Shit! Looks like we were wrong.
Just a random thought…
This should become Day One of Year Zero once again. Instead of BC and AD, we could have BLHSC and ALHSC.
That said, I think a majority of the reason for the mocking it seems of **Argent *is the fact that if he’s right- who’ll know about it? We’d all be gone. So it’s like a free pass. You pretty much have a chance to mock him for all of existence. Because once existence is gone, then he’s right, but does it really matter then?
*Damn, I could have used that for a great Pun somewhere! :smack:
Why? This isn’t the first particle accelerator built and it isn’t going to be the last.
And I think you’re wrong.
Actully, no, the main reason is, for the reasons that have been stated over and over again, his worries are simply foolish. There is essentially no chance of him being right; it really is on the same order of likelihood of worrying about the accelerator attracting some extradimensional Lovecraftian entity’s attention.
Not that I’m hugely worried about it… I have no way of understanding the science behind it either way. But you’re implying that scientists know what they’re doing. A lot of dead test pilots would disagree with you. It turns out that what they thought would happen didn’t because practice hadn’t caught up with theory.
The point of the collider is to learn something that is currently unknown or unverified.
I’m always loathe to mention this for fear of giving the doomsday tinfoil hatters just more to worry about by even somewhat seriously considering the possibility, but should there actually be a microscopic black hole created that does not emit Hawking radiation and ends up gravitationally bound to the earth (most of 'em will just zoom away due to having a speed greater than escape velocity), it wouldn’t result in the immediate destruction of the earth – in fact, at first, we’d hardly notice anything at all, except for ‘missing mass’ in the collisions, I believe.
See, while in the mind of most people, ‘black hole’ = ‘big scary instant death thing’, what we’ve got here is something far smaller than a proton, with an incredibly small reaction cross section, which, at first, would hardly interact with matter at all. It’d merely orbit around the centre of the earth at a trajectory given by the parameters of the collision, pretty much disregarding the matter it passes through (after all, the earth has a density about equal to iron, which, compared to a black hole, isn’t so much as a wisp of smoke).
In fact, the good people over at Backreaction have crunched some numbers and conclude that in a (incredibly unlikely) worst case scenario a black hole would have to travel about 200km on average before ever so much as encountering one nucleon, and what happens then is pretty much anybody’s guess; at a speed of about 11km/s (just below escape velocity so as to not have our precious black hole zoom away into space), that would take about 18.2 s, and, since the black hole will have a mass in the TeV range and nucleon masses are about 1 GeV, will increase the BH’s mass by about one thousandth.
That isn’t in any way a reasonable estimate of the accretion rate – for a far more accurate, and technical, treatment see this paper by Steven B. Giddings and Michelangelo L. Mangano, which concludes growth time generally to be on the order of thousands to billions of years, again, absolute worst case – but you can see that it would take a while till total destruction, giving all doomsday proponents plenty of time for "told ya so"s; so we’re actually just really really confident that what we’re saying is right.
So what time is it being switched on then, and will it’s doing so drain power from neighbouring areas?
I do have one (very stupid) question though. Do black holes form in this sort of thing often but evaporate? I’ve always heard that they appear in certain collisions and then just evaporate in less than a second. Does this happen often or did I get bad info?
I mean obviously what we’re “worrying” about is a black hole that doesn’t give off hawking radiation, but do black holes even form regularly in the first place?
The reason I’m asking is because a lot of people say “no black hole will form” but I was just wondering if that’s shorthand for “no (meta)-stable micro black hole will form, though an evaporating one may” or it means what it says.
Seems like there are too many “maybes” here still. Maybe it will make a black hole. Maybe the black hole will emit Hawking radiation. We’re not sure what Hawking radiation is exactly, and it’s just a theory, but it might come from the black hole, if the black hole happens. But it might not.
Shouldn’t they, like, be absolutely certain?
If they were absolutely certain what would happen, they wouldn’t need to build it in the first place. It’s an experiment. That’s how we learn stuff, and the reason we’re not still living in caves waiting for a forest fire so we can cook dinner.
Law of diminishing returns.
Weigh the risk of creating a stable black hole, versus the reward of…well, we’re not sure.
You’re not risking anything, with the majority of scientific experiments. In the ones where something IS as risk, it’s usually something that effects only those working on it (i.e. the laboratory explodes or something.)
In this case, the people who’d be effected if they fucked something up would be more than just the scientists - it would be everyone in the whole world.
Seems like a real crapshoot to be playing with the whole of humanity (and without their consent, no less.)
With all this said, can someone here provide a good refutation of the specific claims made by the scientific critics of the LHC? Not the claims made by me, but the claims made by the guys who actually drafted the scientific papers outlining the potential risks of the collider.
They do set up detectors in nature, that’s why they know these super high energy collisions happen every single day in our upper atmosphere. There’s a big difference in what you can see from the ground and what you can see in a highly controlled experimental environment.
All of the maybe this and maybe that is trying to explain complex bleeding edge particle physics to laymen. None of that matters, what should matter to the layman is that these types of collisions have been happening every single day in the upper atmosphere of our planet for the last 3 billion years, and the Earth hasn’t been swallowed up into an alternate dimension yet.
Physicists do not have all the answers because there is no black hole test environment, no way to do experiments with alternate dimensions, they can only tell you what the theories are. Like good scientists, until it is backed up by extensive testing, they’re loathe to offer “guarantees” that black holes do this or that.
None of that changes the dead certain fact that this collider will not produce energies in excess of what happens in nature, in our atmosphere, every single day,without destroying the planet.
Now that would make a nice SF story plot, specially with the twist of humanity developing a life saving stelar drive in the nick of time, based on the data gathered during the particle collision experiment that created the Earth eating black hole.
Haha, wanted to share this, since we don’t need ANOTHER thread on this:
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2008/09/09/end-world-half-life039s-gordon-freeman-spotted-cern-atom-smasher
I think this means we’re screwed by an invasion from Xen/war with the Combine.
Well, according to General Relativity, they can’t form, at all. If they did, this would mean new physics – in this particular case, large extra dimensions (I think somewhere upthread I’ve given a short outline as to why you need large extra dimensions for mBH generation).
Stephen Hawking has estimated the probability of a black hole forming at less than one percent, though I’ve got no clue how exactly he arrived at that figure.
On the contrary, Hawking radiation is extremely well understood and rest on very well tested assumptions in General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory; it hasn’t been observed yet due to a critical black hole shortage, but there’s virtually no dissent on its existence.
On the other hand, black hole creation is purely speculative.
I’m starting to suspect I’m on your ignore list or something. Even if you just flat out reject my (very possibly flawed) interpretations and argumentations, how about all the links to papers and articles I’ve posted in this thread and others?
But the point - once again, for the umpteeth time - is that the scientists don’t NEED to know what they are doing to know that it won’t blow up Earth, because it’s happened billions of times already without doing so. They are just making it happen where they can get a close look.
Well, they turned it on, and we didn’t get sucked into a black hole. Of course, it’ll be a few years yet before we can determine whether the collider’s CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions are sufficient to push the earth’s climate over a catastrophic edge.
Do you have a link?
I’ve read the linked papers and I don’t understand them. Which makes sense because I’m not trained in physics - high school chemistry is the extent of my scientific knowledge, and I wasn’t even very good at that. But from what I have read of the data - it’s just so damn theoretical. It’s making me suspect that these scientists have basically just come up with a bunch of names and a bunch of classification systems for things, but they don’t really know what the things are. They’ve come up with a very elaborate taxonomy and language, but just what it’s referring to, they’re still not certain. And they’re hoping to just make their discoveries by accident.
Would you go to a mechanic who said, “here, I’m just going to poke around inside your Porsche for a while with this nine-iron, and maybe something will get fixed.” Or a surgeon who said, “let’s see what happens if I stick my hand inside your stomach and wiggle it around…maybe it’ll make you feel better.”
Most sensible people want guarantees when they’re dealing with things in life. I realize that, as you said, “real scientists can’t guarantee anything.” They can just say, “uh, the probability is less than one percent…I think.” If someone handed me a pistol and said “there’s less than a one percent chance that there’s a round in the chamber, go ahead and put it to your temple and pull that trigger,” would I do it? Fuck no. Even if there’s less than one percent chance, I have a GUARANTEE that there is a ZERO percent chance if I don’t pick up the gun and pull the trigger at all.
Such is the case here.
Nobody has really refuted my comment earlier about the nuclear explosions. The conditions occur in nature to produce nuclear explosions - but you don’t have Hiroshima and Nagasaki just randomly erupting wherever the fuck. It takes humankind to pull the switch to make that happen.
ETA - they turned it on, yeah, that’s not the point. They haven’t started the actual collisions yet, which gives me about two months of worrying about this shit and drinking whiskey to try to take my mind off of it.
True, but IIRC first collisions aren’t scheduled until Oct. 21, so there’s time for worry yet.