Still, what’s with the ‘we’re still here’-argument? 10[sup]31[/sup] LHC programs since the beginning of the universe, 10[sup]13[/sup] every second, 10[sup]5[/sup] on earth since its creation, and nothing bad happened so far. If the possibility of dangerous mBH production existed, such astronomical objects as neutron stars and white dwarfs would have lifetimes far shorter than so far observed – on the order of a few million years at best, yet we see them being a thousand times older than that.
And, for this astronomic observation to even be necessary, we’d need some mechanism by which only neutral black holes are allowed to be created, since charged mBHs would be stopped within the earth, and consequently would have long since accreted it, and there’s basically no way that I can conceive of for the black hole creation mechanism to automatically discern whether or not the outcome would be charged, and consequently ‘deny’ the formation of charged ones.
And, regarding Hawking radiation, it’s perhaps worth noting that you don’t really get to chose either or – all theories that allow for mBH creation also require them to Hawking radiate. As has been said before, Hawking radiation is a pretty basic conclusion from doing quantum mechanics on a curved space-time, which doesn’t really change whether or not you add a dimension or three.
And, far more fundamentally than even Hawking radiation is the fact that, via CPT symmetry, anything that can be created has to be able to be destroyed in an inversion of the creation process.
Lastly, your analogy is bunkum – pointing a gun at your head is known to be a dangerous thing; running a particle collider is known to be perfectly safe.
Okay, but we also have to check to make sure that putting on your socks is ABSOLUTELY SAFE and NOT GOING TO DESTROY THE WORLD then, considering it’s the same level of risk we’re talking about here.
Let’s say the second pistol has a 99.8 percent chance of producing delicious ice cream, to give you some actual incentive to want to use it (analogous to, say, discovering a wealth of physics knowledge).
Let’s also admit that the one that’s “guaranteed to be unloaded” really also has some infinitesimal probability of somehow having been loaded; the only reason they couldn’t guarantee the second pistol was unloaded was the same sort of reasons that will prevent them from guaranteeing anything, ever. (On edit, yes, the best analogy here is that they also can’t guarantee that your socks won’t kill you.)
Let’s also push that 99.9 percent chance more towards 1 - 1/10^(mindboggling large). (Again, socks)
Yeah, I’ll shoot that second pistol. Delicious, tasty ice cream. Yum, yum.
Has any group of physicists ever alleged that putting on socks could destroy the world? Has there been litigation in the European Court of Civil Rights against putting on socks, on the grounds that they could endanger humanity? Does putting on socks entail the invocation of mysterious and untested theories like Hawking Radiation? Does it require a six billion dollar device to do it? Does putting on your socks mean that you have to create high-energy collisions which - while they may have been occurring naturally in our atmosphere - will be created in totally different circumstances, in a laboratory and not in outer space, bringing all sorts of new conditions into the equation?
I’m being willfully stupid. So be it. I’m not backing down here - I’ve said my piece and I’m not going to change my mind unless CERN sends 50 St. Pauli Girl look-alikes over here to suck my cock, and gives me a free SIG AMT and a lifetime supply of Swiss Army Knives.
Okay, maybe it was a bad comparison, but would it put you more at ease if I told you that there was this exact, and I mean exact same debate 1999-2000 (or somewhere around there 2002 maybe?) with the exact same lawsuits over the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider? It’s pretty much the exact same thing we’re talking about here, taking normal collisions and artificially creating them on Earth in a big metal tube, as far as I can tell we’re still here and they turned it on.
They collide slightly heavier ions there. In fact it’s more powerful than the LHC (well, for now, the LHC may do ever so slightly more energetic stuff in late '09)
In fact, I think the exact same guy brought up the hoopla over that one too (Rees, right?)
I found a good quote on the fears from that time:
“the chance of this happening is like you winning the major prize on the lottery 3 weeks in succession; the problem is that people believe it is possible to win the lottery 3 weeks in succession.” ~Frank Close, professor of physics at Oxford
These were the safety issues raised, let’s see if any of them ring a bell:
RHIC creates a black hole
RHIC creates a transition into a different quantum mechanical vacuum (see false vacuum)
RHIC creates strange matter that is more stable than ordinary matter
Yes, that’s what being willfully stupid is. Have fun being irrationally scared into pieces over nothing, so committed to “not backing down” that you avoid the very education which would put you at ease.
See, the problem with this argument is that they don’t. Period. The collisions are exactly the same, whether they occur in an evacuated metal tube, the outer layers of our atmosphere, or the surface of a white dwarf.
Well, Rees brought up his oft-misquoted ‘1 in 50 million’ figure up regarding data produced by the RHIC, IIRC. But he’s certainly not any sort of particle collider alarmist; he’s been quoted as ‘not losing any sleep’ over the LHC (even though he thinks that the chances of us reaching the year 2100 are only about 50%).
Look, personally I don’t care if you spend your evenings gibbering in the corner over imagined evils. But it’s painfully obvious that you’re not educated enough to understand the physics, not intelligent enough to extrapolate from the man made collisions to atmospheric collisions and not interested enough to try.
Ah, more of that smug superiority. I can just smell the pipe smoke wafting out of your wood-paneled offices while you sit around in tweed suits and chuckle over poor, ignorant me.
New conditions:
Collisions occurring in a laboratory in Switzerland and not in outer space
Collisions being created by a machine, and not by nature
I’d say those are some pretty significant new conditions. Wouldn’t you agree? It’s about as significant as the difference between natural birth and cloning.
Despite what cheesy Sci-Fi movies would have you believe, Outer Space doesn’t have any magical properties, it’s just… space. The conditions in the laboratory are engineered to be the same.
You’re comparing the creation of a complex organism that requires millions of reactions during a long period of time to a near instantaneous single collision with a (comparatively) simple particle?
The machine has nothing to do with it, it’s just making sure they hit, it’s introducing nothing new into the equation, it’s simply pointing two protons at each other and saying “you go here, and you go here,” said protons go “here, and here” all the time, we’re just telling them NOW is the time to do it instead of faffing about and waiting until they feel like it.
Do you know what is far more likely to happen than the LHC causing a world ending event? By orders of magnitude in fact? That tomorrow you, Argent Towers, will go out into the world and gather an army that will start WW3 and, in the nuclear holocaust that follows, blow the Earth off its orbit and cause it to plunge into the Sun. That is what is more likely…So, uh, what guarantees are there that you aren’t going to to this when you leave your house in the morning? Should we just take your word that you’ll be good? No, on second thought, we should board up your house and pour cement down the chimney. Yeah, that’s what we should do.
Give it a bloody rest already. We know you’re scared about waking up one morning and finding a black hole nibbling at your bum (Hah![/Joe]), but it appears you have not changed a single person’s opinion to your side of the argument, nor that anyone really agreed with you in the first place. So, what do you hope to gain by this continuous sheep-like bleating?
Argent, your deep insecurities are hardly my problem, but here’s a few quick questions while you rock back and forth in the corner.
How wide is a proton?
How many “other particles” do you think you’ll find in the cross section of the collider tube when its vacuum is on?
Now, and this is where you should screw up those eyes nice and tight so the thinking doesn’t leak out, how many particles are there in the atmosphere at 1000 km?
It’s not your ignorance we are chuckling about; it’s your childish foot-stomping obstinance.
No, and neither would anybody with the slightest grasp of the underlying physics. A proton doesn’t know whether it was accelerated by a machine or any ‘natural’ mechanism (never mind that magnetic fields are a perfectly natural mechanism). A proton also doesn’t know anything about its surroundings unless it interacts with them; if it’s colliding with another proton, it isn’t interacting with its surroundings.
I think it’s a clever ruse to get Bill Nye the Science Guy back on the air*, considering at this point I think it’s the only way to get him to understand. I mean he was intelligent, qualified, and explained things in a way no mortal man could.
*Which I FULLY support by the way, I’d totally watch it.
