It’s at this point that, while I think you’re an unschoolable schmuck, I must admit I like how you think.
Let’s try this again. You have one pistol that’s been fired a trillion times a year for the last 5 billion years without incident. You have another pistol that is mechanically identical, do you think it’s safe to pick it up and fire it, or do you worry that it will blow up in your hand?
Me? I’m not touching the damn thing, because some dude somewhere mentioned that guns can explode if there’s something wrong with them, that’s too big a chance to take.
If the “some dude” in question is a gun expert (analogous to the physicists who have raised concerns over the LHC) and offers up a scientific and thought-out argument as to why it might explode, then I think I’d listen to his warning.
These scientists who have put forth disaster scenarios from the LHC - what do mainstream scientists think of them? Are they all just considered to be uneducated lunatics? Pussies? I mean, have they been shunned by all their compatriots and reduced to laughingstocks? Does anyone have a link to a refutation of these specific scientists’ claims, by the CERN people or any other particle physicists, that a layman could actually understand? Seeing a bunch of symbols and equations, which to my eyes might as well be hieroglyphics, isn’t going to reassure me. Seeing a specific refutation of the claims made by these scientists, with an explanation - in English, not in equation-speak - might do the job.
So far this thread has been the same three or four people going back and forth with me. I think there aren’t more people here because they either don’t care, they’re too obsessed with Palin and McCain to give a shit, or they’re genuinely scared of what they might read here.
And furthermore, the fact that the CERN people and their apologists have not really gone to any lengths to try to fight the possible public perception that their experiment may be dangerous, speaks volumes to me about their concern for the “commoners.” It’s like they haven’t even tried to reassure people in plain English (or French, or German) about this - they’ve just given half-assed and impersonal answers. I wish they would talk about it like human fucking beings and not like scientists in an ivory tower.
It’d be nice to hear someone say, “you know, we understand your concerns, really, and we want you to know that we, as scientists, are concerned first and foremost with the betterment of mankind - and we would NEVER, under any circumstances, do anything that would put our planet, and your lives, at risk. We understand how scary these possibilities seem to someone who doesn’t have a background in science, and we want to assure you that there’s no truth to these allegations whatsoever.” It would be great to feel like these scientists actually CARED about people other than themselves, and that they were willing to offer a modicum of understanding and sympathy to those who might be afraid of their research. But instead, I’m just hearing chuckles and jokes and getting heavy vibes of, “those poor peons…they’ll simply never get it.”
Don’t these bozos have a PR department?
What, like scientists don’t also want to stay alive? They have all the same motivation as you do to keep the world from being destroyed. They hardly need explicitly announce it just to reassure a few paranoid souls (so hellbent on anxiety that it would do no good, anyway).
You also sneer with condescension for “equation-speak”. Well, hey, the plain English is, there’s no reason at all to be afraid this thing will destroy the world; the equations do not give any credible reason to suspect that. If you want to understand this in more details, then drop the condescension and learn to understand the equations. They’re not there just to serve as some sort of code to keep the hoi polloi from access to the secrets of the society of scientists; they’re there because they’re the most fruitful way to analyze and understand the situation.
But you don’t need to understand this in any further details People who do understand this in further detail have clearly united in saying that there is no cause for concern. If you are unwilling to reach their own level of mastery to investigate the matter yourself, then you have no grounds on which to dispute them.
Why bother? All the information you need has been provided to you, patiently and repeatedly. People have tried to explain to you in simplistic terms. You respond with inane stupidity and a refusal to read or attempt to understand and hand-waving away anything anyone says as ‘too sciencey’ for you to understand, so why on earth would anyone waste any more time on the lost cause that is convincing you that you’re wrong and the world will not end because of this?
How many people go back and forth with lekatt? There are only three or four people talking with you because only that many people have the patience to put up with your willful ignorance.
I’ve read this whole thing.
I’ve read most of the threads related to this topic in which you have exposed your fears.
I haven’t joined in because there’s nothing more I could possibly say that you have not already heard and then ignored.
You have been given the answers you’ve asked for. Repeatedly. You refuse to listen.
That is all there is to it.
Gee, I wonder why the CERN scientists and other worthies in the field of high-energy particle physics haven’t spent any time dispelling these idiotic myths of world destruction?
10 seconds on Google and you could have found for yourself. More proof that you want to stay ignorant.
No? Well what about ‘dark matter’? Isn’t that supposed to have some ‘magical’ qualities?
Well, bearing in mind scientists don’t know what 70 - 80 - maybe 90%, or more, of the properties of ‘space’ are, how accurate are these ‘conditions’ going to be in the first place??
Argent, so far you have provided just one half reputable scientific source, which evaluated the possibility of an Eddington-limit radiating black hole in a mind-bogglingly specialized space-time geometry, and with that one, it turned out that its assumptions were flawed, and the power estimate too high by a factor of 10[sup]23[/sup], IIRC.
So, exactly, what scientists are claiming that the LHC might be dangerous in any way?
And by the way, you still haven’t given an answer to the ‘we’re still here’-argument, just in case it slipped your mind to do so.
What did you think of Ellis’ talk I linked to, btw? That was pretty much plain English, and did address all of your concerns.
No, actually; it’s pretty much only supposed to have mass and interact weakly.
The properties of space are quite well known; dark matter is merely an accounting device that’s needed to give the galaxies enough mass not to fly apart under their own rotation.
And the conditions don’t play much of a role anyway, as I had hoped to have made clear the last two times the question was asked in this thread.
Yeah, let’s have the people you were bitching at for spending money fund a PR department geared towards effectively explaining to the walking obtuse that the near impossible wont happen.
Brilliant!:rolleyes:
You’ll be fine, the world will not end.
Happy?
Fair enough.
Yes, the conditions were that unimportant, they had to build a $5 billion machine to replicate them. :rolleyes:
I think Argent might be contagious.
By using a particle accelerator instead of just waiting for naturally-occurring collisions, they know exactly where the event is going to occur, the speed and type of particle, and they can get results from as many tests as they like. And it’s a lot cheaper to build a sensor array on the ground than it is to build a mobile one and get it into the upper atmosphere.
So, I’m likely just wasting my time, but on the off chance that there’s still genuine worry about the possibility that a black hole might be created by the LHC, here are (some of) the counterarguments, presented in a nice and orderly way; none of them are new, but I’ll try to explain each one as good as I can:
[ul][li]First of all, according to General Relativity, there won’t be any black holes created. Period. Black hole creation, in itself, will be an exciting insight into possible new physics beyond GR.[/li][li]Black holes could be created if there exist large extra dimensions; this means, effectively, that gravity is stronger on short distances than we observe it in everyday life.[/li][li]The same theories that predict the formation of black holes also predict their (near instantaneous) decay due to Hawking radiation; indeed, Hawking radiation stands on far firmer theoretical grounds than the prediction of mBHs. [/li][li]Even if (and that’s a very unphysical assumption) Hawking radiation were somehow invalid in the theories, i.e. if we just kind of cross it out and say ‘it doesn’t happen’ without any more reasons, mBHs ought to still undergo decay merely because the creation process must also work in reverse as a destruction process (via CPT symmetry).[/li][li]If, to go further into speculation, mBHs are created and are stable/metastable, in the overwhelming majority of the scenarios, there still wouldn’t be any danger, since for most space-time geometries, accretion times (i.e. the time the black hole needs to gobble up the earth) are larger than the solar lifetime, i.e. we’d be fried before we’d be eaten up.[/li][li]In those very specific (and unlikely) cases where space-time has the right dimensionality for mBHs with a high enough accretion rate to devour the earth in an appreciable amount of time (still possibly on the order of hundreds of years), the black hole creation mechanism would need to include a mechanism that prevents charged black holes to form, since these would be stopped within the earth after their creation due to cosmic ray collisions and would have long since gobbled up the earth. [/li][li]To restate the level of (utterly baseless!) speculation we’re at now: (1) if black holes could be created, that (2) don’t decay via Hawking radiation, (3) violate CPT symmetry, (4) have a high enough accretion rate to destroy the earth before the sun does, while (5) being only created in neutral variants by some unknown mechanism, we’d still (6) need an explanation why we observe neutron stars and white dwarfs of ages far greater than would be possible if those mBHs existed in this way.[/li][li]And, for one last time, a proton-proton collision is a proton-proton collision regardless of where it occurs.[/li][li]So, the universe has tried this 10[sup]31[/sup] times without managing to destroy itself, or any part of it. Why should we be that astronomically more lucky? Basically, any other end of the world scenario you care to conceive of has a higher probability than that. [/ul][/li]
So, what, in the above reasoning, seems unclear to you? What don’t you accept? Or, if none of the two, why do you still believe in the possibility of global cataclysm?
How obtuse does a poster have to be to not understand that detecting particles that last for for the briefest instant in time likely requires
- Shieldling from spurious radiation → that means digging 30 km worth of tunnel
- Detectors fast enough and sensitive enough to actually “see” the shower of particles falling out of the collision
- Building massive, supercooled magnets still doesn’t benefit from economies of scale.
- Paying researchers, cause the Nike deals keep falling through.
and 5. It’s easier to put helium cooled magnets in the ground than suspended from ballons.
This thread is on the point of being closed.
There is no discussion, just repeated sneers at the opposite position. (And too many of those sneers are right on the line for violating the “no personal insults” rule.)
If one discvovers that one’s opponent will not debate, the smart way to handle the situation is to walk away so that the thread will die a merciful death, not keep it at the top of the page for everyone to see.
No more personal shots.
No posts that fail to address the actual science involved.
[ /Moderating ]
Nice wrap-up, thanks!
You seem to know this stuff, so… one thing that occured to me - or that my intuition tells me is: In a ray-atmosphere-collision, the momentum of the system (incoming particle and stationary particle) after the collision would be such that the resulting Black Hole of Doom (BHoD) - if it could form - moves at approximately half the incoming particles speed in the incoming particles direction - like a inelastic collision between two objects of similar mass. Is that intuition right? Or does such an collision do funky stuff with the conservation of momentum?
If so, the collision in the LHC would form a BHoD that sits static in the reference frame of the LHC, because we crash particles head-on. So argumentations that rely on BHoD quickly passing away from earth won’t really fit here, because any BHoD we create would be just sitting right there in the collider?
… on the other hand, most of all “natural BHoDs” would smack right into earth, because of the geometry of the collision. Hm. I’m not sure what my question was. 
For the record, I’m not worried, I trust the scientists. After all, I take medicine, drive a car with an airbag and fly in planes - without understanding enough of the relevant physics to really know if any of this things will work as i am told.
Your intuition is basically right on target, and this is indeed a point that has received some consideration – if a black hole were to be created in a cosmic ray collision, and if it were neutral, it’d pretty much zip right through the earth, seeing as how it’s only about as dense as iron, which is basically just a wisp of smoke for a black hole.
That’s why we need to look at things denser than the earth – much denser – that would capture such a black hole, and those we find in neutron stars and white dwarfs; if it were possible to create dangerous black holes via particle collisions, those would also be created on said dense astronomical objects, with the result that they should be accreted – eaten up – by black holes a certain amount of time after their creation, and so the fact that we observe neutron stars and white dwarfs far older than the age limit put upon them by the killer black hole hypothesis is direct experimental evidence against it.
An additional note, a hypothetical stable black hole created by the LHC wouldn’t just ‘sit there’, since (1) while the collision occurs with the center of mass at rest with respect to the earth’s surface, nevertheless individual particles created in the collision will zoom around quite a bit, and most often at speeds higher than escape velocity, and (2) even if a black hole is created (nearly) at rest, gravity would just cause it to fall down, right through the center of the earth, and then back again, in a sort of oscillating motion.