Anyone else ready for the world to end?

Haha, seriously though, is anyone else interested in following this? I'm not sure if there's some way to get somewhat frequent information of the results of the experiments that will go on there, but this is pretty huge if you follow physics at all.

6/9/2008 1:21:09 PM

I saw where someone tried to file an injunction recently, that's about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider

6/9/2008 1:27:47 PM

Been following a bit.

I was reading an article the other week about how this project will in 10 years time revolutionize the internet, because they are needing to build the infrastructure to send absolutely massive amounts of data (I've read about 3-4 Gbps) around the world, so that scientists in various locations can analysis the results.


Actually just looked it up - and 'The Grid' which it is referred to as, can transmit up to 10 Gbps

[Edited on June 9, 2008 at 4:15 PM. Reason : .]

6/9/2008 4:07:38 PM

the idea of strangelets and micro black holes are a bit unnerving

but meh

6/9/2008 4:41:14 PM

6/9/2008 4:44:06 PM

the god particle!
ive read some crazy ass interesting theories about this stuff.

6/9/2008 4:57:09 PM

Large Hardon Collider?


I thought this thread was about clever ways to refer to a vagina.

6/9/2008 6:04:46 PM

Time cop!

6/9/2008 6:09:49 PM

I was listening to an interview the other night with Dr. Michio Kaku, the guy who co-authored String Theory. He says the LHC will be the first time we can begin running physical experiments on "the theory of everything"

Einstein must be nutting in his grave

6/9/2008 6:19:07 PM

that thing looks like the Mayan calendar..

coincidence? i think not

6/9/2008 6:25:14 PM

message_topic.aspx?topic=511664

6/9/2008 6:43:28 PM

if it kills us all, i'm gonna be pissed

6/9/2008 7:53:09 PM

^^ That's no moon!

6/9/2008 10:14:02 PM

Well, if it kills us you won't have time to be pissed since the black hole tidal forces will rip you to shred pretty damn fast.

But the LHC black hole theory is my answer to the Fermi Paradox. Species come down from the trees, invent physics, test physics, and destroy their solar system. It might also explain high energy cosmic rays too.

6/10/2008 1:05:29 AM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_the_nature_of_intelligent_life_to_destroy_itself

[Edited on June 10, 2008 at 1:23 AM. Reason : ...]

6/10/2008 1:22:13 AM

so long as they fire it up before or after 2012

i don't need any doomsday jinx floating in the air while this thing is running

6/10/2008 8:39:32 AM

you guys should read this for some crazy theories


http://www.williamhenry.net/art_dis-cerning.html

6/10/2008 8:59:59 AM

^ That ranks up there as one of the dumbest things I've ever read.

6/10/2008 2:36:15 PM

some if it i find very interesting b/c of the Mayan Calendar stuff but some of it is waaay out there. you should youtube William Henry for some really crazy stuff.

6/10/2008 2:55:49 PM

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html

Quote :

"The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can achieve an energy that no other particle accelerators have reached before, but Nature routinely produces higher energies in cosmic-ray collisions. Concerns about the safety of whatever may be created in such high-energy particle collisions have been addressed for many years. In the light of new experimental data and theoretical understanding, the LHC Safety Assessment Group (LSAG) has updated a review of the analysis made in 2003 by the LHC Safety Study Group, a group of independent scientists. LSAG reaffirms and extends the conclusions of the 2003 report that LHC collisions present no danger and that there are no reasons for concern. Whatever the LHC will do, Nature has already done many times over during the lifetime of the Earth and other astronomical bodies. The LSAG report has been reviewed and endorsed by CERN’s Scientific Policy Committee, a group of external scientists that advises CERN’s governing body, its Council. The following summarizes the main arguments given in the LSAG report. Anyone interested in more details is encouraged to consult it directly, and the technical scientific papers to which it refers."

Quote :

" Microscopic black holes Nature forms black holes when certain stars, much larger than our Sun, collapse on themselves at the end of their lives. They concentrate a very large amount of matter in a very small space. Speculations about microscopic black holes at the LHC refer to particles produced in the collisions of pairs of protons, each of which has an energy comparable to that of a mosquito in flight. Astronomical black holes are much heavier than anything that could be produced at the LHC. According to the well-established properties of gravity, described by Einstein’s relativity, it is impossible for microscopic black holes to be produced at the LHC. There are, however, some speculative theories that predict the production of such particles at the LHC. All these theories predict that these particles would disintegrate immediately. Black holes, therefore, would have no time to start accreting matter and to cause macroscopic effects. Although stable microscopic black holes are not expected in theory, study of the consequences of their production by cosmic rays shows that they would be harmless. Collisions at the LHC differ from cosmic-ray collisions with astronomical bodies like the Earth in that new particles produced in LHC collisions tend to move more slowly than those produced by cosmic rays. Stable black holes could be either electrically charged or neutral. If they had electric charge, they would interact with ordinary matter and be stopped while traversing the Earth, whether produced by cosmic rays or the LHC. The fact that the Earth is still here rules out the possibility that cosmic rays or the LHC could produce dangerous charged microscopic black holes. If stable microscopic black holes had no electric charge, their interactions with the Earth would be very weak. Those produced by cosmic rays would pass harmlessly through the Earth into space, whereas those produced by the LHC could remain on Earth. However, there are much larger and denser astronomical bodies than the Earth in the Universe. Black holes produced in cosmic-ray collisions with bodies such as neutron stars and white dwarf stars would be brought to rest. The continued existence of such dense bodies, as well as the Earth, rules out the possibility of the LHC producing any dangerous black holes. "

6/23/2008 10:38:50 AM

WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!

6/23/2008 10:49:48 AM

Don't buy the hype, the LHC may not find any new physics. I hope it does. But, its pretty speculative as far as the new supersymmetric (SUSY) physics goes. Essentially the point is this, there is no SUSY at low energy so at some point there is symmetry breaking and the symmetry is restored and the SUSY kicks in. Trouble is that symmetry breaking is pretty ad-hoc and we don't really have a good handle on how it goes down in high energy physics. Its not that we don't have an answer, we have too many answers. Not to mention the strange fact that the signature of the cannonical symmetry breaking mechanism, the Higgs particle, is missing. We've been looking for two decades now. It could be that there is a different mechanism for the symmetry breaking, there are other proposals, but the Higgs mechanism is nice theoretically. Actually, as I understand it, the way we may first observe SUSY is through the presence of several Higgs particles, the Higgs sector is markedly different in the phenomenology of SUSY field theory.

Low energy string theory claims to produce SUSY field theory through soft symmetry breaking mediated through some super gravity mechanism. The idea is that the symmetry is not totally broken, the residual symmetry has to be sufficient to explain several theoretical problems in the standard model. But, like most arguments stemming from Super String Theory(SST), the appearance of SUSY is not at all a necessary consequence of SST at our current experimental capabilities. In fact, quite a few theorists will suggest it is more natural to not find SUSY until we reach higher energies than the LHC is set up for.

Of course, the more exciting possibility is that we will find new physics which is neither evidence of SUSY or some trivial twist on the current standard model. Only time will tell.

6/24/2008 11:20:33 PM

^ are you sure you wouldn't rather see God pop out of a collision just to pwn the rest of us?

6/24/2008 11:22:00 PM

It could say "created by Jesus Christ of Nazareth of the progeny of David" on subatomic matter and people would still find a reason to not believe. I don't think God is in the gaps, I think God is in the physics and elsewhere. The supposition that an explanation of a phenomenon replaces the need for God is absurd. God is not just something invented by man to explain things. Science is simply revealing how God did things. Well, good science anyway.

6/25/2008 12:41:35 AM

Quote :

"God is not just something invented by man to explain things."

6/25/2008 12:43:45 AM

All I can ever think when I see this thing is Angels and Demons

6/25/2008 12:48:45 AM

Quote :

"God is not just something invented by man to explain things."

6/25/2008 1:05:47 AM

Quote :

"All I can ever think when I see this thing is Angels and Demons damn, what a waste of money."

6/25/2008 1:21:23 AM

Quote :

"God is not just something invented by man to explain things."

6/25/2008 1:22:19 AM

Quote :

"God made by breakfast this morning"

6/25/2008 2:10:08 AM

Quote :

"God is not just something invented by man to explain things."

6/25/2008 2:24:06 AM

take it to the soapbox you nutjobs

6/25/2008 12:04:26 PM

Quote :

"God is not just something invented by man to explain things."

6/25/2008 12:15:30 PM

^^

6/25/2008 2:46:40 PM

Quote :

"God is not just something invented by man to explain things."

6/25/2008 2:56:38 PM

RELIGION VS ATHEISM DEBATE

ready.... GO!

6/26/2008 2:07:47 AM

so when are they lighting this candle?

6/26/2008 8:45:04 AM

Last I heard -they are in final cooling stages now - then a series of tests, then the collisions start I think in late July, ramping up the energy of the collisions from July-September.

6/26/2008 2:20:07 PM

I noticed this paper on the arXiv today, it has more details about a few of the things I mentioned and some pretty graphs about where the Higgs has not been found etc... I think it may be readable for people without tons of physics background... feel free to flame me on that point.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0806/0806.4268v1.pdf

6/30/2008 10:00:18 AM

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/06/30/doomsdaycollider.ap/index.html

i think of anything, that'd be a pretty sweet way for the world to end. not some lame asteroid or something

6/30/2008 4:52:00 PM

Quote :

"Each year the detectors will generate 15 petabytes of data, the equivalent of a stack of CDs 12 miles tall."

6/30/2008 5:31:53 PM

^ yeah, some people are saying that alone is going to help lead to the next generation of the Internet, so they can spread all that data around the world

6/30/2008 9:44:05 PM

^^^

Some fear debut of powerful atom-smasher that headline reads like it was straight out of the 50s.

6/30/2008 9:49:14 PM

woot

6/30/2008 9:49:43 PM

http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0806/0806.4647v1.pdf

not just a single black hole, perhaps lots and lots of them. But don't worry they'll just evaporate into a cloud of high energy radiation through the Hawking process...

7/2/2008 1:15:02 PM

Special on the LHC on the Science Channel (channel 111).

7/31/2008 11:03:26 PM

^I saw that a couple weeks ago. It was interesting, but the host got on my nerves.

8/1/2008 8:39:34 AM

So what are you people going to do these last few days, before the large hardon kills the world on the 9th?

I have enough liquor to last me 3 days, a carton of cigarettes and I am contemplating a vision of colors and exotic objects on saturday.

8/6/2008 10:09:55 PM

september 10, actually

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR06.08E.html

8/7/2008 9:55:02 PM

I am excited about this. I can't wait to find out what can be learned from this experiment.

and SET EM UP

[Edited on August 7, 2008 at 9:56 PM. Reason : set em up]

8/7/2008 9:56:24 PM