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

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 Xei

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

Eh?

FIVE YEARS?

What shit is this? Flip the switch already!

Originally Posted by Seismosaur

FIVE YEARS?

What shit is this? Flip the switch already!

Yay 5 years!

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.