LHC switched on.

This is making me far less nervy about my upcoming trip to talk to the bison at Fermilabs later this year ...

I saw one! On it's back. In the dollar store. Dead.

On a side note, I don't feel very good today.
/me puts on tin foil hat.

Haven't seen any cockroaches, but I did find a fish bowl with the note "So long and thanks for the fish".

I thought a link to this was posted into this thread but now I don't see it.

Video of Brian Cox talking about the LHC.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/brian_cox_on_cern_s_supercollider.html

The TED website has some great stuff. I found the two videos of presentations by Hans Rosling very interesting.

LMAO

funnily enough, my neighborhood is full of roaches 24 hours a day, 356 days a year, and nope I haven't seen one

That one probably tried telling the ants where the hide out was. So his/her companions silenced it in the most permanent way.

Haven't seen any, but that could be because the ants in my yard have declared war on them. Poison doesn't seem to be working this time around.

But, I don't think the sky will fall. Go boom, sure. But not fall.

(I really think that the group filing lawsuits is being a bit.. overly sensitive. I won't say paranoid, but definitely too sensitive. If the Big Bang created the universe, stands to reason, it won't destroy it. But I could be wrong. Goodness knows I've been wrong before.)

ROFL

what about the mice? Has anyone noticed any difference in them?

Fascinating talk - especially evoking Carl Sagan as he does. He still has not made any predictions about what technologies we may discover from this. I have a hard time believing this project has contributions from so many countries if it is purely for elegant theory.

But I'm glad it's being done.

A big problem with the "event horizon" brush off is that it is based on looking at the black hole as the origin or fixed position and outside things moving into it. If the LHC creates a singularity it would most likely have some initial velocity relative to Earth. Since the LHC is dealing with things very very near the speed of light, it could conceivably have a very high intial relative velocity. And thus "punch thru" whatever's in it's path. Taking a singularity-shot to the head would suck.

Yet black holes are everywhere, all the time ... in your house ... on the screen you are looking at ... according to some theorists.

Remember you need a large star to create a black hole a few miles across. Collapsing Earth into a black hole (if you had a way to do it) might get you something around the size of a marble. Maybe enough to eventually tear apart another planet if it got close enough but even then it could take a long time. With LHC, we're talking particles that would only be trillionths of the mass Earth has. There's still only so much you can cram into something that small.

Assuming one of these black holes was stable enough not to vaporize within the first second or two of existence, it would take a very long time to consume any significant amount of matter. And that's extremely unlikely to get the whole planet simply because the gravity well would be miniscule compared to the size of Earth. If it even consumed the entire LHC installation I'd be surprised. And on top of that, this all assumed the little black hole isn't flung off into space or something by the collision.

As for stuff like strangelets, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) brought up all those same concerns and they've been operating for years without incident.

tl;dr: Stop worrying. ANY of this happening is extremely unlikely to begin with. You've got better stuff to do.

Everyone just wants something to change drastically because the other news of the day stress them too much, and even the end of the world doesn't sound quite as obviously unwelcome. LHC is the only "reasonable" excuse for it to possibly happen.

I do wonder what happens if someone drops a cluster bomb on the working LHC though. Or if a 10kt nuclear explosion occurs in immediate vicinity while it's fully powered up...

Besides the demage from the explosive itself nothing much will happen, the particles will simply scatter because the containment field collapses, a few biljoen protons might sound like much but it's actualy a very small amount compared to what the sun flings at us every seccond.

Oh, it's more about the powerful magnets of the containment field and the energy that is pumped into them, and the liquid helium. Before it all collapses, something unusual might happen.

When I saw the word "hadron" I got the r where the d all backwards...
I am more curious about when the territorial wars will start to break out on the moon over mining rights.

Hey, good point - I hadn't even thought about that.

But yes, the LHC couldn't make one. Right now it's circulating protons if I remember right, and the Schwarzschild radius of a single proton is so ridiculously small, the machine would never be able to somehow crush one down to the necessary size no matter how hard it slams them together.

11 Dimensions total. I'm not sure if extra means more than that or if it is even possible to see outside our universe without causing a profound effect on the observed space. Cat in the box kid of thing there.

Parallel Universes is a bit of a misnomer. At the time the phrase was coined, it was intended to mean they never intersected. They all exist -- big and small -- moving around in one of the dimensions above. If you think an astroid collision is a huge event what do you think happens when two universes run into each other? Now that is a really Big Bang.

(where's Rika? we have nerd talk going here ...)

LMAO Ya know...all the ants have disappeared from our office as a matter of fact...

It's pretty fascinating. I can't tell you how many times I've watched that Discovery special with Stephen Hawkins and a bunch of other scientists contemplating the String Theory and the possibility of 11 dimensions or whatever it was..... Just about the time I think my brain might have grasped the issue and it starts to gel.....I lose it and sparsk come out of my ears. But I am definitely psyched to be living in this era of discovery. I would LOVE to have seen that thing being fired up~!!!!

I'm no physicist.

Actually, the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics implied that the probability "universes" don't exist separately, but in a constant state of superposition - meaning that the world we observe and exist in is actually of overlay of many layers of celluloid sheets, each a probable outcome of a quantum event. You can't 'be' in one of them, you, or anything else really, only exist in the totality of them all. According to that interpretation, the cat really is part dead and part alive at any given time, regardless of when we open the box.

11 dimensions of string theory and string theory itself are actually a mess I'm not willing to go into. They aren't proven to exist yet. My money's on Garrett Lisi's theory, if only because it actually sounds like something which might naturally exist, and LHC might provide ready proof of it's validity: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/11/surfer-physicis.html

I wonder if the tinfoil hat crowd will think this a coincidence

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/09/10/asia.quakes/index.html

My kid has one as a pet and it's still alive. I'm thinking it may have only killed the cockroaches. Or as Raudf suggest, those that didn't implode are hiding in their bomb shelters.



Shizzzzzzzzz!
/me brings the foil back out of the desk drawer.

Thales Infinity ponders the likely result of accelerating some addfarmers to ~ 300 million meters per second,realises that the collision "head on" would be close to twice the speed of light,then suddenly remembers he left a pie cooling on the porch and leaves to retrieve it while making a mental note not to worry about things that don't conCERN him. '