Good job, guys! Excellent work.
How’s that? 
From the PopSci books I have read AT’s quote here is correct- scientists do just come up with a bunch of names and a bunch of classification systems for things, and they don’t really know what they are- they then try to match them to things that they find in the particle accelerators.
That is why you have names like color and strangeness- strangeness doesn’t mean it is odd, it is just a term for the state of a quark like spin is on other particles- spin doesn’t mean it is spinning like a top- it is just a description of a state.
That is also why they are looking for the Higgs Boson- it is expected, it has been named and classified by what they think it should be- but it is as of yet just theory.
Oh, and Cervaise- this thread was in the pit for half a second early on- understandable mistake.
Don’t worry. The Man is on the job.
And he’s armed.
Beat ya!
Goddammit, what am I, invisible? I’m starting to think I’m on everyone’s ignore list.
:smack:Oops!
I’ve read through the whole thread and I think I have a lay-man’s understanding of the explanations about why the experiment is harmless.
But I still have a couple of nagging concerns. Will someone more knowledgeable about science please answer the following?
First, if a natural black hole of a microscopic size evaporates quickly, do we know this to be the case for a black hole that is fed a constant stream of particles traveling at near light speeds? For the argument that natural events like this occur all the time to hold, does that mean targeted LHC-like particle streams occur in nature all the time? Are cosmic ray interactions in the ionosphere fed a direct particle stream just like what happens in a collider?
Second, I am skeptical about the argument that the energies are too low to be harmful because it is less than the power of a lightbulb. The whole point of the experiment is to concentrate the energies on a scale humans have not dealt with before. The concentration of relatively small amounts of energy is the trigger for non-linear responses that are observed in nuclear reactions, both fission and fusion. Can we be certain there isn’t a critical threshold where high energy density could trigger a runaway reaction in the highly specialized and unnatural environment of a collider?
Third, if the Higgs Boson and the so-called God Particle are so rare and unobserved, how can we know with such certainty that there won’t be a new reaction that has never been theorized or predicted? Do we have enough math to model everything that can happen in higher dimensions? If such a unknown reaction occurs, how can scientists so cavalierly state that it is certain to be harmless?
I think there is a modified version of Pascal’s Wager at work here. Unless the risk is zero, it’s hard to wager potential scientific gain with the potential downside of the annihilation of our species.
It is not a Star Wars stream of protons lasting seconds. It’s two small bundles of energetic particles being “pushed” in opposite directions around a ring. The reason they do it in 2 directions is to effectively double the power.
Now nature has spent the better part of 4 billion years hammering the planet with cosmic rays that dwarf the energies involved here in this little lab. To date we’re still here.
Now if you take the total energy involved in the LHC and convert it completely into mass the mini-black hole is so incredibly small that it would wink out of existence long before a photon could cross the diameter of a proton. Hell if I remember the calculation right from one of the earlier threads the evaporation time was so small it was meaningless.
Never forget nature plays with energies on a daily basis that dwarfs anything we’re capable of.
True, but this argument isn’t all that satisfying. Consider this: a hurricane has the power of many, many nuclear bombs. Yet, despite their destructive capabilities, we are not concerned that hurricanes will wipe out all life on Earth. But if humans detonate nuclear bombs that are a small fraction of the energy in a natural hurricane, that would wipe out all life on Earth. But nature plays with energies on a daily basis that dwarfs the power of those nuclear bombs!
Yeah, but does it turn blue when properly chilled? Now that there is some highfalutin’ technology.
Thanks, this last part is basically exactly what I’ve been saying this whole time, and I’ve gotten nothing but smug superiority, “you just don’t understand it…mmhhhmmmm…”, being called “shrill” and ignorant and even a “fucking idiot,” and with regards to the scientific questions, been handed a lot of mays and maybes and mights and possiblys and we-don’t-know-for-sures. But it’s all for the good of knowledge, you know. Knowledge! Onwards and upwards! Let’s march right into the mouth of the lion, laughing and cracking jokes all the way at the poor peasants who simply don’t understand the true nature of science.
What we’ve been getting here in these threads is a very narrow cross-section of science-obsessed people, and jokers who are along for the ride to make silly comments - a form of gallows humor? The SDMB is not a sample of the population at large. If this was in the public discourse - like, on the level of the Presidential election - there would be a lot less jokes, a lot less know-it-all answers, and a lot more concern.
Since the thing was turned on today, CERN was the main story on CNN for much of today, and it also got prominent play on the New York Times. There’s concern because most people know fuck-all about science. That doesn’t mean the concern is valid. Actually it means the opposite. If it was public discourse, CERN would have their funding cut because the whole project is an affront to God, who made the Earth 6,000 years ago and never made any Higgs Boson because it’s not mentioned in the Bible. Fortunately, like I said, most people know fuck-all about science and as a consequence, most of them don’t care about CERN in the first place, so aside from a few nuts forming committees, they can’t screw it up either.
No offense intended, but more and more I’m getting the very distinct impression that science (or at least the science involved with this collider) is an elitist’s club with the attitude of “we know what’s best, and you don’t, and we’re going to do this, and you can’t stop us.” Like I said before, if more people knew about this, and about the attitudes of its supporters towards those who are concerned about it (ranging from placation to outright contempt) there would be a massive outcry, protests, and legislation against it. But people are too obsessed with other things to care about this, and so it’s sliding under the radar.
How is “we know what’s best” a bad attitude in science? It’s the pursuit of knowledge. Elitism is required, and in the right context it’s appropriate and necessary. These people DO know more about particle physics than you do. And more than I do. That’s a good thing.
And that would be moronic. But in point of fact, even though a lot of attention has been paid, people still aren’t going nuts.
Let me pose this question to you, Argent Towers. You say that you do not understand the physics. Fair enough. Therefore your fears are based on the word of other people. Why do you believe them over the scientists working on the LHC? What basis do you have to decide that their fears are legitimate?
Not that I have a dog to bone in this fight but…
I wish I could find the thread now. I think it was one of our SDSAB people who happens to know quite a bit about the history of nuclear power and I asked “if nuclear power is so expensive, why did we do it anyway?” and the answer was basically, “yeah, they totally bullshitted us. They said nuclear energy would lead to limitless, safe, virtually free energy.”
Well, that was bullshit, wasn’t it? Who was doling out the bullshit? It wasn’t just the media. There had to have been scientists crapping out bullshit they had no idea about or business speaking about with any authority.
How many billions does it take to decommission a nuke plant these days? Free, limitless energy my ass.
I can’t totally blame AT for questioning some of the bullshit scientists spew to get funding.
Human Genome Project! As soon as it’s done, cure for everything!
:rolleyes:
That’s a good question, and I have a good answer for it.
“Better to be safe than sorry.” That’s a motto that I believe in very strongly.
If someone raises the concern of the whole world being destroyed, and has a scientific basis for making this claim - even if it’s true that I don’t understand it - I want to see that claim refuted one hundred percent before I put my trust in the other side.
If nothing else, these scientists are absolute dummies at handling PR. For God’s sake, don’t they realize how much better off they would be if they would just say, “yes, we have determined there is an absolute zero chance, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the world will be harmed by this collider’s experiments”? Instead, they have to be scientific about it and say, “well, we can’t guarantee anything…there’s a nonzero chance that it might happen…that’s basically the same as a zero chance, but it’s not, see, because there’s still a chance…a really small one…but…uh…well, you just don’t understand the science! Just trust us!” The latter of those two is not going to reassure me. If these people were as smart in the PR department as they supposedly are in the physics department, they would have just issued a flat-out guarantee that everything’s going to be okay.
If they’re so goddamn certain that it’s safe, and there’s not shit that I can do to stop their experiments, I’d prefer a comforting lie over a scary truth.
At the very least they should have had the decency to gather all the scientists together and give a big press conference where they calmly and confidently tell the public not to worry, and provide a refutation of the naysayers’ concerns that makes sense. (If something like this has happened, let me know.)
As for the post above - I’ve been saying it all along: why do we put our blind trust in scientists? Why do we assume that they know what they’re doing and they’re not going to fuck up somehow? Why do we elevate them to the level of gods?
I’m going to say something else, too, and I don’t expect it to be any more popular than the other things I’ve written, but I think this term that they’re using - “God particle” - says a lot about the real motives behind this experiment.
High-level theoretical physics is essentially no different from magic, religion or alchemy. It is an attempt to answer existential questions.
It says about as much about this experiment as the presence of “God mode” in a computer game says about its designers’ motives.
Well, it’s an attempt to find the answers to questions, sure. You say it like there’s something wrong with that? The advantage it has on magic, religion, or alchemy is that it actually pulls this off.
Magical thinking is believing that things work a certain way without any good reason to do so. There’s some of that in this thread, I suppose.
Okay. It’s 100% safe. There; now you can sleep easy.
(Actually, I don’t believe that’s a lie - I mean, yes, literally anything is possible if you want to get accurate about it, but what we’re talking about here is smaking things together with all the great and terrible energy of a fly fart. If I were you I’d be much more worried that all the subatomic particles making up all the universe might suddenly do a hop-twist to the left for no reason whatsoever and spontaneously turn everything into low-fat dairy products. It sounds about as likely to happen as anything the collider’s supposedly going to do to you.)
Poor analogy. Nature produced extremely high energy cosmic rays that continually slam into the earth’s atmosphere in a situation much closer to the situation that is being discussed.
But, you ask what, are cosmic rays?
And these are particles that have crossed incredible distances and yet maintain that energy. Imagine the conditions closer to their source where collisions between 2 of them must have occurred.
And what are the LHC particles?
A Tev is 10[sup]12[/sup] eV.