What are the macroscopic effects of very high energy subatomic collisions?

Factual Questions
1

In this article on the impending startup of the Large Hardon Collider, the author tries to explain the energies the LHC is capable of:

Assuming that’s a proper characterization of the magnitude of energy we’re talking about…what would that be like? If I were sitting at my desk, and a pair of protons collided in front of me at that speed, releasing that much energy, what would it be like macroscopically? Would I see a bright flash of light? Would I be knocked over/killed/vaporized by a massive shock wave that appears to come from nowhere? Or would there be no tangible effects outside the quantum scale?

2

Those numbers are so far off, it’s not even funny. This is why I hate popular media explanations of science. The LHC is expected to have collision energies on the order of 14 TeV, which is about 2.24 x 10[sup]-6[/sup] joules. You can look at this scale to get a sense of what kind of energy that is. It’s nowhere NEAR macroscopic, falling many orders of magnitude below the amount of energy needed to light a 40-watt light bulb for an hour. By comparison, the most energetic cosmic ray ever detected carried an energy equivalent to a major-league fast ball; this, too is many orders of magnitude more energy than the LHC is capable of.

3

This seems to be the same question as this thread, so the answer is that it’s too small to see unless it hit your actual eye.

4

Hmm…I didn’t realize how far off that explanation was. I suppose I could have done the math, but where’s the fun in that?

Knowing what how big a joule is, I understand the energy levels we’re talking about. Miniscule indeed. Bummer…I hoping for some fireworks.

5

I guess that black hole that will eat the Earth and the universe would be macroscopic.

6

That’s 5.4 X 10^-10 Calories, or the equivalent of the dietary energy in 1.2 X 10^-10 Oreo cookies*.

*By weight. An Oreo cookie weighs 12 grams and delivers 55 Calories of chocolatey goodness.

7

I thought we were supposed to assume that the collision energy was that large…

8

Man, I’m still hungry.

9

Looking at the energy density
A proton has a volume of 1.4×10-44 m³
So two colliding protons will have a volume of 2.8×10-44 m³.
An Oreo cookie has a volume of about 1.4 × 10^-5 cubic meters.
That’s 5.0 × 10^38 times the volume of the colliding protons.
So an Oreo cookie with the same energy density as the colliding protons would contain 1.12 × 10^33 joules, or 2.7 × 10^29 Calories.
Eating one of those would make a person very fat.

10

Great, now compare it to the Twinkie™ in Ghostbusters. :stuck_out_tongue:

11

But the real question is… how big would it be? :slight_smile:

Edit after rereading the quoted post: same size. But then… how heavy would it be?

12

The “colliding bullet trains” might be a misguided figure for the amount of energy the machine uses, rather than the amount that actually goes into the high-speed protons. Particle accelerators are horrendously inefficient.

13

It’d mass 1.7 X 10^14 grams. With a volume of 14 cubic centimeters, that’s definite black hole territory.

14

Nervewracking, isn’t it?

15

That’s an interesting list. I wonder about its accuracy, though. Shouldn’t “ton TNT” and “megaton TNT” be six orders of magnitude apart, not three?

16

So that’d be the dark chocolate coating. :slight_smile:

17

The energy stored in the LHC proton beam could melt 500kg of copper.

Cite

I did read a better article on the beam dumps which I cannot now find (*eta *here) - they use multistage magnetic decelleration to dump energy from the protons until they can hit a cooled graphite sink with a swinging beam.

Si

18

Is that what’s called an Angst? :smiley:

19

This dude might have some insights.

20

Wasn’t he the one they claimed was a copy of Dr. Manhattan, only red?