LHC Restart Likely Delayed Until October

Terry Olaes

Terry Olaes

I Used to be the [H] News Guy
Joined
Nov 27, 2006
Messages
4,646
Looks like the human race will get a few extra weeks, as CERN is putting further safety measures into place in the Large Hadron Collider that will probably delay the restart until October instead of September, as previously reported. Good, now Kirk and Spock can have a little extra time to save us from the singularity generator. :cool:

"We're pretty confident about the dates," James Gillies told The Associated Press, adding that scientists believe they understand the error that happened last year and how to prevent it occurring again.
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I see somebody screwed up the link to the thread on the front page again and no I don't think We'll need Kirk and Spock, We'll need Geordie and Data instead.
 
JokerCPoC said:
I see somebody screwed up the link to the thread on the front page again and no I don't think We'll need Kirk and Spock, We'll need Geordie and Data instead.
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Links work fine for me. Have you seen the new Star Trek movie yet? You might get the singularity reference then.
 
No I'm busy with other things, Like saving My money for a good faith deposit on a house. :D
 
JokerCPoC said:
No I'm busy with other things, Like saving My money for a good faith deposit on a house. :D
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Ah, good luck with that! Home ownership can be a cool thing if one is suitably prepared. If you want opinions on it, check out General Mayhem. People talk about the pros and cons of home ownership all the time in that forum.
 
Sweet, lets get this fired up. I'm looking forward to the knowledge gained from this machine (even though it will be many ears till anything is deciphered from the data).
 
They certainly seem to be having some problems, maybe they're still testing and calculating possibilities for a black mesa like incident.
I was at CERN a couple years ago, with our physics study group, and they were still quite much incomplete with the LHC. Was quite an amazing experience. Maybe they'll someday find out about the Higgs boson.
 
i wonder how long until they all die of cancer.

its kinda funny but we look at early chemists/atomists that worked without protection, all dieing of cancer. the room at an american univserity (i forget teh whole story) was converted to new purposes on the campus, since the early 1900s each professor in that room had died of the same type of cancer.

so now we have them plyaing with new toys, no protection
 
This is a black hole, a financial black hole.
 
jroe52 said:
i wonder how long until they all die of cancer.

its kinda funny but we look at early chemists/atomists that worked without protection, all dieing of cancer. the room at an american univserity (i forget teh whole story) was converted to new purposes on the campus, since the early 1900s each professor in that room had died of the same type of cancer.

so now we have them plyaing with new toys, no protection
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You know I remember walking thru the physics department in college and seeing all these crazy radiation warning signs around test areas, I always wondered how safe it really was to be around those places for any amount of time. It comes with the price of progress I suppose. Many people risk their lives in different ways, all to advance some cause, but some causes are worth it.
 
Awesome. So you know what that means...

ddarko046.jpg
 
I think it'd be funny if they delayed it until December 21, 2012.
 
jroe52 said:
its kinda funny but we look at early chemists/atomists that worked without protection, all dieing of cancer. the room at an american univserity (i forget teh whole story) was converted to new purposes on the campus, since the early 1900s each professor in that room had died of the same type of cancer.
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i don't think this is true. as far as i know radiation leads to numerous types of cancer, not any one in specific, even when it's the same radiation source in the same environment. you might be right, but i'd need to see some documentation before i believed that statement.
 
I still think the LHC will generate stable micro-black holes that will not have enough velocity to escape the earth's gravity well. They will fall to the center of the earth, and slowly grow large enough to begin consuming normal matter, instead of near massless solar neutrinos. Once that happens, the diameter of the earth will begin to shrink, and its rotation rate will increase (which will be the first sign of trouble). But by then it will be too late, and there will be no way to stop it.

When it comes to playing with things like black holes, and how they may or may not interact with poorly understood phenomena like dark matter and dark energy, I think Joshua said it best:
"The only way to win is not to play"

I don't see how observing the Higgs boson is worth even a one in a trillion chance of destroying the world. Validating the standard model of particle physics isn't going to get us anti-gravity, warp drives, wormholes, or time machines. IMO, the money spent on this could have been better applied to problems such as alternative energy, world hunger, disease research, or global climate engineering.
 
yevaud said:
I still think the LHC will generate stable micro-black holes that will not have enough velocity to escape the earth's gravity well. They will fall to the center of the earth, and slowly grow large enough to begin consuming normal matter, instead of near massless solar neutrinos. Once that happens, the diameter of the earth will begin to shrink, and its rotation rate will increase (which will be the first sign of trouble). But by then it will be too late, and there will be no way to stop it.

When it comes to playing with things like black holes, and how they may or may not interact with poorly understood phenomena like dark matter and dark energy, I think Joshua said it best:
"The only way to win is not to play"

I don't see how observing the Higgs boson is worth even a one in a trillion chance of destroying the world. Validating the standard model of particle physics isn't going to get us anti-gravity, warp drives, wormholes, or time machines. IMO, the money spent on this could have been better applied to problems such as alternative energy, world hunger, disease research, or global climate engineering.
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You sound like the kinda guy who is against the use of hydric acid.
 
niconx said:
You sound like the kinda guy who is against the use of hydric acid.
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I'm against overly obscure references to common chemicals. Water is water, it's not dihydrogen monoxide, not hydrogen hydroxide, just water.

I don't wear a tinfoil hat. I know enough about physics to know that the physicists are not 100% certain how a micro black hole will interact with dark matter, dark energy, or solar neutrinos.
The fact that they intend to make black holes anyway is IMO highly irresponsible.
 
yevaud said:
I still think the LHC will generate stable micro-black holes that will not have enough velocity to escape the earth's gravity well. They will fall to the center of the earth, and slowly grow large enough to begin consuming normal matter, instead of near massless solar neutrinos. Once that happens, the diameter of the earth will begin to shrink, and its rotation rate will increase (which will be the first sign of trouble). But by then it will be too late, and there will be no way to stop it.
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There are particles constantly slamming into the earth at much higher velocities than what the LHC will be dealing with.

If black holes were so easy to create we wouldn't exist right now.
 
yevaud said:
I'm against overly obscure references to common chemicals. Water is water, it's not dihydrogen monoxide, not hydrogen hydroxide, just water.

I don't wear a tinfoil hat. I know enough about physics to know that the physicists are not 100% certain how a micro black hole will interact with dark matter, dark energy, or solar neutrinos.
The fact that they intend to make black holes anyway is IMO highly irresponsible.
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Fair enough :p However refusing to do new physics research is a frightening thought for someone like me. I am not sure everyone really knows what black holes are? They are not even holes at all, only really dense matter that causes a steep curve in spacetime. If you dont have enough of it then its not going to create a curve big enough to matter. The earth causes the same curve and so does the sun. Getting an atomic sized amount of matter to create an out of control black hole is senseless. Being afraid of things contrary to scientific proof is also senseless. Humanity should not stagnate because of irrational fear. There are many more things that WILL wipe out this earth that we need to be ready for as a species.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
There are particles constantly slamming into the earth at much higher velocities than what the LHC will be dealing with.

If black holes were so easy to create we wouldn't exist right now.
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I agree that micro black holes are created by these high velocity collisions. The reason they're not a problem is that they start off with very high velocities, approximately 1/2 the speed of light, and at that velocity are able to keep right on going into the vacuum of space.

The black holes created at the LHC will have very low velocity, because they are created in head-on collisions of particles with similar mass and nearly identical velocities. They will not be able to escape the gravity of the earth, and will fall to the center, and likely orbit the center.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
There are particles constantly slamming into the earth at much higher velocities than what the LHC will be dealing with.

If black holes were so easy to create we wouldn't exist right now.
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Don't bother making sense. He has some *very* strange crank ideas.
 
yevaud said:
I don't wear a tinfoil hat. I know enough about physics to know that the physicists are not 100% certain how a micro black hole will interact with dark matter, dark energy, or solar neutrinos.
The fact that they intend to make black holes anyway is IMO highly irresponsible.
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they don't intend to make them. you're right that physicists don't know how a micro black hole would behave, and that's because they've never been observed.

they're not being irresponsible IMO. if the LHC produces high enough energy reactions to create micro black holes, then the constant barrage of cosmic radiation against the earth should produce them as well. since the earth hasn't been destroyed by a micro black hole, then either they take higher energy densities to create or they destabilize too quickly to produce any dangerous interactions with surrounding matter and energy.
 
niconx said:
Fair enough :p However refusing to do new physics research is a frightening thought for someone like me. I am not sure everyone really knows what black holes are? They are not even holes at all, only really dense matter that causes a steep curve in spacetime. If you dont have enough of it then its not going to create a curve big enough to matter. The earth causes the same curve and so does the sun. Getting an atomic sized amount of matter to create an out of control black hole is senseless. Being afraid of things contrary to scientific proof is also senseless. Humanity should not stagnate because of irrational fear. There are many more things that WILL wipe out this earth that we need to be ready for as a species.
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I'm not proposing stopping particle research, any more than I'm against microbial research. I just believe that the burden of proof that NOTHING can go wrong should be on the shoulders of the researchers and scientists involved.
I realize the Schwarzschild radius of any micro black hole created at the LHC would be much smaller than even an electron. I also realize that if Hawking was right, these black holes will evaporate almost immediately. I'm 99.9999999% convinced that there's nothing to worry about, but when it comes to the fate of the world, I think it would be prudent to TEST these hypotheses BEFORE firing up the LHC and hoping for the best.

I have done a good deal of reading on this subject, and I have yet to see anything that addresses my concern.
 
yevaud said:
when it comes to the fate of the world, I think it would be prudent to TEST these hypotheses BEFORE firing up the LHC and hoping for the best.

I have done a good deal of reading on this subject, and I have yet to see anything that addresses my concern.
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then what do you propose, looking for a micro black hole in the wild? how can you test a hypothesis about micro black holes that might potentially destroy the planet without creating one?
 
dystopic said:
then what do you propose, looking for a micro black hole in the wild? how can you test a hypothesis about micro black holes that might potentially destroy the planet without creating one?
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If high energy cosmic rays create micro black holes (which I believe they do) then there should be vast numbers of them being created in the upper atmosphere, and passing through the earth at very high speeds. If they don't immediately evaporate, then they should be detectable in neutrino observatories.
 
yevaud said:
If high energy cosmic rays create micro black holes (which I believe they do) then there should be vast numbers of them being created in the upper atmosphere, and passing through the earth at very high speeds. If they don't immediately evaporate, then they should be detectable in neutrino observatories.
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that's what i meant by "in the wild" ;)

your reasoning still confuses me. you want to confirm the existence of natural MBHs produced on earth by cosmic radiation, but you say that those black holes aren't dangerous because they're much faster than those that would be created in the LHC. so how does confirming their existence bear on the LHC's safety? is your reasoning something like, "if we prove they exist naturally, then we shouldn't risk creating them because artificial ones could be dangerous"? that doesn't prove artificial ones are slow, let alone dangerous.

moreover, as i understand it, the physics that predicts they might occur in LHC experiments also predicts that they'd travel at great speeds, not sink to the center of the earth.
 
Taken from the LHC wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LHC
Once or twice a day, as the protons are accelerated from 450 GeV to 7 TeV, the field of the superconducting dipole magnets will be increased from 0.54 to 8.3 teslas (T). The protons will each have an energy of 7 TeV, giving a total collision energy of 14 TeV (2.2 μJ). At this energy the protons have a Lorentz factor of about 7,500 and move at about 99.9999991% of the speed of light.[19] It will take less than 90 microseconds (μs) for a proton to travel once around the main ring – a speed of about 11,000 revolutions per second.
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That's pretty fast to begin with, 99.9999991% the speed of light...
 
niconx said:
Taken from the LHC wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LHC


That's pretty fast to begin with, 99.9999991% the speed of light...
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It's fast, but its a relatively low energy all the same. The highest energy particle ever detected in a cosmic ray had an energy roughly equivalent to a tennis ball traveling at over 90 MPH.

Frankly it's a risk that I think is well worth taking. I've grown a bit cavalier regarding my beliefs on the "philosophy of physics", if you will, since I started studying it a few years ago. That's the real issue here: not a question of science but a question of prudence. The frontiers of physics have always carried with them enormous risks.
 
yevaud said:
I still think the LHC will generate stable micro-black holes that will not have enough velocity to escape the earth's gravity well. They will fall to the center of the earth, and slowly grow large enough to begin consuming normal matter, instead of near massless solar neutrinos. Once that happens, the diameter of the earth will begin to shrink, and its rotation rate will increase (which will be the first sign of trouble). But by then it will be too late, and there will be no way to stop it.
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It may sink to the center of the Earth and decrease it's diameter, but the Earth will still have the same mass, so why would anything except the amount of surface area, the temperature, and us being squished change? I mean eventually, when it starts sucking up matter from outside of Earth's atmosphere, it ("the Earth") will start to become more massive, but by then it won't matter. And who knows how long that would take anyway.

yevaud said:
I don't see how observing the Higgs boson is worth even a one in a trillion chance of destroying the world. Validating the standard model of particle physics isn't going to get us anti-gravity, warp drives, wormholes, or time machines. IMO, the money spent on this could have been better applied to problems such as alternative energy, world hunger, disease research, or global climate engineering.
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Actually, if this proves the standard model of particle physics wrong, we might be able to solve problems such as alternative energy, world hunger, disease research, or global climate engineering. Of course, the money could have been spent on those problems directly, but with people thinking solving those problems is impossible with the current scientific knowledge, it's unlikely that the money used in this research would be spent there.
 
A Black Hole is a gravitational event, no amount of smashing a couple atoms together will ever create one. Not ever. Now smashing the Sun into another Sun at the speed of light.... er still wouldn't work because they'd literally pass through one another and splatter all over the place. But taking a couple Aldebarons and pushing them together slowly into one giant star, would eventually lead to a stellar blackhole when the star burned up it's fuel.

Sillyness. I'm especially amazed at how these scientists are finally coming to grips with the concept of... A LEAK. Glad they finally understand it now, so maybe they can move on to understanding the very foundations of the Universe.... cough.
 
xX_Jack_Carver_Xx said:
A Black Hole is a gravitational event, no amount of smashing a couple atoms together will ever create one. Not ever.
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that is indeed what a conventional black hole is. they're described under general relativity.

micro black holes are different. they are produced not by extreme gravity, but extreme density. here's a pretty good article from scientific american that goes over the gist of it:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=quantum-black-holes
 
You know if I was the director of this science team, I would just flat-out lie about the risk involved. I mean who would really know except a few 100 scientists in the world who could grasp such high-level math. All science is a risk: All of it. What is called for here is risk analysis; accordingly, if the risk if infinitesimally small then proceed with the project. People looking for 100% guarantees in this venture or anything in life are going to be sorely disappointed.
 
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