The Stephen Hawkings of the world say no worries but there’s this theory
that their proton-smashing will create mini-black holes that will swallow the Earth.
The only good news in that case is, they’ll start with France.
Update – A successful test of the Hadron Collider.
Dis is not fair…Pardon, I can not ear yu!
Nothing dire will happen. Its the luddites again with their anti-tech mentality. Just remember Y2K.
Is that a promise? They will start in France? PLEASE!!!
Hard to believe a post like this. It sounds like something pre-1984.
Ur, ur……..it wasn’t supposed to do that. Shades of Chernobyl, April 26 1986 or just bearded scientists getting their jollies again /sarc.
Hard to believe a troll is really a mini-black hole that will swallow something pre-1984.
Hard to believe schools in and mom upped for the modem. again
Well, can you blame the public for being a little confused, there is about as much clear and consistent statements coming from the people involved as can be expected from people who stick their fingers in electrical outlets to do their hair! 😉
Scientist 1 – there is as much energy to be released as in a hurtling freight train, aircraft carrier, etc
Scientist 2 – there is as much energy to be released as 2 mosqutioes colliding, bumble bee landing on flower, etc
Scientist 1 – these conditions have not existed since the big bang!
Scientist 2 – these collisions happen all the time in nature!
Scientist 1 – this has a good change of producing micro black holes!
Scientist 2 – it is unlikely to produce black holes at all.
If they really want to convince Joe Public that there is no danger, then perhaps they should get their talking points sorted out ahead of time.
I realize that science usually doesn’t attract such public attention, so therefore these guys/gals are fully overwhelmed but seriously, they need to get their PR act together!!!
Big effing deal.We here in Canuckistan created a black hole a looonnngggg time ago.We just called it the Liberal party.
Annnnnnnnnd Justthinkin WINS!!
Oh wait, they were just a blackhole for my tax dollars…..wonder if that counts?
Yeah.
Well, it appears that certain members of the public are concerned that the physicists in question have not fully appreciated the gravity of the situation.
Well, it appears that certain members of the public are concerned that the physicists in question have not fully appreciated the gravity of the situation.
Posted by: Brent Weston at September 10, 2008 7:24 AM
Brent…you do realize that gravity is just the metaphysical manifestation of the realization that the Earth sucks?
Heck and here I thought the Black Hole proliferation factor was racial.
Exactly slap shot. The sounds you’ll really hear are it going “niggardly” and “devil’s food cake” really really loudly before the explosion!
:0
It’s another Zionist plot… The Zionists have been developing a secret particle weapon that will induce seething, whining, ranting, rioting, homophobia, misogyny, suicidal thoughts, domestic violence, racism, lying and a lousy sense of fashion.
i think we discussed this one on a previous thread. The “mini black holes” are event horizons. I won’t be making any special preparations.
Justthinkin:
LOL. The Earth also may have a magnetic personality.
I saw “The Mist”, I’m heading for my local grocery store so I’ll survive! 😉
Don’t worry someone already sent them a crow bar to battle the aliens the start coming out of the torn dimensional seams.
“The game’s protagonist is the theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman and a survivor of an experiment that goes horribly wrong when an unexpected “resonance cascade” rips dimensional seams, devastating the facility. Aliens from another world enter the facility through these dimensional seams.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life:_Uplink#Synopsis
Like Brian Cox said, “Any scientist who believes that this will create a black hole is a twat”
-IF- a black hole -could- be created by the LHC, it’s mass would be so tiny that it would evaporate due to Hawking radiation before it could consume any matter.
Also, collisions much more powerful than this happen in nature ALL THE TIME, and WE’RE STILL HERE.
Of course the fact that they screwed up basic engineering calculations while building it, doesn’t exactly inspire GREAT confidence:
On 27 March 2007 a cryogenic magnet support broke during a pressure test involving one of the LHC’s inner triplet (focusing quadrupole) magnet assemblies, provided by Fermilab and KEK. No one was injured. Fermilab director Pier Oddone stated “In this case we are dumbfounded that we missed some very simple balance of forces”. This fault had been present in the original design, and remained during four engineering reviews over the following years.
And Justthinkin answered another question science has been wondering about.
What is on the other side of a black hole?
Little Brown Envelopes full of taxpayer dollars!
Good Morning CANADA!
Very bright and sunny day here.
So what’s this?
Black holes for earth, man made to boot, eh.
( Um, … trying to digress this with a second cup of coffee … )
Anyways, are we dead yet? Can someone let me know if it happens, got a busy day planned.
🙂
Better load the shotguns and gas up the chainsaw, just in case.
If it happens it would entirely be GW Bush’s fault, of course….
Slapshot….ROTFLMAO.Okay.So I have a sick mind.Heh.At least we can laugh at ourselves.And yes Brent,very magnetic.I keep trying to leave,but you know how opposites attract!
Artificial black holes will have a usefull purpose. The will give us a place to dump our garbage.
Sorry for the spelling errors.
Artificial black holes will have a useful purpose. They will give us a place to dump our garbage.
Well this is one of those things that if they actually create a blackhole significant enough to be a problem we will all be gone very quickly, so not to worry.
Hawking has made a couple of predictions on this one
1) That they will create blackhles that will disappear
2) That they wont find the Higgs Bosun particle.
I love stuff like this because you get to test theories and predictions with real data….unlike a few other theories we are all aware of.
Good Luck to them, the march of human curiousity continues.
No, I don’t think the experiment can create black holes. France remains intact.
The experiment is dealing with events AFTER the BigBang explosion and focusing on the early forms of mass. A black hole is energy that is ‘pre-mass’ (not an accurate term) and therefore, operates in aspace and atime.
Can space/time mass be transformed into aspatial and atemporal energy (a black hole)? No idea. After all how do you remove the dimensions of time and space from mass? But as Hawkings suggest, that energy would instantly disappear, ie, be transformed back into mass.
Will they find an earlier particle? Why not?
Agreed Stephen.
Even though I only have the smallest hope of really understanding what they may achieve, the study of “basics of the universe” type science has always facinated me.
I once watched a full hour about string theory. Was completely hooked and only came out of it with a headache and an amazement at the minds that could create a concept like that. Wether or not the theory ever gets proved it makes the ol brain box work overtime. Always a good thing.
Does the HRC know about all this “black” hole talk? Perhaps Lucy can go and try to find one…
Texas Canuck:
You jest, but others have made the same comment in serious, e.g.,
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2008/07/commissioner_de.php
thus proving that the world has gone stark raving loony.
If you haven’t viewed it already, I recommend highly Large Hadron Rap:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM
The beginning of the first serious experiments using CERN’s Large Hadron Collider this week has given rise to a welter of fanciful scare stories about the obliteration of the Earth by a pocket black hole or a cascade reaction of exotic particles. Similar predictions have been made around the launch of several other particle physics experiments and even the first atomic weapons tests. Predictions of the world’s end are nothing new though. We’ve picked out 30 of the most memorable apocalypses that never, for one reason or another, quite happened.
1: 2,800BC: The oldest surviving prediction of the world’s imminent demise was found inscribed upon an Assyrian clay tablet which stated: “Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common.” Wherever more than two people over 30 are gathered together, expect to hear remarkably similar sentiments….
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article4717864.ece
It is still pretty early in the test cycle.
Wait until they flip the ‘Turbo’ switch.
I thought this has been done already in a Dan Brown book “Deception Point”.
cant Obama save us.
he’s black
he’s an —–hole.
Alas, France would not be the first place to go. A black hole would immediately fall to the center of the Earth and begin its earnest task of consuming the planet from the center outwards.
If Canadians elect the Liberals, we’ll be creating our own black whole right here.
Oops Should be “black hole.”
Well off to the garage. Where is that darn crowbar anyway!
The LHC won’t actually begin the experiments that the public, *cough* I mean the unwashed masses, *cough* I mean Liberal Arts Majors, fear will end the earth.
It’s a silly debate and millions of dollars have been spent creating studies to assure the public that the LHC poses no dangers. A complete waste of time and money that could have been spent on more staff, equipment, or funding for the LHC itself.
One great mystery of this scientific experiment I haven’t been able to figure out.
Seems the scientists are trying to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang and unlock the secrets of how our universe got here.
Don’t know about anybody else, but whenever I set off a Big Bang (lighting a firecracker, for example … OK, that’s a small bang), things close by tend to be destroyed, not created.
I guess the bigger the bang, the more that’s destroyed … the better the chance of something to be created.
Kinda like … you have to break a lot of eggs to create an omelette.
Or, is this just my lack of imagination?
Oh, forgot.
Where did the eggs come from?
And, if there a Big Bang created the universe, what exploded if nothing existed?
setyoufree:
There was no time before the big bang. The beginning of time _was_ the big bang, so “nothing existing” prior to the big bang is logically impossible. At least thats how I’ve always understood it.
A similar question could be asked of those of religious persuasion as to what created God, how did he come about, or what came before we were created?
“A similar question could be asked of those of religious persuasion as to what created God, how did he come about, or what came before we were created?”
You’re assuming God exists in a plane that is governed by linear time. What if He doesn’t?
And even if you remove God from the picture, you’re going to still be left with the same endless causality paradox that none of us with our frail, superficial grasp of all things infinite are going to be able to comprehend.
Exactly my point Blackbeard. Assumptions about what beget what are meaningless, as the same principles that are claimed about God’s spatial location with regards to time can be made about the beginning of the universe.
set you free – the term ‘Big Bang’ shouldn’t be compared with your firecrackers..which, by the way,. do release heat and particles of matter. And don’t necessarily destroy what’s around them.
The BigBang is a term used by scientists to describe the formation of the universe. As pointed out, before this ‘explosion’ there was no mass. Pure energy, if there is such a thing – and in our universe, pure energy doesn’t and cannot exist. Our universe was created by/with this ‘event’, which established space and time. And therefore, mass..which exists as energy moulded in space and time.
The key value of the BigBang, in my estimation, is that the constraints of space and time began.
If they could produce black holes that didn’t evaporate immediately, we could use them to suck up all kinds of undesirable things, Gore, Suzuki, Hansen, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, the list goes on. Could be very useful, which means that it is virtually impossible.
As for Hawking predictions, he usually bets against things that he thinks will actually happen, at least that’s his record so far with Kip Thorn.
I for one hope that the do find the Higgs Boson, otherwise they are going to want a whole lot more money to redo all their research.
Thanks for the responses.
Tell you the truth, I’m not smart enough to figure it all out … so, I’ll just cling to my guns and my religion.