I have seen the future.

It's working again.

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atlasimpure.livejournal.com

I'm not assuming it WILL end the world but the whole point of the project is to do, make and discover things that they currently barely have the math to describe. Heart of gold, anyone?

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I'm not sure if it is more amusing or frightening that Europeans are horrified by the thought of genetically modified plants but pour tax dollars into trying to create black holes.

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Magnus, they really aren't joking when they say that anyone who thinks the LHC will cause a problem is *an illiterate without the slightest grasp of what's going on*.

Complaining that the LHC might destroy the universe is like complaining that sodomy might cause God to destroy Tblisi.

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Complaining very publicly that the people who pay you are idiots is not a sign of broad intelligence either.

Even when the people who pay you happen to be idiots.

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anton-p-nym.livejournal.com

Of course it is. The idiots in question, in the main, will never approve of big-ticket science projects. Calling them on their idiocy won't alienate them from supporting high-energy physics research, because they're already not supporting physics research. However, calling the idiots on their idiocy energises the emotions of those who [i]are[/i] open to supporting high-energy physics research.

-- Steve's thinking that if it works for the Neo-Cons, maybe it'll work against those who put 'em in power.

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I read about a study a few years ago showing that roughly 50% believed there were no genes in natural food. At first glance that would look like 50% of the population is ignorant of basic science. But to a scientific mind, it looks like 100% is ignorant: This is exactly the result one would have gotten from having a large number of people toss a coin. Some are bound to come up with the right answer even if they don't know.

These are the people who decide, at least by proxy, whether we should look for hidden dimensions, strange quarks and God particles. (Picking some of the most unfortunately named pheonomena here.) It's amazing that it's come this far.

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artemisgoddess.livejournal.com

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Any other way to get to the page?

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It's working again.

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artemisgoddess.livejournal.com

It's not

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Works for me.

Here:
Scientists get death threats over Large Hadron Collider

Scientists working on the world's biggest machine are being besieged by phone calls and emails from people who fear the world will end next Wednesday, when the gigantic atom smasher starts up.

The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, where particles will begin to circulate around its 17 mile circumference tunnel next week, will recreate energies not seen since the universe was very young, when particles smash together at near the speed of light.

Such is the angst that the American Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has even had death threats, said Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University, adding: "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t---."

The head of public relations, James Gillies, says he gets tearful phone calls, pleading for the £4.5 billion machine to stop.

"They phone me and say: "I am seriously worried. Please tell me that my children are safe," said Gillies.

Emails also arrive every day that beg for reassurance that the world will not end, he explained.
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Others are more aggressive. "There are a number who say: "You are evil and dangerous and you are going to destroy the world."

"I find myself getting slightly angry, not because people are getting in touch but the fact they have been driven to do that by what is nonsense. What we are doing is enriching humanity, not putting it at risk."

There have also been legal attempts to halt the start up.

The remarkable outpouring of concern about turning on the experiment, the most ambitious in history, comes as a new report concludes that it poses no threat to mankind.

Since 1994, when the collider was first mooted by the multi-national European nuclear research organisation (CERN), dogged doomsayers have claimed that there would be a small but real risk that an unstoppable cataclysm would take place.

Many of the emails received by Gillies cite a gloomy book - Our Final Century?: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century? - written by Lord Rees, astronomer royal and president of the Royal Society.

"My book has been misquoted in one or two places," Lord Rees said yesterday. "I would refer you to the up-to-date safety study."

The new report published today provides the most comprehensive evidence available to confirm that nature's own cosmic rays regularly produce more powerful particle collisions than those planned within the LHC.

The LHC Safety Assessment Group has reviewed and updated a study first completed in 2003, which dispels fears of universe-gobbling black holes and of other possibly dangerous new forms of matter, and confirms that the switch-on will be safe.

The report, 'Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions', published in the Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, proves that if particle collisions at the LHC had the power to destroy the Earth, we would never have been given the chance to worry about the LHC, because regular interactions with more energetic cosmic rays would already have destroyed the Earth.

The Safety Assessment Group writes, "Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth - and the planet still exists."

The Group compares the rates of cosmic rays that bombard Earth to show that hypothetical black holes or strangelets, that have raised fears in some, will pose no threat.

As the Group writes, "Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes, so any black hole produced would be much smaller than those known to astrophysicists." They also say that such microscopic black holes could not grow dangerously.

As for the equally hypothetical strangelets, the review uses recent experimental measurements at the Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, New York, to prove that they will not be produced in the LHC.

The collider is designed to seek out new particles including the long-awaited Higgs boson responsible for making things weigh what they do, the possible source of gravity called dark matter, as well as probe the differences between matter and antimatter.

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maskedretriever.livejournal.com

A good point to make here is that black holes (which will very probably be created) actually are only dangerous if you make them big enough.

No, really.

A black hole of a certain size will burn up due to Hawking radiation. And there really is no chance at all that the LHC will make black holes big enough to endanger the earth.

Even though there WILL in all likelihood be some really really tiny ones.

Which scientifically speaking, is AWESOME.

Also, that mention of the high-energy cosmic rays thing was a surprise to me-- it puts things in perspective and even gives us a neat threshold: if you're going to build a collider that will produce energies above the "reasonably likely" impacts, THAT point is when to seriously consider building them in orbit.

Which both scientifically and from a strictly cool-factor perspective, is even MORE AWESOME.

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It bears a cursory mention that Hawking radiation has never been observed in the wild. On the other hand, placing two tiny surfaces extremely close together in a vacum does make them move together, as they would if the vacum was full of particles that constantly begin to exist and then de-exist again, the mechanism which is supposed to drive the Hawking radiation.

I guess that is as good as it gets. I certainly would not take Hawking's say-so. The man had a complete and compelling theory about the history of our universe back before dark energy was discovered. That is roughly like someone having a complete geography book where the oceans are missing. We shall probably have to wait for a new generation to make sense of the universe again. And then it will probably mutate again into something even more incomprehensible.

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can you point me toward the papers which show that dark energy has been discovered? I was led to understand it was still just another theory with many holes in it, and that dark energy / matter was equally as unobserved as hawking radiation.

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OK, I deserved that, being firmly in the "words mean things" camp myself. No, nobody has observed dark energy - and if they ever do, it will probably get a new name. It is defined by our inability to observe it directly, just like dark matter. This contrasts with Hawking radiation and gravity waves, both of which should in theory be observable but are still missing. (I'm all for looking for them with taxpayer money, but others may disagree.)

What has been observed is accelerating cosmic expansion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_universe). I think this is fairly close to consensus by now. If there is no dark energy, then we have acceleration without energy, which means high school physics is wrong from the first chapter. Or perhaps the nature of light itself is thoroughly misunderstood. It is no shock if a bunch of apes still don't understand the cosmos after a couple hundred years without supernatural explanations. But for now, dark energy is it.

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thankyou for your answer :)

I think it boils down to that, for me anyway, dark energy is too much of a fudge factor and instinctively feel* that the universe isn't a bodge job and has much greater elegance than sticking arbitrary constants into the formulae to make it work.

_{* yeah, i know gut feelings aren't exactly part of the scientific methodology.}

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Dark matter has been observed. Not "directly", since it's DARK, but there was a study several months ago showing that out in the black between galaxies there was something very heavy that was distorting light that travelled through it.

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not sure gravity lensing is conclusive proof, but hey.

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More importantly, the same theory that says you can get black holes is ALSO the same theory that says they will dissipate immediately and harmlessly.

If you ignore the bit that shows they're going to dissipate, you have just gutted your argument that they will appear in the first place!

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falconwarrior.livejournal.com

"What we are doing is enriching humanity, not putting it at risk."

Didn't Dr. Breen say that once?

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