The thing is, though, while you might not understand, they do. Just because it all seems like jargon and made up shit to you, doesn’t mean it is. If you can’t tell the difference between a paper on General Relativity and TimeCube, doesn’t mean nobody can.
Also, the ‘still here’-argument isn’t really that complex at all, and I’ve yet to see you even address it.
No, it’s absolutely not. We know that there is no chance that the LHC will destroy the world because it hasn’t happened yet. It’s as simple as that. A (slightly) better analogy would be to take a revolver, pull the trigger, I dunno, a couple of billions of times with nothing happening, and then give it to you to test it by shooting it at a target – your worries would be equivalent to worrying about a bullet being fired, ricocheting of the target and killing you.
Plus, there is likely to be a tremendous pay-off from the LHC’s experiments, even though we might not yet know what it is. Take nuclear medicine for example – impossible without research into particle colliders.
No, in fact, those things and far worse ones happen all the time in nature – stellar fusion, novae, gamma ray bursts, all kinds of nasty shit. We just happen to inhabit a rather cushy corner, because life (as we know it) generally can’t develop in the midst of nuclear explosions.
Sorry for the triple post, but that wasn’t there when I wrote my last one – as I’ve outlined above, even if there were a stable, microscopic black hole created, destruction wouldn’t be immediate (and neither would our knowledge of it, I gather), but, if it happened at all, could take anywhere up to a couple of hundreds of billions of years, so if you really want to continue worrying, chances are you’ll die of liver failure before you’d be sucked into a gravitational maelstrom.
You’ve stated that you don’t understand what they are doing, so how can you make such an analogy?
Your doctor says, “I’m going to use a big magnet to diagnose your stomach ache”. Sounds pretty ridiculous to use essentially a big magnet to diagnose a stomach ache, but isn’t that what an MRI does? Or, do you freak out because you think it could pull all the iron out of your blood?
Maybe if you thought of the LHC as a large version of an MRI it might help. It looks similar and shoves protons around in order to detect their radiofrequency. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mri
That’s not what they’re doing. What’s happening here is:
The mechanic says “let’s inject a highly flammable mixture of hydrocarbons and air into the engine, light it with a 100,000 volt shock, and see what happens”.
The uneducated Chicken Little says “Won’t that blow up the engine? I don’t know jack shit about engines, but explosions break things.”
The mechanic says “It sure as hell shouldn’t, this has happened millions of times before in this engine, using a lot more fuel than we’re using, and it hasn’t broken yet.”
Chicken Little wants him to explain WHY it won’t break the engine, in layman’s terms. So the mechanic goes into metallurgy and energy density, shockwave patterns, culminating in the statement that it is extremely unlikely that anything bad will happen, and CL says “I don’t get it, it’s too complicated, explosions break things”.
I for one am amazed that speculation about this is still going on. There was a moron on my local radio station this morning saying that there was a 1 in 50 million chance of the Universe being destroyed.
Why don’t these people read a little bit more and use their brains?
For the record I think the chances of us being destroyed by this are astronomically small. As has been said here many times, this type of collision occurs in nature regularly, if it was going to happen in less than the lifetime of the sun we would have noticed by now.
What amazes me is that no-one seems to be singing the praises of the scientists, engineers and technicians who have managed to construct a ring 26km in diameter roughly 100m below the surface which can combine two beams of hadrons with sub-micron accuracy.
I call for a motion to elect this as the winning post of this thread.
Funny thing is, you occasionally DO convince things to happen in a car where a pinpoint application of kinetic energy is beneficial. A nine-iron might be such a tool to perform such an action. A poor one, but carefully applied, it could get the work done.
Your problem is: You don’t understand it [in this case, the LHC] so obviously NOBODY understands it.
What an ignorant thought. Doesn’t matter though, you won’t listen, it’s your lot in life.
Well, I don’t know about the moron on your local radio station, but the original moron who came up with that figure was Sir Martin Rees, the UK Astronomer Royal.
But! To pre-empt shrill cries of ‘see, even actual high profile scientists take the risks seriously/1 in 50 million is still way too high when it comes to the destruction of the world!’, let’s put that figure in its oft-eschewed context: based on a paper by Arnon Dar, Alvaro de Rújula and Ulrich Heinz that discusses an astronomical limit on the destruction of the earth through the creation of strangelets (i.e. takes the fact that we’re still here and uses that to put a constraint on the probability of our destruction), Rees concluded that if (I believe) the RHIC ran for 10 years, the probability for a catastrophic event would be less than 1 in 50 million, which is not the same as saying that there’s a 1 in 50 million chance of cataclysm (cf. this article).
Again, this is a constraint that was derived using then current astronomical data, away from any theorizing – newer data has pushed this probability to one in approx. 10[sup]19[/sup], and there’s also the fact that there are currently no good theoretical reasons to assume that a catastrophe were even possible.
I apologize for the previous post. I seriously thought this thread was in the Pit. My post was uncalled for in this context and I retract it and apologize without reservation.
Bah! It’s a plot to lull you into a false sense of security! They’re only colling it down and aligning the MACHINE OF DOOM! Then, when the worry has abated, they’ll flip the switch and kill themselves in an orgy of fundamental particles.
The only difference between the days of yore with the weirdos screaming about the end of the earth is that teh intarweb gives them legs and voices; if not for that, the squealing fear-mongers would be the shouting freaks you used to be able to avoid on the street.
Yep, those wild and crazy particle physicists started up CERN just to have one long party and milk the taxpayers for the expense… It’s quite the high-paying profession, particle physics. It’s right up there with investment banking in the pay-offs professionals can expect.
