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

99.999% the speed of light?? That must take some doing...

Doesn't that mean that the short lived particles'll last much longer due to relativity?

Originally Posted by Xei

99.999% the speed of light?? That must take some doing...

Doesn't that mean that the short lived particles'll last much longer due to relativity?

Only from the perspective of the particle. We'll still see them the same.

Doesn't make much sense to me...

Say the particle is 'watching' a clock. It normally lives for one minute, say from 12.00 to 12.01. However at near light speeds, the time of its surroundings goes faster; it still experiences itself as living for one minute, however it sees the clock go from 12.00 to say 13.00 in this minute. Therefore external observers see the particle for a whole hour.

The particle will appear to live longer only to the outside, "from the point of view of the particle" the lifetime isn't altered.


By the way, Dreamworld:

some Russian mathematicians are warning that we might get more than we bargained for. Specifically, time-travellers: futurenauts using our ultra-duper atomsmasher to punch a hole in causality and hop back from the future.

This is a reason to use the LHC, not the contrary.

Originally Posted by Xei

Doesn't make much sense to me...

Say the particle is 'watching' a clock. It normally lives for one minute, say from 12.00 to 12.01. However at near light speeds, the time of its surroundings goes faster; it still experiences itself as living for one minute, however it sees the clock go from 12.00 to say 13.00 in this minute. Therefore external observers see the particle for a whole hour.

No, it's still a minute to us. Speed and time are all relative to the observer.

The particle will appear to live longer only to the outside, "from the point of view of the particle" the lifetime isn't altered.

That's what I was talking about.

No, it's still a minute to us. Speed and time are all relative to the observer.

That really not what relativity says.

If that was so then the experiment where they flew an atomic clock around the Earth at high speed wouldn't have worked, would it? We would still have observed the atomic material decaying at the same rate (from the ground, not on the plane). But it didn't, it lasted slightly longer.

Hey, have they lit this thing up yet? How close are we to the end of the world?

Five years... news guy wept and told us.

Originally Posted by Elis D.

No, it's still a minute to us. Speed and time are all relative to the observer.

If it's relative for the observer, doesn't that mean just that:
For the particle 1 minute has passed.
For the people 1 hour has passed.

So it isn't 1 min for us. It's one hour for the observer.

That's after 2012. We'll all be dead by then.

Rofl.

Originally Posted by Xei

Doesn't make much sense to me...

Say the particle is 'watching' a clock. It normally lives for one minute, say from 12.00 to 12.01. However at near light speeds, the time of its surroundings goes faster; it still experiences itself as living for one minute, however it sees the clock go from 12.00 to say 13.00 in this minute. Therefore external observers see the particle for a whole hour.

The particle will only see one hour pass on that clock, if said clock is moving with the particle, ie. moving just as fast.

The atomic watch that we sent into space, to prove the theory of relativity, counted "slower" because time was going slower for it, and for the vessel it was carried within.
If the proton we're gonna shoot through the LHC is sentient, or atleast able to perceive time (think of this as a hypothetical situation, seing as it is impossible), the proton would measure time to be slower and, from its perspective, it would take longer to go around the LHC, than from our perspective.
Lets say we put a human into LHC. He flies around, and takes a look on his watch and he's been in there for an hour. Once he gets out, he talks to the scientists, and they say he was in there for 30 minutes.
So in very simple words, from his perspective and according to his measuring gear, he was going around in there at half the speed of light, but to the scientists and according to their measuring gear, he was moving at the speed of light. Or atleast 99,9999999999%. Once again, this is a hypothetical situation by the way


I hope this helped you out a bit at understanding relativity.