Thread: May 2008 (LHC) Particle Accelerator - Miracle or Catastrophe?

I heard about this.. How the hell is this good news? He is fucking around with the fabric of space-time.. I doubt he can do it anyway. We are not ready for time travel. We know NOTHING about it.

Hey it doesn't matter if a make a black hole! At least I'll make a scientific discovery!!

Originally Posted by Dreamworld

We know NOTHING about it

We would learn alot more about it if we actually performed it, then not do anything at all and read theroies by scientists who claim to know what they are talking about.

I dont really get the article though, did the time travel work? Are we recieving stuff from the future?

I heard about this.. How the hell is this good news? He is fucking around with the fabric of space-time.

Um... who is?

I doubt he can do it anyway. We are not ready for time travel. We know NOTHING about it.

...this isn't a time machine, you dolt. And we know everything about the spacetime fabric ever since Albert Einstein described it flawlessly.

Hey it doesn't matter if a make a black hole! At least I'll make a scientific discovery!!

Have you ever considered the possibility that you know fuck all about physics but the people making the particle collider do??

Tell me why a particle collider should create a large black whole. Go on, if you're such an expert.

Or you could just be quiet. It doesn't matter how many people with no knowledge of physics say 'ooh it might make a black whole!!' or 'ooh it might reverse gravity!!' or 'ooh it might turn everybody into blocks of iron!!', nobody is going to listen to you.

How can a stream of protons create a black hole?

It pretty much can't, since black holes are formed when large masses condense into such a small point in space-time that it collapses into a singularity. You're not going to get that by firing hydrogen ions at one another at 80% the speed of light.

Don't anybody get their hopes up that this will result in an answer to the Grand Unifying Theory. To even begin to test that would require a collision of energy in an order of magnitude so high, you'd need a super-collider the diameter of Pluto's orbit to pull it off.

Worst case scenario - they don't find anything useful in the new band of GeV they can now test in (very unlikely).
Best case scenario - they discover the Higgs Boson particle, or some other millisecond particle that turns the world of physics on its head.

Originally Posted by C911

We would learn alot more about it if we actually performed it, then not do anything at all and read theroies by scientists who claim to know what they are talking about.

I dont really get the article though, did the time travel work? Are we recieving stuff from the future?

I can give less of a shit about this discovery. Especially if they are making a tear in space time. Its just retarded. The worlds fine without it. A mini black hole isn't going to feed a country. It might just eat them. You can't hide in your closet because a black hole would suck the whole world, and solar system after time.

Mini Black holes?

Wtf.

HOLE not whole

lul

Originally Posted by Aquanina

HOLE not whole

This sort of thing happens just above the Earth all the time to no ill effect. And you're still not a physicist so stop trying to lecture those who are. Physicists are, by definition, not idiots, especially not the ones who build particle accelerators. If they thought they had any chance of killing themselves, there's no way they would do it.

You're not going to get that by firing hydrogen ions at one another at 80% the speed of light.

Woah, they're really that fast?

Originally Posted by Seismosaur

Mini Black holes?

Wtf.

Yes a mini black hole. I think doing more research on black holes in the universe would be appropriate instead of creating our own tear in space time.

The realization that holes could be small prompted Hawking to consider what quantum effects might come into play, and in 1974 he came to his famous conclusion that black holes do not just swallow particles but also spit them out [see "The Quantum Mechanics of Black Holes," by S. W. Hawking; Scientific American, January 1977]. Hawking predicted that a hole radiates thermally like a hot coal, with a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. For a solar-mass hole, the temperature is around a millionth of a kelvin, which is completely negligible in today's universe. But for a black hole of 1012 kilograms, which is about the mass of a mountain, it is 1012 kelvins--hot enough to emit both massless particles, such as photons, and massive ones, such as electrons and positrons.

Because the emission carries off energy, the mass of the hole tends to decrease. So a black hole is highly unstable. As it shrinks, it gets steadily hotter, emitting increasingly energetic particles and shrinking faster and faster. When the hole shrivels to a mass of about 106 kilograms, the game is up: within a second, it explodes with the energy of a million-megaton nuclear bomb. The total time for a black hole to evaporate away is proportional to the cube of its initial mass. For a solar-mass hole, the lifetime is an unobservably long 1064 years. For a 1012-kilogram one, it is 1010 years--about the present age of the universe. Hence, any primordial black holes of this mass would be completing their evaporation and exploding right now. Any smaller ones would have evaporated at an earlier cosmological epoch.

Hawking's work was a tremendous conceptual advance because it linked three previously disparate areas of physics: general relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. It was also a step toward a full quantum theory of gravity. Even if primordial black holes never actually formed, thinking about them has led to remarkable physical insights. So it can be useful to study something even if it does not exist.

In particular, the discovery opened up a profound paradox that aims at the heart of why general relativity and quantum mechanics are so hard to reconcile. According to relativity theory, information about what falls into a black hole is forever lost. If the hole evaporates, however, what happens to the information contained within? Hawking suggested that black holes completely evaporate, destroying the information--in contradiction with the tenets of quantum mechanics. Destruction of information conflicts with the law of energy conservation, making this scenario implausible.

One alternative, that black holes leave behind remnants, is equally unpalatable. For these remnants to encode all the information that could have gone into the black hole, they would have to come in an infinite variety of types. The laws of physics predict that the rate of production of a particle is proportional to the number of types of that particle. Therefore, the black hole remnants would be produced at an infinite rate; even such everyday physical processes as turning on a microwave oven would generate them. Nature would be catastrophically unstable. A third possibility is that locality--the notion that events at spatially separated points can influence one another only after light has had time to travel between them--fails. This conundrum challenges theorists to this day [see "Black Hole Computers," by Seth Lloyd and Y. Jack Ng; Scientific American, November 2004].

From O's link. So is this a test against physical law? What if physical law is correct?

Originally Posted by Dreamworld

I can give less of a shit about this discovery. Especially if they are making a tear in space time. Its just retarded. The worlds fine without it. A mini black whole isn't going to feed a country. It might just eat them. You can't hide in your closet because a black hole would suck the whole world, and solar system after time.

They aren't making a tear. They are just smashing two particles together. If something goes wrong, we won't know it. So it's best to press the buttons!

Scientific American: Quantum Black Holes