Large Hadron Collider
 

It's going to start up soon. Is it going to create a black hole and kill us all? Discuss.
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/LHC-en.html

i don't have anything really constructive to add, but........my father in-law is always bringing up topics like this. he doesn't have any formal education in these fields but reads alot about subatomic stuff as a hobby. it's seriously interesting and terribly complicated. oh, and i hope it doesn't create a black hole that kills us.

And supposedly, the biggest revelation will be if nothing happens.

This is what they expect to happen:
"When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and "missing links" in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass.[3][1] The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity. The Higgs boson may also help to explain why gravitation is so weak compared to the other three forces. In addition to the Higgs boson, other theorized novel particles that might be produced, and for which searches[4] are planned, include strangelets, micro black holes, magnetic monopoles and supersymmetric particles.[5]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadron_Collider

Interesting stuff, if a tad over my head.

Chris

I think this is more likely to happen than a mini blackhole.
http://www.jedigirl.org/www/images/s...sformation.jpg

Chris

is 11 dimensions really enough?

I think the large hard-on collider is cool.

and the worst possible scenario is large scale population control for a planet that can only support about half its curren population sustainably.

maybe this is Bush's master plan for the US economy, Bush Sr. talks europeans into doing this in europe, it takes them a decade to complete, and now they are about to blow up half of europe and our economy over here will be dominant again...good plan.

Bohr, Fermi, Szilard and Oppenheimer had concerns the H-Bomb, once detonated, would continue to burn until the hydrogen in the atmosphere was depleted. They also had concerns the damned thing wouldn't work as advertised.

I doubt Steve Hawkins will get to experience micro-blackholes generated by the LHC. However, if they do occur, I'd rather they did so on the French end of the ring than the Swedish half...

- L

This isn't the Higgs Boson?

My roommate in college who was getting his Comp E. degree argued with me once about Pistol Shrimp. because the cavitation bubble they create collapses and creates instantaneous moment the temperature of the sun.

He had problems with it, because he determined that if it did reach that temperature it'd cause a reaction that would burn the atmosphere. Then when he admitted defeat on that juncture he began demanding why ship props that cause cavitation don't do the same.

I wish that was the Higgs Boson.

The Higgs Boson actually is just a particle to define a field that is theorized to exist that all particles travel through. The problem is that all feilds have their own particle that defines it's existence and energy. The Higgs Boson though has never been seen. The Higgs Field if it exists would have to contain a lot of energy and all large or highly energetic particles are unstable which could explain why the Boson hasn't been seen before. When the accelerator is fired up it's not even predicted that we'll see the boson particle come from the smashed protons, rather we'll see extra particles in a secondary split follow the initial.

heat transfer has a time component. if you dont have much time, you dont get much heat. so if that cavitation bubble was in, say, a gallon of water... it probably wouldn't raise the water temperature noticably.

a hardon collider sounds a lot like "docking." which I know nothing about