Friday, Jun 27, 2008
Phew! Relax everyone, they know what they're doing!
Mail On Sunday: Earth will not be gobbled up by black hole during big bang experiment, reassure scientists
The Earth is not at risk of being sucked into a black hole, a safety report into the world's most powerful particle physics experiment has found.
Scientists at Europe's CERN lab plan to use the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to smash highly-energised protons together at super-fast speeds to produce miniature versions of the Big Bang.
The collisions will create temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the sun.
Posted by gardeniadotnet @ 01:01 PM (1384 views) Add Comment
32 Comments
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1. mark said...
you think?
would you trust these guys,
when were we given the chance to vote? yes we want this, no we dont, as per usual public are nothing but sh*t on the shoe of the nations governments
2. Ollie said...
If they knew what would happen they wouldn't need to do the experiments would they!
Even if the risk is so small the consequences must far outweigh the benefits
3. nooneo said...
Indeed Ollie!
And who will we blame if the whole experiment goes **ts up!
Did Gordon Brown have anything to do with this by the way!
4. Beartil2010 said...
1. This has been widely publicised across the national press for years, it's just that people find Posh & Becks to be more important, 2. The risk is minimal, 3. if it does go wrong we won't even have time to worry about it, 4. if the world goes pop then there'll be no-one left to blame anyone so don't worry about it
5. Andy said...
Meanwhile, CEO's in the banking sector try to recover there balance sheets slipping into a black hole, after realizing the CDO experiment went into meltdown - the amount of anti-asset, anti capital material has lead to a chain reaction where even the FED and BOE are incapable of quenching after injecting cash deposits into the reactor creating inflation levels more than that reported in the sun or the bbc.
6. planning4acrash said...
We are now run by unelected, unaccountable corporatist pan-continental and global organisations. Hense recent focus on the Lisbon Treaty.
7. mark said...
wonder if this is why labour are changing planning regs for nuclear power stations and tescos???????? SO they can build a giant tescos nuclear plant burning live chickens...... after all thats what labour want a tesco country
8. d'oh said...
The strangelets are the ones that worry me. Mind you we won't know much if it happens. The whole earth would be turned into strange matter in a couple of seconds. Having been a research scientist for the first half of my career, it always worries me when other scientists say "nothing to worry about". I'm being very serious here. A lot of them are supremely confident with little reason to be, and their current reassurances about black holes and strangelets do not reassure me in and of themselves. I would want to know lots more details, but when I've asked the resident nuclear physicist in the office he bases his lack of concern on second hand evidence. Still, I find the cosmic ray argument somewhat comforting, at least at face value.
Where we really have to worry is with the biological experiments. I remember some colleagues who thought that 2 wire mesh doors completely secured a caterpillar virus experiment near a wood filled with rare species that would potentially be decimated if the virus got out. When I pointed out that Australia recently had virulent form of myxomitosis escape from an island many, many miles offshore, all I got was strange looks. The CSIRO in Australia has been continuously introducing species to counter the disasters caused by previously introduced species to counter the disasters caused by previously introd...you see what I mean. About the only success they've had is the prickly pear beetle, yet they keep on introducing non-native fauna and flora. (Though try to walk through customs with an undeclared Mars bar in your pocket!)
Some of the scientists I have run into just scare me with their (wilful) ignorance of disasters caused by hubris.
The other argument that always annoys me is the selective disadvantage: it's okay to add all sorts of genes to farm plants, as if they escaped they would be at a selective disadvantage...oh please!
9. Bob said...
This experiment is carried out naturally every day in the upper atmosphere as high energy particles in space hit the atmosphere. We aren't able to watch what happens up there though so we're re-creating it down here in the middle of a pile of machinery to allow us to watch. The level of scientific knowledge in todays western societies is truly depressing. The scary black hole business is from a bunch of right wing religious loons in the US who want us all to go back to the dark ages when god explained everything and we didn't have to worry about pesky things like 'knowledge'.
10. Sharpe said...
at least it would be something the Swiss knomes finally contribute to the world aside money laundering, funding organised crime and the cuckoo clock (argueably Bavarian)
11. gardeniadotnet said...
A few months ago, I met a man who commutes from Australia on a weekly basis, carrying a cargo of snake venom so precious that it has its own seat!
12. cornishman said...
I don't know about the earth being gobbled up by a black hole - but what I am finding a little bit worrying is my feelings of loss when the HPC site went down earlier. How sad is that? What if it never came back? Is Gordon Brown trying to stop us talking about him?
Where is Young_mark these days anyway?
13. Ader said...
'What is 96 per cent of the universe made up of?'
Krusty surely? ;)
14. drewster said...
RELEVANCE TO HPC??????????
Come on Mr Gardeniadotnet, you can do better than this.
15. This comment has been removed as it was found to be in breach of our Blog Policies.
16. holding out said...
G. I didn't think you allowed to take liquids onto planes these days without tasting them first.
17. scandinavian pessimist said...
Guys,
Any suggestions that this experiment could turn the earth into a black hole are completely unfounded and quite frankly ridiculous. The outcome of the experiment is actually very well known, just like most scientific experiments are. In fact, if scientists did not know the outcome of their experiments, they would rarely be able to prove anything because they would be looking at the wrong data.
Trust me on this one, the only black hole we need to worry about is Gordon's budget deficit.
18. jack c said...
@15. gardeniadotnet
Ray, please explain (in laymans terms) how this article has anything to do with the central debate on house prices?
19. Charlie Brooker said...
I expect the banks are rather hoping the scientists will produce a black hole.
Then the bankers will have an excuse for where all the money went.
I guess that's why they call it the Black Holes pricing formula.
20. yoyo1 said...
"These strange particles could turn nuclei in ordinary atoms into strange matter - destroying the Earth in a doomsday scenario." I guess that may effect house prices.
21. Charlie Brooker said...
@jack c
Because derivatives are priced using the Black Holes pricing formula.
The upshot of using this model is massive quantities of money get sucked into oblivion.
22. Retired Banker said...
Well, in the unlikely event of this experiment going wrong, it would certainly 'accelerate' HPC.
23. Bryan The Alian said...
Where do you come up with these figures 100.000 hotter than the sun . Can you not get it in your head that we need usable energy ,could this be put to good use. I bet Einstine is laughing in his grave . Did you get the equipment from the alians to measure these tempratures
24. Herrbbiiee said...
aaaannnndddd.... KABOOM ! ! !
or is it KERRASSSHH???
25. Jk said...
The amount energy used in proton collisions at CERN's LHC will only be an energy level equivalent to when you swat a mosquito on your arm. These are not explosions, but finely targeted collisions of particles. They are extremely short-lived particle showers, so there is no way that there will ever be a Black Hole created.
26. Davros said...
You are aware that machines have been running experiments exactly like this for years without any problems? This is no different, just a tad more powerful. Next please.
27. Sneaker said...
Federal Reserve: Economy will not be gobbled up by credit crunch during monetary inflation experiment, reassure bankers.
28. last_days_of_disco said...
@jack c
Oh its a bit of fun, not offensive at least. Skip it, if it lacks relevance. Its ok every now and then to go off topic, its just when it happens all the time it gets painful. The fact is house prices have crashed, we can be less tense. Now we are into the interesting part of recording the process and the results.
I must admit s2r still freaks me out every now and then, but then he produces the most beautiful graphs sometimes.
I think trying to look good to the mainstream media is a mistake on a blogg.
I find that 90% of the content on this site is relevant.
29. letthemfall said...
My particle physics is a little rusty these days, but particles, including, I assume, mini black holes, created in colliders decay very rapidly. It's the old monkeys typing out the works of Shakespeare thing - it won't happen. Still we should be used to wacky thinking here: we read it every time a VI gets to sound off in a newspaper.
30. Swissnic said...
The purpose of an experiment is to prove or disprove a theory. These guys arn't just playing with sub-atomic particles to see what happens, they have a whole load of maths explaining exactly what will happen - BUT the only way to prove it is by experimentation.
Now - if the LHC will final disprove the existence of God and kill off religion once and for all, I think it is definately worth the wrath of God in the distruction of earth by miniture black hole or Strangelet particles morphing everyday matter into miniture Pacmen!!!
Remember Cold fusion??? Since when does any highly publicised scientic experiement work anyways!!! Let the Schweizzeria play in their tunnels and lets get on and watch the amazing event which is unfurling before our very eyes - the long awaited Housing Apocalypse.
31. d'oh said...
letthemfall - scandinavian pessimist - bob - Unless any of you are QCD physicists your comments are about as worthless as mine. There is a theoretical possibility that, although strange quarks decay very rapidly, there is a theory by Bodmer and Witten (Two very important and well thought of modern physicists - Edward Witten is one of the most productive modern mathematical physicists) that matter consisting of large numbers of strange quarks could stabilise and start devouring any normal matter it comes in contact with. Concerns were raised in serious physics journals at the turn of this century that the RHIC experiments could lead to problems that would not appear in nature's cosmic ray experiments. At present the evidence seems to be that the particles created do decay too quickly to be a problem, but people are still open minded to the possibility:
e.g. see the report of the LHC safety study committee:
http://doc.cern.ch/yellowrep/2003/2003-001/p1.pdf
You will see that most of their arguments against are quite theoretical and based on toy models of these phenomena. It should also be noted that many of the most strident rebuttals of these concerns are by scientists heavily involved in these projects which involve a lot of money and power, i.e. vested interests.
32. letthemfall said...
d'oh
In case you happen to read this, thanks for posting the cern document - interesting. I studied some of this stuff at university, though I am certainly no expert on the topics in the document and have forgotten an awful lot. The arguments are inevitably theoretical. The suggested sources of danger - micro black holes and strangelets (new one to me that) - are not even known to exist, at least not from experiment. My feeling from reading (some of) the document is that the conditions for disaster to exist may not actually be possible, and in any case are at worst highly improbable, not to say negligible. You can say that the physicists who wrote the piece have a vested interest, but this is to suggest they might gloss over anything significant, which, notwithstanding scientists' many shortcomings (and I should know) strikes me as unlikely. My conclusion? We'll wake up the day after this collider starts up.