LHC switched on.

As many of you may know the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was switched on this morning at 8:30BST.

By smashing particles together at speeds of up to 99.99% the speed of light, scientists and mankind for that matter hope to answer some of the greatest mysteries in the universe.

Investigating questions like, what is mass?, dark matter?, and the possibility of extra dimensions and parallel universes.

It's taken 20 years of preparation , 10 billion dollars and scientists from over 70 countries.

Ok so maybe the ideas aren't as popularly accessible as those of the Apollo moon landings, but this moment does herald perhaps an even more momentus milestone in our search for understanding.

If nothing else it sort of puts all the hubris and hyperbole spouted by some of the exponents of SL into perspective.

Why am I sticking this up to rapidly sink down the front page and disappear? Because believe it or not this really is one giant leap for mankind (to paraphrase another) and I thought it was worth mentioning.

We're all going to die. T___T
Nah, it's actually interesting for something this big to start happening in my life time, I wonder how it'll develop, good or bad. I've seen a few pictures of it and it looks rather fun to actually get up and running, but you gotta think if it'll end up creating something devistating.

as allways, new technologies and discoveries are used in weapons befor being put to good use

god help us what they will discover...

It's old hat! There are loads of hadron colliders in SL, they've been here for ages and we take them for granted!

Yes indeed.
But I can't stand the ones with bling!

All swallowed up in bloody black hole of our own making.At least the Swiss will go first,never much cared for cheese or Rolex watches.

Remember, the www was invented there though

Pep (By a Brit of course)

True

I'm all excited about it! I'm eager to hear what they manage to do with it.

Ok, so I have a thing for advancements in science.

It won't have got up to speed until October - plenty of time for it to fizzle out before then.

Those guys cranking the machine up are going to be buggered then.

*chortles* At least it's not ran by Linden Labs!

I'm waiting before making any judgment on usefulness. A lot of things were claimed for electricity when it was first being used. A lot of it was balderdash, of course.

have you seen the vid?

http://tinyurl.com/58ecpy

I think the whole thing is pretty interesting...can't wait to see what it turns up...even if it is gonna take a while lol.

waiting for something.. I live less than a mile from a particle accelerator.. all I can say it does is keep the good thunderstorms away (they always seem to split right here about a mile or 2 west!!!)

but its fascinating what they learn about physics as well I am eager to hear what this largest and faster yet if I heard right (faster than Fermilab's four-mile Tevatron, the world's highest-energy particle accelerator, can reach an energy level of 0.980 TeV for each of its particle beams, until now I think...) should be something very cool that will take years and years to get any real results from, maybe not ...maybe like the news and some are saying we will get sucked up in a man made black hole LOL

Hehe...look what's on Google's home page:

Apparently, Stephen Hawkins bet a hundred bucks that this event isn't going to amount to much.

LOL! Awexome!!!

Well he bet a hundred bucks that this machine wouldn't be powerful enough to discover the Higgs boson, even though current theory suggests it should be.

"The LHC will increase the energy at which we can study particle interactions, by a factor of four. According to present thinking, this should be enough to discover the Higgs particle, the particle that gives mass to all the other particles,"

he also went on to say that:

"I think it will be much more exciting if we don't find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of $100 that we won't find the Higgs."

he also believes that the experiment could discover superpartners;

"Their existence would be a key confirmation of string theory, and they could make up the mysterious dark matter that holds galaxies together. Whatever the LHC finds, or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the Universe,"

Finally he said:

"Both the LHC, and the space programme, are vital if the human race is not to stultify, and eventually die out. Together they cost less than one tenth of a percent of world GDP. If the human race cannot afford that, it doesn't deserve the epithet, human,"

So I'm not sure where he suggested it "would not amount to much"

Has anyone seen a cockroach since this thing was turned on?

Well, a lot of people don't understand black holes - they think of them as big vacuum cleaners and that's just not how they work. Short primer time!

Every object has something called a "Schwarzschild radius". When an object which is collapsing in on itself reaches a certain size (the radius), at that point it cannot be stopped from collapsing all the way into a singularity (or black hole, if you like). When the object gets smaller than that radius, the area of the radius becomes the "event horizon", and anything that touches the event horizon gets immediately yanked onto the black hole. But the thing is, OUTSIDE the event horizon, the gravitational pull is the exact same as when the object was a regular object.

So, let's say the sun collapsed RIGHT NOW into a black hole (it doesn't have enough mass to do so in real life, but let's pretend). The earth would NOT get "sucked in". Of course, it would get very very cold really quick. And eventually a whole bunch of dust and space garbage would start assaulting us, because there's no solar wind to keep it away. But no sucking-in for quite a long time. See?

So if the LHC made a mini black hole, the earth would not get sucked in. Not even the LHC would get sucked in. So it's all gravy.

You thinking they're hiding in their bomb shelters awaiting humanity's destruction?

So the world's not gonna get reduced to just 1 prim - phew

Ok. So you're saying that the Sun doesn't have enough mass in RL, but - what about in SL?
Do we as residents need to fear? Or would the SL Sun's high mass mean that it can't regain script energy fast enough to llPushObject us into its event horizon.

I hope so... otherwise that sun is getting a big, fat AR from me!

If they wanted to make black holes, the could have saved alot of money and just used LL's asset servers.

Lindal's Resident Geek here:

Good summary, Dakota. But, if we WERE able to create a black hole here on earth, there would be a lot of things to worry about.

For one thing, the earth and the hole would attract one another through mutual gravitation. Unless we have some way to hold onto the slippery little critter (possibly by giving it a charge by feeding it ions), it will drop through the floor and fall into orbit around the earth's core...with said orbit being mostly INSIDE the planet. Nearby matter would be attracted to the hole as it passes, falling in and adding to its mass. As the hole gains mass, its Schwarzchild radius grows, allowing it to attract even more mass... In time, the entire earth could be eaten away...but long before that, we'd all be fried by the high energy X-rays emitted by the infalling matter.

Fortunately, the new accelerator can't create a black hole. Mass is energy, as Einstein says...but even with the new machine, there's not anywhere near enough energy involved to create a black hole equivalent amount of mass.

The Earth is safe...but wear your lead underwear if you tour the facility, OK?