time passed a lot for them, but little for you. In short, you'd still be dead quickly, even though to people on mars it would appear to be an eternity.
-matt
Your screaming seems to scream out "moderate me"
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I think they feel that this Universe is much too much like Windoze. It's time to reformat the disk and re-install.
Your right, curiousity is in our makeup. Unfortunatley, It makes up about 10% of our composition. the other 90% is greed. I find this really sad.
In the case of a nuclear explosion, energy is released because the resulting nuclei have less binding energy than the original nuclei.
If nuclei are ripped into their constituent quarks, it seems that energy would be required (rather than released) to do so.
The article reports that the 'strangelets' produced may set off a chain reaction, converting everything it comes into contact with into strange matter. But it seems that a lot of energy will be required to break up nuclei into its constituent quarks (?). But where would the energy for a such chain reaction come from? After all energy has to be conserved e.g. colliders require very large amounts of energy to accelerate atoms to very high speeds to break them up in the first place.
But the article just says that matter may be transformed into 'more strange matter'. What does this actually mean?
I am going to buy stove that runs only on human energy..
can take the chance of wood.. There is all sorts of *stuff* in that wood stuff...
By the way, for a good summary of the technology involved in producing the Cassini probe (and why you shouldn't panic about the plutonium on board), check out this letter on Brill's Content. It was written (by a friend - go Chris go!) in reaction to one of the many paranoia inducing articles that's been circulating about the probe.
A two atom black-hole would probably evaporate!
"Cosmic rays" are generally electrically charged ions, i.e., atoms from which one or more electrons have been stripped or added (unusual). Most of the ions are protons (Hydrogen ions). Next most common are alpha particles (Helium ions). The other ions are rare enough that if they have special names, then I don't know them. Some very small percentage of the ions will be made from atoms heavier than iron. Of these, an extremely small percentage will be gold (or heavier). They're rare, but they exist. There would even be some uranium ions. Occasionally there would be head-on collisions out in space, say 100 miles above the earth's surface. If a black-hole were to be formed then, it would be likely to be captured (head-on collision, remember). Then it could spiral in slowly. If it were still in the atmosphere (and charged [almost certainly]), then this would be easily detected via a cloud-chamber like reaction. This would also slow down the orbit, so it would spiral into the crust.
OTOH, the capture cross-section would be so small, that it might not matter. It would probably evaporate rather than accumulate mass.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Hey, we're talking about a two atom sized black hole. When it evaporated it would probably need to be in a test chamber to be detected. (I haven't calculated this, but that's my first estimate.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You need to match the wave-length. Maybe you could bob-it in time to call digital watch crystals? (CPU clocks?) :-)
More seriously, does ANYONE know what size/shape/composition of antenna should be used? AFAIK, noone has detected any yet. This bird may not fly. (Good thing to investigate though.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Or a garbage incinerator? (Once it got large enough you could get up to ?50?% of the total energy off as em radiation. Talk about a spaceheater!)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Well, you'd probably need to put it in orbit. That should be safe enough... if the containment failed, then you'd have a REALLY micrometeorite in orbit. I doubt that it would slow down before evaporating unless you had put most of a planet into it, and with total conversion (close order of, anyway) you could certainly afford to expand the orbit as it gained weight. Of course, the microwave downlink for power transmission might be a tad controversial.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
No, conservation of energy must be obeed at the quantum level too, although you can "cheat" a little. Heisenberg's uncertaintity principle states that conservation of energy can be violated, but that the amount of time for which this surplus energy can exist is inversely proporional to the amount of energy (the exact relationship escapes me, but it's something like t=(hbar)/E, where t is time, E is energy and (hbar) is Planck's constant over 2*pi).
:o)
Therefore, 0 energy can exist forever (t goes to infinity), an infinite amount of energy can exist for zero time, and everything else falls somewhere inbetween.
On a related matter, I remember reading a couple of years ago that the total energy of the universe is, in fact, zero (counting potential energy as being negative, as always). So, there is no violation of conservation of energy, and the universe has every right to exist for as long as it wants....
Tim
Getting back into Physics mode
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I'd go with the duration of the universe being undefined - mostly because it is :o)
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Also "Forever Peace" by Joe Haldeman.
Cameron Simpson, DoD#743 cs@cskk.id.au http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/
Finally something to replace Y2K in the end-of-the-world-is-here arena!
How 'bout having a slashdot poll on the matter?
;)
Sigura Non Grata
...if this does destroy the world, the end of the Microsoft monopoly will be assured.
or will it?
chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
"London Sunday Times" *cough* - what's that then?
You've got the details mostly right. It discusses using a radioactive dust as a weapon (probably since when the story was written, it was believed "impossible" to build an ICBM). Planes would "dust" cities to destroy them. Different dusts would have different strengths.
After ending WW II using the dust, every country in the world is supposed to turn its planes over to the UN. Whenthe stand-in for the Soviet Union turns in their planes, they dust the US instead. Moscow is then destroyed, and Manning (the head of the program) becomes world dictator.
There's a lot more, but just get a copy of the story. It's a good read.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
You need an excuse to do some serious partying?
Better go read about how a transistor works before you start posting. Classical physics says nothing about electron "holes"
Look on the bright side.. at least it would destroy Microsoft once and for all :)
So, you've got an O:Line? That dont impress me much du du da du.
I will, in time, write up an article on the RHIC startup, but for now, I've whipped up a quick FAQ for those of you interested in learning a bit about the collider from some one on the inside. That's me. By the way, we are oranizing a conference titled Open Source/Open Science, on the use of open source in science. So if you guys want to see the RHIC for your selves, then you are welcome to come to BNL, hear about Open Source and see the collider and its detectors! [A shamless plug by one of the conference organizers. :) ]
Sorry, we use Linux in one form or other in all experiments at RHIC. Looks like were doomed!!!!
Everyone who knew your parents before you were
:>
born realized that if they had any kids they would
grow up to be a nerotic toad like you.
Umm... so they were right... maybe the naysayers
about this project are wrong?
I, for one, don't really care either way. The information
they get out of completing the project will be interesting.
Getting sucked up by a black hole or disappearing
in a big bang would be interesting as well.
I just hope it doesn't happen when I'm sleeping..
or is so fast that I miss it... (that would suck)
Heh
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
We are all gonna be watching TV some night and all the broadcasts will be interrupted by some bald kook with a naked cat saying, "I will turn this on unless you pay me ONE MILLION DOLLARS!"
Mister programmer
I got my hammer
Gonna smash my smash my radio
...how much they don't tell us about? Still the thing is that where talking about scientists here, in the scientific community, if you say something can happen, but it's extremely unlikely, you're simply covering all of the bases. Unfortunatly, when Reporter X hears this, they proceed to "expose" this because people have a "right to know" (Or is that the newspaper has a "right to sell issues" I forget.)
:)
Of course this does not mean that I don't think that a bunch of scientists, that usually have little knowledge of what they're actually doing couldn't end up destroying the planet. I just have faith that if they fuck up it'll prolly be huge, with no way out. In which case there's nothing we can do anyway and so it's pointless to worry about.
At least that's my 00000011.
save us bruce willis!
Considering the amount of redundancy and lack of proof-reading in Hemos's headline there must be some embedded radioactivity up there!
Hemos, what cell phone do you use?
Do you have statistics to back that up? More specifically, do you think things would have been better without welfare? How? Just curious.....
The only reason all cover-ups appear to fail is that you never hear about the ones that succeed.
"That national labs have better technology than the technology industry is probably the best indictment of how much taxation has hindered the development and spread of technology. If these companies didn't have to spend so much on taxes, accountants to calculate them, their support staff, and lawyers and their support staff, they could devote those funds to lowering costs or further research."
Point well taken, but my understanding is that the National labs and agencies such as NASA can focus on research that would simply not be cost effective for the private sector. For example a company might find that it can take a man to Mars for 4 billion bucks, but realize they can only get
1 billion dollars in revenue, and thus find the venture unprofitable. Same thing for high energy physics; it's useful but not economical for the private sector. Government agencies have no such constraints, and thus can investigate new technologies that are not yet ready for commercial
application. Once the megabucks have been invested
by the National Labs (at great financial loss) any marketable new technologies can then be developed by the commercial sector and mass produced.
The only reason all cover-ups appear to fail is that you never hear about the ones that succeed.
No.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Wasn't it in that movie that aliens came to warn us we were about to ignite the whole Universe with our scientific experiments, or something like that?
At last we can explain Area 51...
C.
Here is an official press-release from the director of BNL to the article - I am a PhD student doing my thesis work on RHIC, so I don't want it to blow up either... ;->
cheers,
patrick.
BNL Media & Communications wrote:
> The following statement was issued today by Brookhaven National Laboratory
> in response to an article on RHIC published in yesterday's Sunday Times of
> London. Please share it with others in your area who do not have access to
> e-mail.
> ***
> Statement by John Marburger, Brookhaven Lab Director, On Consequences of
> RHIC Operations
> July 19, 1999
> Yesterday, the Sunday Times of London published a story under the headline
> "Big Bang Machine could destroy the Earth," with an accompanying editorial.
> The story has its origins in a letter in the July 1999 issue of Scientific
> American magazine, in which a prominent physicist describes a possible
> scenario in which an exotic elementary particle transforms its
> surroundings.
> I am familiar with the issue of possible dire consequences of experiments
> at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which Brookhaven Lab is now
> commissioning. These issues have been raised and examined by responsible
> scientists who have concluded that there is no chance that any phenomenon
> produced by RHIC will lead to disaster.
> The amount of matter involved in the RHIC collisions is exceedingly small -
> only a single pair of nuclei is involved in each collision. Our universe
> would have to be extremely unstable in order for such a small amount of
> energy to cause a large effect. On the contrary, the universe appears to
> be quite stable against releases of much larger amounts of energy that
> occur in astrophysical processes.
> RHIC collisions will be within the spectrum of energies encompassed by
> naturally occurring cosmic radiation. The earth and its companion objects
> in our solar system have survived billions of years of cosmic ray
> collisions with no evidence of the instabilities that have been the subject
> of speculation in connection with RHIC.
> I have asked experts in the relevant fields of physics to reduce to a
> single comprehensive report the arguments that address the safety of each
> of the speculative "disaster scenarios." I expect the report to be
> completed well before RHIC produces the high-energy collisions necessary
> for any of these scenarios. When the report is completed, it will be
> broadly published and placed on the Laboratory's web site.
> **************************************
> BNL Media & Communications
> pubaf@bnl.gov
> 516-344-3174 or 2345 * Fax 516-344-3368
> Brookhaven National Laboratory
> Bldg. 134 PO Box 5000
> Upton NY 11973
> www.bnl.gov
> **************************************
Come, join the Second Churce of Genocide.
There is one small problem with your calculations: where in the world would the black hole get a million tons of mass? Even in the world of High Energy physics you can't just create mass, it has to come from somewhere. At most the scientists are going to be slinging around a few atoms of some of gold...last time I checked atoms of gold were not measured in tons so the mass isn't comming from there. And it sure isn't going to get that much mass by somehow converting the energy into mass. Here is some more High School physics:
1 eV=1.602*10^-19 J
100 GeV (100 billion eV)=1.602*10^-8 J
E=mc^2
1.602*10^-8J=m(3.00*10^8)^2
m=1.78*10^-25 kg
And that is if every shred of energy in the system is converted to mass.
So, in total, we have less than a kilogram of mass avaliable to make a black hole. What kind of event horizon do you think this will create? I don't know the equation offhand but I would be willing to bet it would be *damn* small. As in sub-atomic, if that is even possible.
And if we consider that black holes actually decrease in mass at a rate that is inversely proportional to their mass, then the only conclution that seems logical to me is that these tiny black holes will "evaporate" before they can do any damage, or really have any effect on anything. That is, if they are even created which is doubtful.
Well, say you had a black hole out in deep space, where there really is very little to pull in. In that case then it might stop growing. As I understand it black holes actually shrink at a rate that is inversely proportional to their mass. That means that, theoreticaly, a black hole could completly vanish (or "evaporate") if it does not keep sucking in more matter.
In the case of these tiny black holes that are under discussion they would have such a weak pull and tiny event horizon (point of no return, nothing escapes a black hole's pull once it has crossed the event horizon) that they would evaporate faster than they would pull in mass, and so they would vanish before hurting, or even effecting, much of anything.
DISCLAIMER: IANAHEP (I Am Not A High Energy Physicst) and could be completly wrong.
"In space, black holes are believed to generate intense gravitational fields that suck in all surrounding matter. The creation of one on Earth could be disastrous."
Who'd a thunk it?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Whoever came up with the idea that strange quarks can mysteriously transmute "everything they touch" into strange quarks needs to go back to high school. Here's a few of the conservation laws such a reaction would violate:
1) Conservation of charge. The strange quark has charge -1/3e; "conversion" of any other quark besides the down and bottom (which have equal charge) would violate charge conservation which is known to be preserved in all interactions.
2) Conservation of mass/energy. The strange quark has mass ~150MeV; up or down quarks (which compose nucleons) mass only 5 or 7 MeV respectively so any reaction producing a strange quark from an up or down requires massive additional energy (and so is not self-sustaining).
3) Conservation of strangeness. Preserved in all but the weak interaction.
So if strange quarks really are the King Midas of subatomic particles, they have to violate an awful lot of conservation principles. Sorry, it's not going to happen in our universe.
In the july SA there are some letters to the editor about this very subject. The response to the letters spells out the arguments against this possiblity rather succintly.
Here's the original article:
http://acnsun10.rhic.bnl.gov/RHIC/index.html
and the letters to the editor:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/1999/0799issu
Sounds great, but what good would it do, from what I've heard, (could be wrong, but I have asked around) gravity waves travel at approximatly the speed of light, so seriously, I don't see how this would do us any good. Now if gravity waves traveled at infinate speeds, that would be something.
well, as far as ways to go are, that wouldn't be to bad. I mean think how many people die in shootings, hit by a bus, car crashes, etc.
No one knows their names and such, but if your the first person to die by such an odd event, i think it'd get written down and published a lot.
(Standing in line to the afterlife)
ME: Hey man, how'd you get here?
Other: Hit by a bus, you?
ME: First person ever known to be swallowed by a black hole.
Other: What a way to go.
-Yogger
Think about it. Test fired on Friday, and creates
some sort of space-time warp, plane comes into contact with it and *POOF*...gonner.
It's possible...just not too probable
.
----------------------------
Dammit Jim...It's "U-N-I-X",
Just to summarize a few things, the comments /. pretty much just hit the mark - cosmic-ray
on
interactions are ~ the same energy, so if this
could happen, it would've happened.
Also, the comment about a "black hole forming"
seems to be psuedo-science crap - a 'miniature'
black hole would not even have the gravitational
field to draw anything *into* it - it would have
to rely on chance interactions to grow larger,
and considering that its Schwarzschild radius
would be smaller than the known radius of a
proton by *huge* amounts, I don't even know
if it *is* possible for it to absorb anything.
Also, as soon as it absorbed any particle, it
would be unstable due to charge-angular momentum-
mass limitation. The short answer: black holes
aren't dangerous. Huge amounts of mass are
dangerous. We don't have huge amounts of mass here.
No danger.
The 'strangelet' pair formation is curious.
I don't know enough about subatomic physics/
quark theory to actually know what this
actually is, but stupid physics tells me that
you can't just randomly break strangeness
conservation, so instead of forming just
strange matter, you'd need strange-antistrange
pairs, and thus baryon-antibaryon pairs. Which
means in order for these 'strangelets' to
convert something to strange matter, the
corresponding antiparticle would have to be
present - i.e. strangelet + p + pbar ->
strangelet + whatever the particle is with
(ssd) rather than (uud). (or ssc, or sud, etc.)
plus its antiparticle. Considering the vast
baryon-antibaryon asymmetry (see any antimatter
lying around? I didn't think so.) this isn't
a danger at all.
What I want to know is how this got published.
Granted, I haven't much gotten into graduate
physics yet, but this is really poor stuff at
face value.
Patrick
Note: I don't work for the laboratory, although since I'm on one of the RHIC experiments, technically I am an employee.
- Burt
------------------------------
The following statement was issued today by Brookhaven National Laboratory in response to an article on RHIC published in yesterday's Sunday Times of London. Please share it with others in your area who do not have access to e-mail.
***
Statement by John Marburger, Brookhaven Lab Director, On Consequences of RHIC Operations
July 19, 1999
Yesterday, the Sunday Times of London published a story under the headline "Big Bang Machine could destroy the Earth," with an accompanying editorial. The story has its origins in a letter in the July 1999 issue of Scientific American magazine, in which a prominent physicist describes a possible scenario in which an exotic elementary particle transforms its surroundings.
I am familiar with the issue of possible dire consequences of experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which Brookhaven Lab is now commissioning. These issues have been raised and examined by responsible scientists who have concluded that there is no chance that any phenomenon produced by RHIC will lead to disaster.
The amount of matter involved in the RHIC collisions is exceedingly small - only a single pair of nuclei is involved in each collision. Our universe would have to be extremely unstable in order for such a small amount of energy to cause a large effect. On the contrary, the universe appears to be quite stable against releases of much larger amounts of energy that occur in astrophysical processes.
RHIC collisions will be within the spectrum of energies encompassed by naturally occurring cosmic radiation. The earth and its companion objects in our solar system have survived billions of years of cosmic ray collisions with no evidence of the instabilities that have been the subject of speculation in connection with RHIC.
I have asked experts in the relevant fields of physics to reduce to a single comprehensive report the arguments that address the safety of each of the speculative "disaster scenarios." I expect the report to be completed well before RHIC produces the high-energy collisions necessary for any of these scenarios. When the report is completed, it will be broadly published and placed on the Laboratory's web site.
**************************************
BNL Media & Communications
pubaf@bnl.gov
516-344-3174 or 2345 * Fax 516-344-3368
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Bldg. 134 PO Box 5000
Upton NY 11973
www.bnl.gov
************************************
Oh, you'd be riped to shreads befor that happens.
the closer you are to a black hole or any other mass, the more gravity pulls on you. The forces acting on diffrent parts of your body would be diffrent. this is why planets rotate (I think).
the forces acting on your body near a black hole would be strong enough to rip it apart.
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
If someone had asked 70 years ago what quantum teory was good for. No one could probably give him an answer. But look now we have computers
yes we do, you do know that quantum mechanics has nothing to do with conventional computers (like the one your sitting at)
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Considering how dificult it is, or at least was to refine U235 and plutonim, I'm gussing it would be a *lot* cheaper to build a nucliar bomb instaid, considering it would take tons of dust (and I mean that literaly) to whipe out a city, and the dust would probably take a while to kill everyone.
besides, and atomic bomb would work pretty well anyway...
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
No, it would seem like forever to a hypothetical outside observer. A person cannot observe relativistic distortions of their own perception of time. Realtivistic distortion only applies when one frame of reference (something falling fast into a black hole) is observed by another (somebody not falling).
That document is packed full of info. The largest inhalable particle size and its consequences was particularly interesting.
With our full share of atmosphere we'd have a much higher pressure and greater greenhouse effect. We also would have much more silicon and fewer metals available at the surface. Plate tectonics might also not be operating, so our present cycling of carbon and water back to the surface might not be happening. The Earth's core might also not be rotating and generating magnetism the way it is.
Our planet would be more like Venus. But it is not because the Moon is there but rather how the Moon appeared there.
ME: First human ever known to be swallowed by a black hole.
Other: Then you should be in that line over there, with the other beings with cosmological endings.
James P. Hogan's "Thrice Upon a Time" also involves an accident in extreme physics.
That is how "Sledge Hammer" dealt with the previous season's finale where the hero dealt with a problem involving a nuclear bomb.
There was a letter to the editor in a recent Scientific American about that possibility. The reply explained why it was unlikely and pointed out that more powerful cosmic ray reactions happen frequently in our own atmosphere. If it could happen, it would have happened billions of years ago.
If it's a fizzle, well, what the heck. They might find out what they wanted to. Great.
If it really does end the world, swallow the earth and kill everyone, like, who will be sorry? Nobody will be able to blame the poor fellas who started it. We'll all be dead, so what. (Unless, of course, some sort of afterlife exists, and the premises of that afterlife does not rule out lynchings)
Or, we end up with something really cool and unpredicted, like a small, not that very dangerous black hole or something that maybe is sort of useful. Imagine watching a tiny black hole swallow your pizza cartons!
Don't hate the media, become the media.
Oops. Better not go outside - there's a non-zero risk that you'll be hit by a bus. Mind you, there's a non-zero risk that the roof will fall on you if you stay inside.
Nothing is perfectly safe. However, the chances of this creating a black hole that will wipe out the planet are significantly less than that of a nuclear holocaust at midnight on December the 31st. Or of a race of war-like aliens suddenly materialising and enslaving the entire human race next week, for that matter...
Forget about the little ol' black hole doing the earth fantasy, but how about doing the entire universe in less time than a twink of an eye. NPR did a nice little piece on something called
Vacuum Decay
A scary mathematical possibility, however slight.
that the correct URL is
Vacuum Decay Here
See, it could be just like that, snapped somewhere unexpected.
NPR did a nice story on whacking the universe instantaneously.
You can listen to what all the math means on this story about
Vacuum Decay
My physics is a bit rusty but if a microscopic black hole formed wouldn't it actually be "A Good Thing" (tm) since it would be so small we should be able to suspend it in a magnetic field after it is charged of course and simply extract energy out of it.. creating a almost limitless and clean power supply?
You know, I get nervous when the kid next door plays with firecrackers. How do you suppose our interstellar neighbors feel?
"Look George, those crazy earthlings just turned their planet into a black hole."
I wonder if the black holes already in the universe were caused by other civilizations trying the exact same thing once upon a time. It could be just another milestone in the evolution of a culture -- language, machinary, heavy-ion smashing....
"Word is that earthlings have finally reached the heavy-ion smashing stage. I wonder if they'll be able to control it?"
"
"Whoops, guess not. Better put some orange cones around what used to be their solar system."
It's not funny to you, but somewhere there's a hyper-intelligent lifeform that thinks it's hysterical.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Why the hell do they want to recreate the creation of the universe anyway?
Wouldn't that basically create a universe either, inside this one, or a universe that just wiped ours away.
Some things you just don't do..putting your hand in the blender on purpose is one..this is probably another one....
If these companies didn't have to spend so much on taxes, accountants to calculate them, their support staff, and lawyers and their support staff, they could devote those funds to lowering costs or further research.
Woo hoo, is that a laugh. I would say that there is definitely a "non-zero" probability that if these companies didn't have to spend so much on taxes, et cetera, they would devote those funds to higher executive salaries. As another poster has said, companies don't do altruistic research any more -- there is no ROI in it.
In related news, there are several companies competing with a couple of governments (US included) to document the human genome. Altruism? Not a chance. In a year or two at least part of your genetic code will be patented by at least one company. Unless, of course, all that "wasteful" government spending on the human genome project pays off and they beat the companies to it.
Government research pays off, no matter what that research is in, because YOU end up owning it. Not some company in California who will charge you nicely if you want your children to have blue eyes.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
Bismark, The founder of the modern wellfare state, Said "The Purpose of Wellfare is to buy some peoples votes with other peoples money." Look at all the votes that money has bought. A lot of politicans would have to get a real job if it wasn't for wellfare votes.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
It was friggin' hilarious. }:)
- =^o.o^=
If you read this document objectively, it does manage to dispose of the issue of acute toxicity from accidental exposure (e.g., the anti Cassini hysteria), but is deeply flawed in other respects.
The authors assume and define away a number of problems. Example: that terrorists with access to plutonium oxide would spread it into a reservoir in its current form. Even if there isn't some more soluble and absorbable compound of plutonium, why would the terrorist put it in the reservoir, which by its nature is designed to remove impurities, when they could simply put it into the intake of a viaduct get bilions of times the concentration? Is there any data at all suggesting the kind of settling effects you see in a reservoir (where water is impounded for years) in a viaduct (where water entering is destined for the tap in less than 24 hours)?
Here is an example of a definition problem. What exactly is their definition of "inhale"? Obviously one that would preclude asbestos particles, coal dust and diesel particulates. A large plutonium particle would lodge in and irradiate lung tissue for years. If you really bought their arguments, then people handling and machining plutonium should not be expected or required to take any special precautions.
The problem with this document is that the authors so obviously have an axe to grind, and so transparently use badly contrived examples, it discredits their conclusions, many of which I'm inclined to agree with.
On the other hand, a lot of people who agree with this document are going to come away from this with some false optimism about the situation in Russian weapons labs. The real issue is that the purported terrorist uses of plutonium simply wouldn't be the highest and best use of the resource for the terrorists. If I were a terrorist, I'd use it to make a bomb. Or I'd trade it with a rogue state for explosives and blow up the viaducts supplying New York city. Or maybe trade it for some shoulder launched anti-aircraft systems. Of course the rogue state is getting the plutonium, with which it is probably going to make a bomb.
I believe in using numerical reasoning to solve problems. Papers like this make my job harder, because they discredit in the public mind the very idea of numerical reasoning.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Nope. The historical problem with dropping money into underdeveloped regions is that we weren't giving it to the people, but to corrupt governments as part of our cold war effort to contain the Soviets. The poor didn't get much of it and we really didn't give a shit that the local pol were lining their pockets.
Generally, poor people use money very rationally. First, they spend it on things which prolong survival. Next, they spend it on things which improve their prospects. Next they spend it on things which improve their status. People who live on the edge know a lot about spending for the greatest marginal value.
You should look into initiatives to send capital to microenterprises, along with very elementary business education. If you put 10B into well a designed microenterprise program,you'd see real transformation in peoples lives. If you gave BG another 10B, you'd see pretty much more of the same old.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
How can any substance contain the incredible temperatures they describe in the article? Wouldn't the "miniscule fireball" simply melt everything around it?
#include "mysig.h"
It has to have the mass/energy of a million H bombs to do that. A Hole with the m/e of two gold nuclei will just make a pretty spark.... 4.something Mev per atomic mass x about 170 x 2, about 1.5Tev.... 1.5 x 10^12. 1 eV = 10^-19 joules. 1 watt for a ten-millionth of a second.
Whoop-de-whoop.
Unless it's Gev per atomic mass, in which case it'll be 1000x more powerful.
And I live on Long Island, this is pretty fucking scary. You could already say I'm 'strange matter,' but I don't wanna get any stranger.
-- insomniac --
And a huge black hole would also wipe out Israel!
-- insomniac --
No you wouldn't
-- insomniac --
What about the expansion theory of the creation of the universe, where a quantum blip went into expansion mode... Isn't conservation of enery/matter a classical (i.e statistical) phyisics "law", rather than a quantum reality? If the inventors of Quantum theory don't claim to understand it, then I doubt any slashdotter does!
now, that explains why SETI is not more successful: just a few years after that aliens learnd how to send out radio waves, their curious scientists turned their plantes into black holes.. ;-)))
http://www.lhep.unibe.ch/newmass/intro/strangelets .html
... So who cares about 100Ge/V gold ion collisions? Is this the typical English attitude of "if we're doing it of course it's much more important than anywhere else" ? or are these people just unaware of the aforementioned experiments? or am I just completely missing something here?
in this experiment they're colliding Pb atoms with up to 158Ge/V
stay tuned to find out.
I am writing this for all those apocamaniacs out there in the wild.
IF ANYONE CREATES A BLACKHOLE ON EARTH, the time it will take your brains to recognize it as such, eg:
Time for signal to go from eye to brain, or another type of sense.
will be longer than the time it will take the black hole to squeeze you and me and a lot of other things around us, until we are no longer bigger than nothing!
So rest at peace, your death and ours will be swift.
Now let's get serious, I was just wondering that maybe we ought to ask them to use NT to run the experiments!
At its crash rate, no black hole can ever form and swallow us ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!
Maybe even (just to make sure), ask it to write reports using Office2000 and showing them on screen! There combined crash rate will reassure our whole population.
Kill Microsoft? No! Just hire their GUI guys!
Earth is constantly being bombarde by extremely high energy particles often called cosmic rays. These particles collide with particles in the upper atmosphere routinely at much higher energies then can be acheived in the particle accelerator. The biggest evidence against a singularity forming as a result of collisions in the collider is that we don't have singularites forming in our upper atmosphere.
1) has spent eight years building its Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider...how did they get to maintain funding while the SCSC got killed?
2) Is there any difference between the two projects other than size? (RHIC is two 2.4-mile circular tubes, SCSC circled the town of Waxahachie)
3) Why don't we put some of this budget surplus back into "big science", like SCSC or a Mars mission, or do we have no interest in investments in our future?
(Score:-2 Bitter and politically off topic)
Just give me a good 24 hours to go and get laid and go parachuting and get laid and eat lots of greasy junky food and get laid before they flip the switch just in case it does end the world and I'll be happy.
~Kevin
:)
you forgot to first post the ask slashdot article
~Kevin
:)
Moderation just doesn't work...
~Kevin
:)
Well if I was DAMN sure it would end, time to steal some cars and do some drugs and whatever the hell else that's illegal.
If the world didn't end, I'd have minimal guilt about the sex and grease b/c I know whatever damage I would of sustained would be far less then dying without a big wide smile on my face.
~Kevin
:)
Okay, besides the fact that there's turmoil in Iran, the Chinese have a neutron bomb, Taiwan decides to be agressive, the stock market is absurdly high, Russia has gone to hell in a handbasket and probably has lost fissionable materials, and the rain forests are still being wiped out, now we have to worry about the *complete* destruction of the earth?
Can everybody just wait until after the millennium arrives? It's not like the experiments can't wait, and there's enough pre-millennial jitters going already. Let's let all the Y2K stuff get done, and let all the prophecy predictions prove baseless, and *then* we can try making black holes on the surface of the earth.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
Right. If it were just the black hole created with those two little particles, it would be no problem. What they are worried about, however, is a chain reaction where all sorts of strange quarks would be stripped off atoms to create a massive black hole. Not that I beleive anything like this could happen, but that's what they are saying, I think.
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
And your mother was a slug
The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient... - High Road to China
This reminds me of the type I tried to explain the science fallacy that "vacuums suck" to a former girlfriend. Vacuums don't suck; it's the fact that there's fewer air molecules coming from a particular direction that results in the unbalanced pressure, and thence the "sucking" effect. Once the air pressure drops enough that the back pressure from the vacuum matches the internal pressure in the chamber you'll see no "sucking" effect -- and the air pressure in the chamber won't drop further.
This article contains a similar fallacy: "black holes suck in..." They do not, they *cannot* reach out with some mysterious force to yank unsuspecting atoms to their death.
They *do* have gravitational attraction, of course, but we're talking about a miniscule mass. Any singularity with this mass will be indescribably small, and even if it survives Hawking radiation it will only rarely hit a proton or electron just right to effect capture. I'm reminded of Rutherford's experiments shooting electrons at gold foil -- and in that case the few bounces where due to an electrostatic force many orders of magnitude stronger than gravity.
The dangers from such a black hole are non-existent. The risk of strange matter contaminating the earth are harder to quantify... but where are the strange *stars* from the same effect?
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
as I'm sure others have noted, if a big bang happened, which I'm seriously believing won't have a chance in all of creation to happen, there won't be anything left to make stoves with, no humans to heat it, and no food to cook in/on that stove. Anyway, why worry about the physical body? It's the spiritual body to be concerned with.
Insert mind here.
The part that scares me about GM foods is how incredibly ignorant and passive the American public is. I read recently that 30+% of all corn in America is GM now. Although I think it's an insane risk (worst case, we're talking cascading global crop failures) for a negligible payoff to farmers (and zero payoff to consumers), what's really crazy is that they don't have to label it! I'm greatly heartened by all the protest in Europe. It sounds like they may be forced to label GM food over there soon and there is talk of increasing government subsidies for organic farming. Both are good results. America could really learn some social lessons from Europe. There's more to life than the almighty dollar.
Wasn't there a short story by Larry Niven where an astronaut on Mars commits murder by "accidentally" dropping a microscopic black hole through another man? At the end of the story,the narrator estimates that in a couple of years Mars would be gone, replaced by a slightly larger black hole in the same orbit.
--
Clear, Dark Skies
First, get your facts straight. NASA isn't launching anything in August. Cassini, which NASA launched last year, will be making a close pass to Earth in order to get a gravity boost on it's way to Saturn.
In any case, your description of the plutonium risk is a massive exaggeration. Plutonium is primarily dangerous if you breath it in as dust after managing to survive the atomic explosion that spread it around in the first place. If you do that, it is about the most toxic substance known to man - it will settle into your bones and just start spawning cancers.
NASA probes, OTOH, are using ceramic pellets to encase the plutonium. No dust. You could probably even handle the pellets (for a short while) without ill effects.
The biggest threat you face from Cassini is if it re-entered and happened to hit you on the head as it crashed.
Sheesh. You'd think someone who posts on Slashdot would know a little science.
--
Clear, Dark Skies
If by some strange chance a singularity was created by the ion collider, what they would have to do is isolate it somehow, contain it, and get one of the space agencies to pack it off on a quick course out of the solar system (just don't point it towards anything important ;-). Just because it's a black hole doesn't mean it will suck in the entire earth - it wouldn't have enough mass. More likely a steadily increasing trickle of surrounding matter would be assimilated.
Problem is, how do you suspend a black hole (preferably in vacuum) long enough to get it out of here? If it got away and ate its way down through Earth's crust, it would end up eventually destroying the earth as it absorbed matter at an exponentially increasing rate.
~ Give me 101 plastic soldiers, and I will conquer the world.
We're all Gonna Die !!!!!!!!!
This is exactly what Nostrademous said in one of his visions :
"Humanity shall destroy itself within the first months of the 2nd Millenium. The Sword of thy death shall be known as RHIC*"
*Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
I swear that this is an absolutely authentic translation from his old text, I haven't modified the slightest word.
Murphy...
Well it's one way like the other to stop Microsoft from the World Dominition, but isn't it a bit too much ?
Didn't happen, I believe :P
Still, I suppose scientists have to think about such matters. In this case, I'd say go for it! Mad science! Bwahaha!
Linux note: HEPpc: Linux Resources f or High Energy Physics
--- Premature complacency is the evil of all roots
It's at Brookhaven National Labs. So when disaster happens and the Earth is destroyed, we get Steven Adler to do the writeup ;)
--- Premature complacency is the evil of all roots
If this thing only costs 350M pounds, I wonder how expensive it would be to construct a machine that could deliberately produce these strangelets. Something for the Dr Evil's of the future to consider anyway...
So perhaps all those Year 2000 conspirasists really do have a case...
Work like this is to develop a GUT (Grand Unified Theory), a set of laws that govern each and everything, everytime across the universe. If we developed it, such quick advances would be made in physics: space travel, communication, etc. That 350m pounds is CHEAP is it is found.
FunOne
FunOne
Damn straight! Besides, there have been many high energy collision experiments, obviously. All physicists are doing by cranking up the energy is looking further back in time (i.e., asymptotically closer to the hypothetical t=0 point of this universe, not unlike approaching absolute zero temperature). I don't think there's any reason to expect this experiment to cross some magic threshold that would annihilate our universe, of even the Earth.
Am I wrong? Anyway, if it were to happen, we probably wouldn't even know what hit us -- quick and painless.
I noticed this, and it struck a chord with me. My physics professor and TA from last year are both working on this project in a section called PHENIX. (See, we do more at the University of Tennessee than play football!! :)) They're searching for evidence of what the universe was like just seconds after the big bang and verifying theories on the type of matter existed... if I remember correctly, it was something like "Quark-gluon plasma." If you want to know a little more about this particular area, check out http://uther1.phy.ornl.gov/experiments/phenix.html and/or http://www.rhic.bnl.gov which is the collider group's homepage. Hope this helps out with a little of the confusion :). Go Vols! -Allen Cain
Allen Cain
Oh shit! I better buy a wood stove.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
"But where would the energy for a such chain reaction come from?"
You know those pennies you have in a jar? And the little plastic tray cashiers keep pennies in? Well these are the so-called "lost-pennies". Einstein's special relativity relates time, mass and energy. We all know time is money, and conversely money is time. We also know energy must be conserved. It follows then that these lost pennies must create a surplus of energy to fulfill the law of conservation of energy.
Note: certain configurations of lost pennies, socks, and drying machines have been known to create black holes...so remember, always take the change out of your pockets before doing laundry
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I hear that worried person saying:
"Oh, gee, just a mega-H-bomb, not global annihilation...whew!"
heh
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Yes but even if time slowed exponentially, you should be dead by the time you might care. A few milliseconds past the horizon and you should be ripped to pieces.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
ok, is it just me, or does anyone else out there think that there are just a few slightly more important things out there for world governments to spend money on? Isn't anyone else disturbed by some of the money being tossed around on crap like this instead of somewhat more practical stuff like cures for horrible diseases? The more big nifty science crap I see on slashdot, the more I start to understand how fucked humanity's priorities are.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against this sort of research, but couldn't all this money and manpower be better used???
Just a thought... and on the subject of misspending, imagine if our governments had put the money behind echelon to a legitmate purpose...
and it goes bad. You end up with a black hole with the mass of the moon.
The moon is quite far enough. A black hole doesn't suck any harder than the same mass of cheese. The difference is that the cheese takes up space, while the black hole doesn't, unless you count the event horizon...
Building the lab on the back side of the moon wouldn't make it any safer in terms of black hole problems. Radiation problems, sure. But when you consider solar and other cosmic radiation, anything human-made coming from the moon is going to be pretty minor. Human-made radiation sources on the planet can be a problem because they are inside the defenses.
Fear my wrath, please, fear my wrath?
Homer
We apologize for the inconvenience.
The book Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman talks about this very subject. It's the driving point behind a very diverse plot; it gets pushed off to the side later, but provides the impetus for the characters to get into a hell of a mess.
Good book, too. Won the Hugo for 1998.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I can't find the book that gives the exact equation but I seem to remember reading that a black hole with an event horizon the size of one neutron would have a mass of about one hundred million tons. Now excuse the crudity of this next step but a million tons is about 1 billion killograms so 100M tons is 10^11 kg. Now, from High school physics:
F = G (m_1 * m_2)/(r^2)
so if m_1 is the black hole and m_2 is a 220 pound (100kg)person then:
F = (6.67e-11)(1e11*100)/(r^2)
F = 667/(r^2)
Now this means that a person at one meter from the point of colision would feel a force of 667 Newtons -- about 130 pounds
That is not a whole lot; however, there is a catch. As the size of a black whole increases (by size I mean the radius at which the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light) the density increases. This means that one of a radius of say an atom 1000 times the radius 1 billion times the volume could be 1 trillion times the mass. In other words, New York is gone. D.C. is gone. Philly is gone. Chicago, Boston, Miami, and maybe Houston are all gone. It probably wont destroy the earth but man made structures would have a problem. How much nearly sideways force can a building take? I don't know. Thats not my area of specialty and I encurage information from people who do know. But remember, the force is directly related to the mass and I do know that buildings are pretty heavy.
Please any one who knows the mass of buildings or the amount of side force they can take please reply. Also if anyone can find the actual equation for the mass a black hole please post it. Probably (hopefully) it wont happen but it's still a fun exersise to figure the damage.
You've just ventured outside the realms of science and into the realms of theology.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
The Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, CA, is actually building a gravity-wave detector; the actual building sites are far from civilization. Essentially, if I remember right, they're gigantic laser inferometers, a mile or so in length (don't know exact number) that will detect gravity waves contracting and expanding the mass they travel through through the changes in the laser inferometry
... it'd have a mass of what, a few atomic particles? It's even horizon would be less than an atomic radius, if that's even possible.
And if I remember right, Stephen Hawking showed recently that micro black holes 'evaporate' almost immediately; the smaller they are, the faster they vanish
No, that will be the MS-Vac vacuum cleaner.
.sig, but it's SOOO funny: The day Microsoft sells something that doesn't suck will be the day they sell vacuum cleaners.
I apologise to whoever has this as his/her
:)
Suppose our fears are justified and it does happen? Do you want to be killed by a black hole?
---Got Coffee?---
Why do we even bother researching this kind of stuff when we know that there is a chance of it screwing up everything? They already know that stranglets can be dangerous, so why are the insisting on making them?
---Got Coffee?---
There were some fears of the a-bomb igniting the atmosphere expressed among those at the first a-bomb test, but they weren't really taken seriously. I know there _was_ some serious concern, however, of the first underwater h-bomb test starting a fusion reaction in the ocean itself...
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
Er - how do you know that the BigBang that caused our universe to exist has not been caused by two stray gold ions colliding in a previous universe?
Just a thought.
--
Jor
Waitaminute! Shouldn't we have interstellar capability before we start creating black holes? That way we can leave.
I'm thinking in the style of Simmons' "Hyperion" where mini-blackholes are used to punch holes in space-time alowing for instant jump-doors and so alleviating all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace. The first hole was created on Earth, got loose, and turned the Earth into a Swiss Cheese. Of course there was lots of time to leave and they had the abilility to leave by tediously mucking about in hyperspace.
So maybe these guys should wait a few centuries or so...
-M
I'm not a Physicist, but I'll try to play one on the net. Here's what I think is the current theory:
The vacuum is full of virtual particle-antiparticle pairs, constantly forming and annihilating, with a mass-time product less than the uncertainty principle's magic number. When a pair occurs near an event horizon, one of the particles can tunnel deep enough into it to be annihilated by its antiparticle below the horizon, allowing the partner to escape - as if the particle below the horizon had tunneled out. (If there isn't an antiparticle available, there isn't energy available to kick loose the particle that didn't penetrate the event horzon. So it falls in, too, and the virtual particle-antiparticle pair disappear back into the vacuum.)
So black holes evaporate. Bigger black holes have a bigger separation between the mass and the event horizon, and thus a lower mass density just under it. So the smaller the black hole the faster it eveporates. "Evaporate" means emit a spray of energetic subatomic particles.
If I have the constants right, a stellar-sized black hole emits the odd particle now and then, a mountain-mass black hole is a good approximation of a nuclear power plant's core, and so on. But radiation reduces their mass, so the faster they radiate, the faster they shrink, and the FASTER their radiation increases, until the event horizon suddenly disappears and the remaining particles come blasting out of the former cage at nearly lightspeed. It goes BANG big-time - because this happens when there's still a lot of stuff in there. Current high-end H-bombs would blush with envy.
A black hole with the mass of a couple heavy ions would have a very short lifetime, even as compared with other subnuclear processes. Making one that would have a lifetime in seconds would consist of creating a density of matter that would push stuff through the event horizon faster than it tunnels out. That's equivalent to making a BIG atomic fireball and squeezing it down to the size of a single nucleus.
So we might see black holes as screwier-than-usual short-lived composite particles acting as intermediate steps in sunuclear reactions. But we shouldn't see a baby black hole falling quietly out of the accellerator and eating the earth.
Of course, my understanding of the model could be wrong. B-)
Or the model could be wrong. In which case, other predictions from it (such as the hole forming in the first place) are also up for grabs.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm reminded of a story printed in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, wherein the officer in charge of the Manhattan Project realises the tremendous lethality of plutonium dust. To prevent its use by governments [who might 'dust' cities to kill the inhabitants quickly and cheaply], he takes the dust under his control and the aircraft and holds Washington hostage to make himself a military dictator. After dusting a small town to prove its effectiveness, Washington capitulates. As dictator of the U.S., he seizes the U.N. and repeats the threat, demanding that all nuclear materials and aircraft be turned over to his control. He creates a U.N. military with control of all plutonium and aircraft, ends air travel entirely, and becomes the first ruler of Earth, incidentally putting an end to war and national sovereignty.
The Russians withhold some aircraft, and Moscow gets dusted, killing all inhabitants. The story didn't get into the whole 'benevolent dictator' thing, but it did raise the quesion of why plutonium dust was never developed as a weapon.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
I don't know how correct the science of the story is, but it made clear that the dust was easily obtained as 'tailings' of the refining process, and considered a nuisance until it was realized how lethal it is. I know that actual tailings from uranium mining is a big environmental problem at uranium sites like in northern Saskatchewan.
Plutonium dust is, in fact, tremendously lethal even in small doses, and the level of radiation poisoning it creates kills you quickly from radiation sickness, not slowly from cancer.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Great, now my mom will hear that idiot read this news story on his show and proclaim that along with the news of Kenedey going down in the ocean that the end of the world is near....
Ever watch that guy? He can turn a news story about a cat stuck in a tree into bible relevations.
I for one believe that tampering with the beauty and order of nature is foolhearty and all for the sake of deeming ourselves as gods. It's almost as foolish as genetic cloning. Even without the formation of stranglets or miniture black holes, generating strange subatomic particles that can alter matter is no child's play. Beware of the Manhattan project part deux.
Sounds like the London Sunday Times has been reading Cosm by Gregory Benford.
In it, a scientist borrowing time at Brookhaven's RHIC creates a "cosm" (universe in a very heavy silver ball several feet across). She spirits it back to UC, and then the folks at the RHIC try to create some more, not knowing they could destroy the world, and end up just destroying most of the ring.
Was a good book the first time around.
-Todd
---
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
The studies on the Monarch butterfly affected by BT pollen showed, in a lab, that if the catepillar ate the BT pollen vs. non BT pollen (The pollen happens to fall on the leaf of a different plant they are eating) they grew slower and had a higher mortality. What do you think happens when the farmer sprays his non BT crop with pesticides to kill the corn borer the BT protects against. I would guess the pesticide nearly wipes out the nearby catepillars. After all the corn borer is just a different spiecies of catepillar.
In my opinion GM crops are the best chance to have a sustainable crop production without dumping tons of chemicals on the crops and into the ground, like is the current pratice.
Pickets can be dangerous - those pointy tips can penetrate the lab walls and set off a chain reaction well before it was intended. :)
OFTC: By the community, for the community
"A successful test-firing was held on Friday and the first nuclear collisions will take place in the autumn, building up to full power around the time of the millennium. "
:)
So January 1st, y2k, we won't need to worry about computer failures - they're putting this thing in full swing.
Reminds me of a quote from some field commander in the US civil war:
"At this range they couldn't hit an elephant!" Those were his last words.
OFTC: By the community, for the community
because the world would be a very boring place if we only did what was safe.
and because the pay off would be incredible.
"Perfection is achieved only at the point of collapse"-
Can anyone say "Total protonic reversal"? ;-)
"Ok, important safety tip. Thanks Egon."
The chance probably is so small that it's nothing to worry about, but it irks me somewhat that some bunch of curious suckers think they have the right to flip the on-switch on a device that could *possibly* condense the earth to the size of a marble, or turn it into a big ball of strangeness, not that the latter would effect a perceptable change.
Anyway, they'd better master the graviton or get warp-fields working, or discover a limitless energy source sometime soon, 'cause it's time these colliders produced some useful results. I mean, really, what do W and Z vector-bosons have to do with powering spacecraft?
- A disgruntled hacker.
how ironic is it that this will device will go into full production around the time of the millenium, do they do these things on purpose? too many coincidences....
Anyone remember when the scientist had a fear of igniting the atmosphere when they were testing the H-bomb? I always thought that one was funny also. Or was that some kind of Cobalt bomb or something? Geesh, I'm loosing it.
HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA
Anyway, I'd like to know more about strange matter. Have people written about it?
First: Yes, if they did manage to squeeze some mass into a quantum black hole, the hole would radiate away it's entire mass as Hawking radiation in fraction of a femtosecond. However, that mass would only be the mass of two ions (plus whatever relativistic mass they had put on). I expend more energy that that each second keeping my skin warm. /., was a successful strategium).
Second, if I remember my quantum chromodynamics correctly, a single quark cannot exist as a real particle. It must either be bound up to its antiparticle, or to enough other quarks to balance out to "colorless". Therefor, there is no way a single quark of any flavor could come out of the reaction.
I think the place that wrote that article seized upon the name "strange" as somehow menecing, and is trying to stir up controversy (which, given the traffic on
Go read the actual science site, and go get some books (Brief History of Time and the like) and then make up your mind.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Actually, not everyone agrees that there was a big bang.
I find the theory quite insane myself.
I'm not a creationist, but I think steven hawkings doesn't buy into the theory either.
I don't beleive there's enough gravatational force in the universe to cause it to collapse onto itself, and I don't buy the "dark matter" hack of a theory to explain that away.
But hey, what we believe today will be laughed at next century.
Robs@dreamforge.com
that's all i can say. totally lame.
Once there was a Man who Built a Machine that Could Destroy the World by flipping a Single Switch. Or So He Thought.
:)
He didnt know.
And so he flipped the Switch-
And never found out.
I read that in a Heinlein book, I dont know where he got it from, it sounded like he was quoting, too.
Personally, as the story continues, I would not want to flip the switch.
How the story continues is that there is so much risk, although so much gained, they send it into space and eventually move it to the far side of the moon.
But if we create a Black Hole that isnt far enough.
And what do we gain? Knowledge is not worth more than the Bystander's family.
If you want to learn, that's fine, But let's learn something else first, Like Mass Transference via Matter/Energy conversion or Hyperspace. I have some theories on that Involving ZeroG, Vacuum, and Kelvin0... but that's another post
Then set up a lab in a distant corner of the galaxy, beyond the fringe, and do whatever you want.
Before risking a farm by building a channel, you get consent of the farmer. Before risking the Solar System by building a research facility, you get consent of the solar system. Wich means building a few mars rockets and Jupitor Shuttles to check all the areas unknown...
"..And other such nonsence.."
I'm not done, but that's it for now.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Any mass that is consumed increases the size of the black hole. Given enough surrounding mass, growth increases at an exponential rate.