Actually, yes. There are three types of magnets in the ring (according to BBC Radio 4 yesterday) and one of them does turn blue when it’s the correct temperature - called Oxford Blue. Apparently the correct temperature is the temperature of liquid hydrogen, or about -267 degrees C.
Maybe one try for a non-snarky answer is called for.
Existential is the wrong word. Fundamental is the word you’re looking for. Look, Einstein showed us E=MC squared, showing us (and this is proved through nuclear reactions) that energy and mass are effectively interchangeable but that mass contains an absolutely huge amount of energy. So a fundamental question about theoretical physics and the foundations of our universe is “why”?
Also, where is all the matter? All of our studies so far show that the universe is far less massy than we would anticipate. So where is all the mass? we can’t see it, it doesn’t appear to interact with other forces like magentism or gravity, but it does seem to effect other forces.
These are the types of questions the LHC is going to try to answer. And the outcomes are simple - lots of science has come from particle colliders that is of direct, meaningful, and real value to humanity. And I’m not talking about mixed-benefit things like nuclear reactors and bombs.
Reading links for you to ponder:
Dark Matter
History of particle accelerators.
As to what particles they’re looking for, experiments have shown most of them, with a few exceptions like the Higgs Boson and the graviton, neither of which have been proven experimentally to exist. But how exactly would you propose naming something far smaller than we can see? They are named by their behaviors, by how they effect things around them. It’s not made up, it is simple descriptive language.
List of particles
The difference here, though, is that a hurricane doesn’t nearly have the energy density of a nuclear bomb, while particle collisions in nature are exactly the same as particle collisions in a collider (and hence, not the product of ‘unnatural’ conditions, since the timescale for a collision is far to small to have any concurrent interaction with the environment – i.e. things stay the same whether you do them in a collider or in the other atmosphere), and often of far greater energy and energy density.
You’re perfectly free to join that club, though, by simply studying the field. And the same argument can be made for any class of highly specialized professionals – I wanted my house to be a massive iron sphere on a wooden pillar, but the architect wouldn’t do it, because apparently it violates some architect secret society creed or something.
Perhaps, or perhaps people just care about more worthwhile things.
No, what you actually want is a lie to dispel your misgivings about a truth that is not scary at all, which isn’t really the scientists’ concern.
Well, there you go. The windows media link isn’t working for me at the moment, though, but the flash downloads fine; it’s about 73 minutes long, and could have been found by a simple google search using terms like ‘CERN’ ‘safety’ and ‘press conference’.
Nobody does that any more than you put blind trust in your architect that he won’t build a house that breaks down in a gust of wind. Science is a self-controlling process; the things that are wrong weed themselves out, plus there’s a lot of control mechanisms in place, not least those motivated by fiscal interests – six billion dollars is a lot of money, I mean you could nearly fight three weeks of war in Iraq with it.
There’ve literally been dozens of safety reviews, none of which came up with any shred of credible evidence for any conceivable danger; in fact, regarding for instance strangelet production, the LHC is safer than the RHIC, since those things actually are less likely to be produced in a hotter quark-gluon plasma (and yes, those words have a distinct meaning as much as any words can have one in so far as that they relate to a concept with precisely defined attributes).
Yet still, the nature of these things is such that the LHC might make dragons that eat us all up, so I’d suggest not just sitting on your ass worrying away, but going out there and getting yourself some dragon hunter equipment and maybe building a dragon proof shelter or something.
You’re very very wrong there. Theoretical physics is still falsifiable, even though this falsification might be hard to come by, which is pretty much why we need that collider. That’s to say, you can definitely find out that a theory is wrong if experiment doesn’t agree with it; that’s something that can’t be done with magics or other dogmas.
No, it doesn’t. The sun burns quite well without us.
As I argued above, the reason things don’t continually erupt like fuck all around us is that we wouldn’t be here if they did.
Look, I’m about to sound insulting and I’m sorry but you have no sense of scale of what goes on in the universe. You really don’t.
The energies we’re talking about here (the LHC) are on the order of 10[sup]13[/sup]eV.
Now let’s look at our natural laboratory – the universe.
Our atmosphere has a surface area of roughly 5x10[sup]14[/sup] m[sup]2[/sup].
Cosmic rays on the order of 10[sup]15[/sup]eV (100 times more energetic than the LHC) have a flux rate of 1/m[sup]2[/sup] per year. So we’re looking at 5x10[sup]14[/sup] per year.
Did you read that number? Lets assume I’m off by a factor of 100 and our atmosphere has 5x10[sup]12[/sup] or 5 000 000 000 000 collisions involving energies 100 time higher than the LHC every year.
And that’s just our tiny planet shielded by solar and terrestrial magnetospheres for a insignificant slice in its history. Imagine what conditions must be like at the source point for cosmic rays. At the point where these particles, which have traveled intergalactic distances, first gained their energy. Think the chances are good that perhaps 2 or 3 of them might have reached much higher energies and collided?
Me too.
Think the universe blinked out of existence?
Me neither.
Here’s the problem, there are two ways to answer this safety question, the “observational” method and the “theoretical” method. The theoretical method is going to be full of maybes, because particle physics is still theory, and the LHC is part of the effort to make it less theoretical and more factual. You are latching on to the uncertainties of particle physics theory as proof that scientists don’t know if it’s safe.
You are ignoring the observational aspect. The fact is that the LHC does nothing but create high energy collisions between protons. These collisions happen all the time in nature, with much higher energies than the LHC can generate. Grey has estimated that higher energy collisions happen on Earth 5 trillion times a year, every year, for the billions of years that the Earth has been in existence, and the Earth hasn’t been destroyed yet.
We can easily observe that high energy collisions will not destroy the Earth, even though particle physics theory isn’t all that great in describing why.
I wonder if what really throws people are the error bars.
In science everything you measure has a certain degree of uncertainty since you simply can not have perfect knowledge. So you show that on every single measurement/plot/diagram. The error bars keep you honest by reminding you that the result you measured so carefully, so exactly is still possibly not as exact as you think. So you repeat the measurement and repeat the measurement using a differing methodology and slowly you bring down the range of the bars.
But they never go away.
So rarely will a scientist speak in absolutes, they’ll speak in couched terms of probability and uncertainty which isn’t reassuring to people who want/crave/demand absolutes.
Argent Towers if you’re struggling with the text posted here maybe this picture will help with your understanding (warning pdf 311KB) That Cern Thing Explained
Oops, sorry Sir Martin. I assumed that the radio presenter had dreamed up the 1 in 50 million as all the articles I had read showed it to be much less likely.
If the collisions in the LHC are exactly the same as the ones in the outer atmosphere, then I would agree it’s reasonably safe. This is a convincing argument.
However, if they are not quite the same, then we are back to the same problem.
Do the collisions in the outer atmosphere happen at the same temperature, pressure, repetitions, angular vectors, magnetic fields, and all the other environmental conditions as inside the LHC?
And if we’re talking about the source of the cosmic rays, some of them originate from “as yet unknown events in the farthest reaches of the visible universe” according to wiki. Yes, those events have not unmade the entire universe. But can life survive near the origin of those events?
Sorry if these are naive questions, but the way it’s being dismissed with an upturned nose and a wave of the hand, it makes me wonder if some folks are just drinking the kool aid and not really examining things very closely.
You state that the collisions are “exactly” the same. Is it true that collision energy is the only thing that determines the outcome? Seems like a mighty bold assertion. In science, there’s so many variables to consider. Do we know for certain that nothing can affect the outcome? :dubious:
I don’t have much to answer the rest of your post with, but this reminds me of one of the many arguments in the AGW threads: if you’re only working off the conclusions of the scientists and not actually investigating yourself, then you’re just acting on blind faith.
The problem here is we’re not physicists. Must we recreate all the steps and crunch all the numbers CERN already went through just to satisfy ourselves that there’s no risk? This is why we have experts, after all, to dig into this stuff so the rest of us can focus on other things.
Not that I want to brush off your concerns, and if anyone here has answers for them I hope they’ll be posted. But the underlying concern here is a little strange, that you seem to think the scientists aren’t much smarter than you or I in this area and simply decided building a multi-million dollar project sounded like a good idea without having gone through all the theoretics first.
You know I was kinda worried about this when I first started reading about it a year ago. Until I did some more digging and found that really all we are doing is recreating something that happens a million times a day so we can measure it. Not to mention if you read up on how black holes form and sustain themselves, I just dont see how a tube and some magnets can copy that!!
Well, it would suck to assume the scientists have correctly assessed the risk, and have an announcement that they’ve discovered a new particle that is dangerous to all life on Earth. By the way, we have about 10 days left before the end of our species. Have a nice day.
A man in a white lab coat shrugs his shoulders and says “sowwy”.
And it is, Rees was merely talking about an experimentally/observationally established upper bound (i.e. ‘the collected data shows that it can’t be any more likely than 1 in 50 million’ as opposed to ‘the chances of being killed are 1 in 50 million’, which is how that statement is usually presented, meaning something vastly different, of course), which is far increased by other experiments and observations, and made further unlikely by (strong) theoretical considerations.
Particle collisions are indeed fully described if you know the energy and the types of particles that collide, and thus, the fact that they take place within the LHC and not in the outer atmosphere – with indeed vastly different conditions regarding pressure, temperature, magnetic flux and so on – doesn’t play a role in determining their outcome.
I don’t really know how to make that more clear though, I must confess. You wouldn’t perchance just take my word for it, would you? 
The only difference between the LHC collisions and the incident cosmic ray collisions that I can see is that there might be other particles nearby in the latter case that collision fragments can interact with (the LHC’s evacuated), which only would lead to subsequent particle collisions at a lower energy.
I must confess I’m not entirely sure what you mean with this. Generally, life cannot survive near the origin of cosmic rays, seeing as how those are typically rather violent cosmic events – supernovae, particle jets from pulsars or matter being gobbled up by a black hole and the like. That’s why we’re here, and not there. But it’s not like they’re (re-)creating something even remotely like that in the LHC (and even though the press loves touting the ‘re-creating the Big Bang’ phrase, that’s not at all what’s being done there – of all the things the Big Bang might have been, it was certainly not a particle collision; the only way in which that phrase might be considered even remotely accurate would be to say ‘re-creating conditions like those a short period after the Big Bang’, which just means creating a region with very high energy density that doesn’t really have anything to do with the Big Bang at all other than you had it then, too), they’ll merely accelerate a couple of protons to a really high speed and then smash them together – you wouldn’t want to position yourself in the way of the beam, but if you follow that rather reasonable precaution, you’re perfectly safe.
Well, really. If the fear of something unknown that isn’t even predictable by theory was enough to stop us, why would we ever progress at all? Turning on the LHC may have signaled an alien invasion fleet to attack, and it’ll wipe us all out in 10 days too. But there’s no way to account for it, is there?
I don’t know, I suppose there’s also the probability that this whole thing is masterminded by a mad scientist with dreams of destroying the world and managed to cover up any and all world-breaking risks from the other scientists. It’s not like this is a two-person job; if there was some kind of predictable risk, wouldn’t someone with the right background and knowledge have spotted it by now? All we’ve heard up until now is the debunked black hole theory.
Assuming there are no mad scientists on the team, don’t you think they have an interest in finding out if there are any world-breaking risks? After all, they live here too. Scientists aren’t amoral creatures who don’t care if we live or die just for the sake of science, they’re humans too. All their stuff is here.
See post #204.
By the way, thanks for the clarification that the collisions are fully described by the energy and particle types. That is a reassuring level of detail that I did not previously know.
No There are fewer variables operating under precise and controlled conditions. This is what is called an EXPERIMENT.
No, but it’s irrelevant. The protons are a consequence of that environment, they don’t actually create it.
Fuck, if you don’t mind, right off with the kool-aid quip. How bloody closely do you want a layman’s message board to examine a cutting edge particle physics experiment that is simply an evolution in collider design? You want an expert? Go call CERN and ask for a post-doc to teach you 6 years worth of physics and math. Make sure your long distance provider gives you air miles or something for the hours spent on the phone.
That’s why you do experiments…to find out if the model is right and if you’re very lucky, that the model is wrong.
This is likely where you’re going “Ah HA! See the model could be wrong!” Let me refer you to this little essay The Relativity of Wrong
You do realise that at the atomic scale temperature is just a measure of average kinetic energy, right? Are you seriously worried that 1410^12+1.610^-4 eV of energy is going to kill us all in a way that 14*10^12 eV isn’t?
Nevermind exotic regions of the universe, all those collision events may just as well take place here.
But, seeing as that post went a bit into some statistics, here’s another one, from the talk I linked to earlier: since the Big Bang, nature (i.e. the entire visible universe) has approximately carried out the equivalent of 10[sup]31[/sup] entire LHC programmes (‘LHC program’ meaning all the collisions the LHC is expected to produce in its 10-20 year runtime), and in fact carries out another 3*10[sup]13[/sup] every second; that’s thirty million million, so I really wouldn’t worry too much about adding another one.
This was alluded to by Grumman, but I’ll just point out that temperature and pressure are aggregate phenomena, i.e., they don’t really make sense at the level of individual particles. Angular vectors (you mean spin?) are properties of the particles themselves and magnetic fields are themselves made up of particles (photons).
What you’re asking is: how safe is our method of accelerating the particles? The answer is that it’s very safe. We have a very good understanding of how to do this, and we’ve done it many times in other colliders. The universe doesn’t have such carefully controlled experiments, so to get particles up to LHC speeds requires very destructive events.