Actually at this point I’m more curious as to why you think particle physicists would coldly and irresponsibly try to destroy the world. It’s not as if they have an escape plan.
Cite?
-FrL-
They can barely string together a wardrobe that doesn’t involve brown pants and a blue shirt. 
This happens all the time. Back in the 1920s, some scientist created an energy-beam device and look at what the press called it…
Well, it should. At the same time you need to make the effort to differentiate between science that is capable of mass destruction and scaremongering.
Personally, I’m far more scared of nature than I am of science. I can’t understand why people want to build houses on ocean shores that will be wiped out by hurricanes, on the sides of mountains that will be swept away by mudslides, or next to forests that will go up in fires. Yet people do by the millions even though these events happen every year.
Science disasters don’t. When was the last science disaster? They don’t happen for two good reasons. 1) Mostly they can’t happen. 2) Scientists are a zillion times more responsible about their work than any other class of workers.
Now you’re being deliberately silly. Energy is energy.
I recommend that like me, you stay anxious over the whole thing. It is defintely a nail biter and I am shopping for brown pants as we speak.
Although modern physics has figured out that there is a relationship between matter and energy, and can therefore calculate energies released when they mess around with matter, they are pretty much ignorant on the following three areas:
1: What is matter, really?
2: What is energy, really?
3: And most important, what is the nature of the matrix–what is the fabric of space–in which matter and energy exist, really?
If physicists understood these three things, there would not still be conversations around reconciling the concepts of Al, Erwin, Werner, Max, Richard and others.
The whole reason for LHC is trying to figure out some of these puzzles. I am not mollified by reassurances from physicists who do not, by their own admissions, understand how the world works in the first place.
If they end up ripping up my part of the universe I am suing those bastards bigtime.
Hey, if you’re really looking for something to be scared of, consider the following: There is a non-zero chance that you will, suddenly, instantly, randomly, experience quantum tunneling to another location in the universe. You will disappear from wherever you are right now, and you will reappear somewhere else entirely. Given the distribution of matter in the cosmos, it is overwhelmingly likely that you will find yourself in the vacuum of deep, deep space, way, way out there, not just between stars but between galaxies. And there is nothing you or anyone else can do to prevent this from happening, or even to get any kind of warning about it.
Now, the probability of this actually happening is so infinitesimally small that you would have to wait for many, many lifetimes of the entire universe to even have a reasonable fraction of a chance of witnessing the event. But it is possible.
And this isn’t even science, in the sense it’s being discussed in this thread, as in something that results from human action. It’s a basic property of matter and spacetime. It could happen to you today, or to an Australopithecine tens of thousands of years ago, or to a crocodile or a car battery or a crumpet.
Is it sensible to be concerned about it? Of course not, because you can be almost completely certain that it isn’t going to happen.
But it might.
Physics dopers: Hush up. 
I can’t tell if you’re joking. Cosmic rays hit the earth’s atmosphere all the time at energies far greater than what the LHC will generate.
Cosmic rays are primarily protons moving at very high fractions of c smashing into atmospheric atoms. They create a shower of particles and, at least to date, have failed to rip the very fabric of space and time
Particle colliders (such as the LHC) smash protons (or other particles) moving at very high factions of c together. They create a shower of particles that physicists can monitor, test and most importantly re-test at will.
There’s no fancy “energy” or “matrix” or another fucked up scientific psuedobabble to worry about.
I don’t think you appreciate quite how small the amounts of energy we’re talking about really are. Less than one billionth of a kilocalorie. Next time you’re outside and a bit of grit blows in your face that is many many times more energy than the LHC particles have.
For comparison purposes, a fast-pitched baseball (100mph) has approximately 100 million times more kinetic energy than a 14TeV subatomic particle.
I really can’t be bothered to post the maths here, but I’m pretty sure of my figures.
Much appreciated. I have seen the numbers and find them reassuring. It’s what we don’t know that makes me anxious…actually; neurosis is more a function of genes, so the LHC is probably just an excuse on which to pin my anxieties.
The pat on my punkin’ head will be more reassuring after the sucker is up and colliding and nuttin’ bad happens.
Look on the bright side. If you do get unlucky enough to experience quantum tunneling, there’s a non-zero chance that it’ll whip to you another part of the universe containing an earth-type planet filled with humanlike nymphomaniacs (or whatever the male equivalent is) who need your genetic material to re-populate their race. See? Science isn’t all gloom and doom.
They come from all over the place. (The wikipedia article on cosmic rays lists some sources, but that article does not contain citations so reader beware. It looks about right to me, though.)
As to your second question, what do you mean by the idea that the rays “are exactly the same as the energy that would be produced by the collider?” What is the “same kind of energy” here? As Exapno Mapcase so helpfully pointed out, “energy is energy.” In other words, we don’t usually talk about “kinds” of energy. But you had something in mind when you used the phrase “same kind of energy.” What was it?
-FrL-
See I find this odd. There’s an unspoken assumption that what we’re doing is somehow so completely novel that nothing nature has ever done comes close to what we’re attempting. It’s a laughably arrogant assumption when you consider the magnitude of energies and speeds the universe regularly presents. It’s analogous to striking sparks on steel and flint and being worried you’ll envelope the entire planet in a holocaust.
We don’t know- that’s an unsolved problem in astrophysics.
Well, Jupiter’s Schwarzschild radius (the size of the black hole it would make if it were somehow compressed into one) is 2.2 meters, and Schwarzschild radius scales linearly with mass. Your 2-foot-diameter black hole would be about 50 times as massive as the Earth, and its center of mass would be much closer to you than Earth’s center of mass is- you’d be a few hundred miles from its center of mass, while you’re 4000 miles away from Earth’s center of mass. You and everything else would fall toward it at a pretty good clip, though I’m not sure if you’d have time to fall into it (I don’t feel like doing the math).
When it disappeared, everything that hadn’t fallen into it would stop being accelerated, but it would keep the velocity it had until it crashed into something or stopped moving because of friction. Something that’s been falling for 10 minutes in Earth’s gravity is going to be travelling at 5880 meters per second (13,153 miles per hour) if it hasn’t crashed into anything yet. This black hole’s gravity will be a lot stronger than Earth’s (again, I don’t feel like doing the math), so things would have gotten a lot more acceleration from it than they do from Earth’s gravity.
Having 50 times the mass of the Earth suddenly appear on Earth would probably do some interesting things to the Moon’s orbit, too.
So no, you wouldn’t be safe in Indiana if a black hole with a diameter of 2 feet suddenly showed up in Kentucky. Of course, you wouldn’t be safe in Indiana if anything with 50 times the mass of the Earth, black hole or no, suddenly showed up in Kentucky.
Of course, the energies involved in the LHC aren’t anywhere close to what you’d need to create an object with 50 times the mass of Earth. The energy equivalent of 50 times Earth’s mass is of order 10[sup]62[/sup] electron volts, which is 10[sup]49[/sup] times the energies that the LHC will be working at. The energies of those ultra-high-energy cosmic rays aren’t anywhere close to this, either. Which is why you don’t see this sort of thing happening more often.
I have hopes that this will happen to me. Of course, my destination is habitable, full of eager young ladies, and I end up being an action hero. 
It would explain what happens to my socks in the drier.
So that’s what happened to the blueberry crumpets I got at Trader Joe’s and couldn’t find this morning! I was assuming that Mr. Neville ate them, but now I know what really happened 
You’re going to die one day, you know that. Right?
Some doot-brains fiddling around with hadrons and causing annihilation for everyone is probably a good enough reason as any other.
Maybe you would prefer your charged particles served up courtesy of an ICBM MIRVing or maybe in a suitcase on the luggage carousel?
Of all the things to worry about, and you worry about that crap?
When it disappeared, would the same equivalent amount of mass-energy not continue to exist in the general region, albeit moving away from it at a spectacular pace, so that everything would continue to accelererate toward the center of that mass-energy until it dissipated enough?
It suddenly struck me how analogous this whole conversation has been to that of conspiracy theorists.
One scientist 20 years ago misspoke about the chances of something bad happening, and that comment is more important in peoples’ minds than all of us saying over and over again that nothing can happen.
That’s exactly the same process as conspiracy bugs using the false reports that inevitably occur in the first few hours of a situation - like 9/11 - as “proof” that something happened/is being covered up/is not what it seems, no matter that everybody else understands the true situation and keeps telling them that they’re dead wrong.
That’s not great company you’re keeping.
Thirteen people died last year when vending machines fell on them. That’s something to worry about.
The Large Hadron Collider? Unless you’re buying something from one of their vending machines, THERE’S NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT.
Not sure. I’m basically working on the “a wizard did it” theory, because I’m not terribly familiar with the physics of a large object suddenly showing up and then disappearing. I suppose it could quantum tunnel there and then quantum tunnel somewhere else, but I’ll admit I don’t know much about how the energy of that would work.
Dammit, Jim, I’m an astronomer, not a quantum mechanic!