Ah, yes, the Great Vending Machine Panic of 2006. Forunately, we were able to isolate and disable the vending machines (all Crane National Vendors machines) before the trend became an overnight epidemic of violent, vending machine rampaging. I understand there’s some muttering from parking meters, but fortunately they don’t have enough change to stay active long enough to organize. Still, I think Cool Hand Luke had the right idea; strike at them preemitively before they get you.
Stranger
Wait wait wait…
You mean there are ways of dying that aren’t highlighted on network news-magazine shows?
Cite?
Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters.
Man, that Dylan guy knows everything.
So if they continure building enough of them LHCs, they could link them up and create this beast you speak of. Better keep an eye on them.
You wouldn’t be saying that if you were a Large Hadron… :eek:
Chaos theory: A scientist somewhere on Earth flaps his mouth and causes a storm in a teacup.
Leading to a strangely attractive misconception.
I think Bob the Enzyte Guy has something to say about large hadrons.
Did you hear abut the dyslexic guy who turned up for work at the LHC?
Never mind… 
Sorry for resurrecting this thread. I just happened to come across these. It’s basically a refutation of all of the proposed reasons why the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is supposedly safe. Does anyone here know enough about the subject to possibly answer any of these?
I found the link to that list here. It’s a discussion forum of a bunch of people who seem to be extremely knowledgeable about particle physics and a lot of them seem to think that there is a possibility of a black hole forming, which could destroy our planet.
Yeah yeah I know, we already get hit by “cosmic rays” which are more powerful than the energy that the LHC would produce. But then why are these people debating about it at all? Why aren’t all the people on those forums just accepting of that theory? Most of them appear to be well educated in physics, so you’d think there wouldn’t be any dissenting opinions at all.
Actually, the more I think about it, I’m baffled that there aren’t any groups who are trying to generate large scale opposition to this collider. There are animal rights organizations and environmentalist groups everywhere you look, but no group of any significance trying to stop an experiment which has a (very small, but still existent) chance of destroying the world? I mean, even if the idea that the LHC could be dangerous is COMPLETELY misinformed, it still seems to be widespread enough that you’d think there would be some kind of organized effort against it.
I mean, yeah, the world could be hit at any moment by an asteroid or something, but at least that would be totally unpreventable and random. If by even the tiniest chance, the LHC produced a black hole that not only killed us all but physically obliterated our planet, I think that would be way worse because it would have been our fault, as a species.
Like I’ve said - I’m not anti science. But science gave us the atom bomb, remember?
Because somebody has to keep the aluminum foil manufacturers in business.
And nuclear power, and radiotherapy, and magnetic resonance imaging, et cetera. Science is a methodology for understanding how the world works and how those rules can be used to create tools to enhance our capabilities. It is neither good nor bad (and we may someday find a valuable use for the atom bomb, like nuclear pulse propulsion or deflecting an incoming meteor) but merely beneficial or detrimental depending upon to what use it is put.
Stranger
Yeah, the idea of a vacuum metastability event is a lot scarier to me than the creation of quantum black holes. At least we’d never know what happened, as the “sphere of anihilation” would expand at the speed of light. It could have already happened somewhere else in the universe and we’d see no sign of it, we’d just cease to exist one day.
I am not a physicist so I can’t comment on the statements made at that website.
However, I notice that there’s very few definite statements made about anything (maybe this is due to the nature of the question at hand). It didn’t come across as a refutation, more like the 9-11 conspiracy guys saying “Oh yeah? Well it could have been an undetectable stealth thermite missile!”
More importantly, look for a list of members of this group. You won’t find any. Keep digging and you’ll find one name, James Blodgett, on the “Contact Us” link.
Googling James Blodgett turns up this information:
He is a sociologist and statistician (not a physicist). It says that he is working with a “…small group of physicists, risk specialists and others on collider risk issues.” Are none of those people willing to put their names on his site, given that they are talking about the potential destruction of the world?
Iron oxide or Manganese oxide?
In either case, :eek:.
The argument in the new links he posted is that while collisons more powerful than any in the LHC do happen naturally, a black holes created by one of them would have a large momentum relative to Earth. The cosmic ray would have to be traveling very fast, and it would hit a basically stationary target, leaving the black hole still traveling fast. The mini-black-hole (MHB) would interact weakly with matter, so it would leave the planet, passing thorugh the atmosphere or planet in a fraction of a second without accumulating any significant mass.
By contrast, a MHB could be created in the accelerator by striking two equally fast-moving particles together from opposite directions, leaving the MHB with little net momentum. Thus it would be more likely to remain on Earth, which would allow it to continue to grow and consume matter indefinitely.
I don’t know if it’s valid, but I haven’t seen anything that addresses this question.
Are you sure it wasn’t the vampires?
Statistically speaking, you’re far more likely to die in a car accident on the way to the supercollider than to die in a black-hole-related disaster.
Or to use the industry’s euphemism: a surplus-gravity event.
Yes, that basically sums it up. Can anyone here address that?
No. Can anyone explain why MHB is the abbreviation for “Mini Black Hole”?
It’s the military designation. One standard-issue Mini-Hole, Black.