Are we going to die in Wednesday?

[Caius]

I'm a bit conCERNed about this, like Conqueror said. HAwking says that this project is important, but I think this project is pure **** and we will burn at 100000 times the center of the sun.

What are your humble opinions?

[PBI]

First of all, we are certainly not going to die on Wednesday, because the aim for Wednesday is just to get a beam running in the accelerator at all, and it will be running at energies which have already been exceeded by the Tevatron collider at Fermilab without any problems. The actual high energy heavy ion collisions people are worried about will be a while coming.

Secondly, although I realise that physicists tend to be dismissive of the dangers of black holes, strangelets, vacuum bubbles and the like, it's not the case that we are simply ignoring the possibility entirely; all the potential world-ending problems that might arise have been thoroughly investigated and the likelihood calculated and deemed not to pose a risk.

Thirdly, I should point out that the collision energies at the LHC are actual pretty feeble compared with the energy of the cosmic rays which have been routinely colliding with our upper atmosphere for billions of years without causing any problems. If the LHC collision energy were capable of causing any of these problems they would already have happened by now due to cosmic ray collisions.

My biggest worry about the LHC is that there will be another mechanical failure and the project will be set back another painfully expensive year.

[Lord Winter]

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=107401

[a completely inoffensive name]

To be honest, if it does create a black hole it would be one of the most awesome ways for the human race to die. Future alien civilizations will look back on us millions of years from now: "holy crap they made a black hole and killed themselves...thats so hardcore."

EDIT: Also, everyone knows the human race will be enslaved forever when Zenu returns anyway.

[Viking]

First of all, we are certainly not going to die on Wednesday, because the aim for Wednesday is just to get a beam running in the accelerator at all, and it will be running at energies which have already been exceeded by the Tevatron collider at Fermilab without any problems. The actual high energy heavy ion collisions people are worried about will be a while coming.

Secondly, although I realise that physicists tend to be dismissive of the dangers of black holes, strangelets, vacuum bubbles and the like, it's not the case that we are simply ignoring the possibility entirely; all the potential world-ending problems that might arise have been thoroughly investigated and the likelihood calculated and deemed not to pose a risk.

Thirdly, I should point out that the collision energies at the LHC are actual pretty feeble compared with the energy of the cosmic rays which have been routinely colliding with our upper atmosphere for billions of years without causing any problems. If the LHC collision energy were capable of causing any of these problems they would already have happened by now due to cosmic ray collisions.

My biggest worry about the LHC is that there will be another mechanical failure and the project will be set back another painfully expensive year.

Well, I'll just second PBI since people only seem to be listening to those who shout the loudest or most.

[Ferret]

The media are so clever these days aren't they , but as my Physics teacher wisely said, at least it's good publicity for physics, now a lot of people know what some of their tax money is paying for.

[Thermal]

i never really believed this since i first heard it
nice to no that if the world would have end we'd hav hav near to no notice on it

[Ferret]

We have, this is the notice, the protons are going to be fired in mid October, if it is going to end it will be then, though the chances of that are stupidly small, too small to care about.

[Reverend Joe]

Thirdly, I should point out that the collision energies at the LHC are actual pretty feeble compared with the energy of the cosmic rays which have been routinely colliding with our upper atmosphere for billions of years without causing any problems. If the LHC collision energy were capable of causing any of these problems they would already have happened by now due to cosmic ray collisions.

That's enough for me. No worries.

[Megas Methuselah]

So, could someone possibly offer me a link to an article about what's going on? This is scaring me.

[||Lz3||]

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

absolutely no reasons to be scared of... this kind of reactions happen all the time... the diference is that this time we could actually provoke it , instead of just witness it...

[CBR]

For a live video feed from the LHC http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html


CBR

[Marius Dynamite]

If they are smart enough to know exactly what to do do create a black hole that will destroy everything, they are smart enough not to build it, so this will not kill us all.

[Ferret]

For a live video feed from the LHC http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html


CBR

I nearly fell for those flashing red lights

[Centurio Nixalsverdrus]

How are we going to die if this black hole is created? I cannot imagine this.

How long will it take after the creation until the earth is swallowed? Will we get sucked into that hole? Is it going to hurt? Really this interests me!

[Carlos Matthews]

Thats a point, would it hurt or would it happen too quick to notice?

[Megas Methuselah]

What happens in a black hole anyways?

[Conqueror]

I'm no physicist, but the basic "doomsday" scenario seems to work like this: A micro black hole created in a collider, assuming that it doesn't vaporize by the theoretical Hawking radiation, would have low velocity and be caught in the Earth's gravity field. It would then fall into the center of the planet, where it would slowly accrete until eventually the whole Earth collapses into it. It could take years for the black hole to grow large enough for this, but nothing could be done about it.

[PBI]

Nobody really knows how long it would take for a black hole to swallow the Earth because, according to everything we know about black holes, they just don't work that way. To assume the premise that a micro-black hole created at CERN would not evaporate and instead would suck up the Earth already flies in the face of modern science, so from that point on it's all pretty much speculation.

As for what happens inside a black hole; it's a good question, but I'm afraid it's one of those great unanswerable ones, like "What was around before the Big Bang?" It's not unreasonable to think there might be something interesting going on inside the event horizon, but unfortunately since it's a physical impossibility to transmit information out from within the event horizon we can never do anything more than speculate.

[Viking]

Nobody really knows how long it would take for a black hole to swallow the Earth because, according to everything we know about black holes, they just don't work that way. To assume the premise that a micro-black hole created at CERN would not evaporate and instead would suck up the Earth already flies in the face of modern science, so from that point on it's all pretty much speculation.

As for what happens inside a black hole; it's a good question, but I'm afraid it's one of those great unanswerable ones, like "What was around before the Big Bang?" It's not unreasonable to think there might be something interesting going on inside the event horizon, but unfortunately since it's a physical impossibility to transmit information out from within the event horizon we can never do anything more than speculate.

There's always computer simulation and physics lessons learned in other ways; to give us an idea at least. Perhaps..

[PBI]

We can predict what might happen based upon our current theories, sure, but since the envisaged situation coming about would rely on our current theories being completely wrong it suggests our predictions wouldn't be that useful.

[Viking]

We can predict what might happen based upon our current theories, sure, but since the envisaged situation coming about would rely on our current theories being completely wrong it suggests our predictions wouldn't be that useful.

Oh, I should only have quoted the relevant part. I was talking about black holes in general; knowing what's "going on" inside them.

[PBI]

Ah, yes that makes sense.

We can certainly come up with theories and ideas for what might go on inside a black hole, but my understanding is that these theories will always be essentially unprovable since due to the nature of the event horizon there is no way for anything on the inside to produce an observable effect on the outside.

We might be able to come up with a GUT that in principle could be extended to sensibly describe the inside of an event horizon, but in the end whether you are happy with such an extension is a question of whether you feel the theory is truly a "Theory of Everything" or simply a "Theory of Everything We Know About".

[Centurio Nixalsverdrus]

Note: I have transferred my questions about black holes to a new thread, The Black-Holes Thread.

[Rhyfelwyr]

Don't worry everyone, at least we've managed to buy another couple of months

[KarlXII]

Damn, I was looking forward to Nuclear Winter!

[Viking]

A nice article from NASA (why not from CERN? I could perfectly well have missed it, though..) here:

The Day the World Didn't End

[...]

First of all, yes, it is true that the LHC might create microscopic black holes. But, for the record, it could not have created one on its first day. That's because the physicists at CERN didn't steer beams of protons into each other to create high-energy collisions. Sept. 10th was just a warmup run. To date, the collider still has not produced any collisions, and it is the extreme energy of those collisions — up to 14 tera-electron volts — that could potentially create a microscopic black hole.


Actually, once the LHC is running again and begins producing collisions, physicists will be ecstatic if it creates a tiny black hole. It would be the first experimental evidence to support an elegant but unproven and controversial "theory of everything" called string theory.

In string theory, electrons, photons, quarks, and all the other fundamental particles are different vibrations of infinitesimal strings in 10 dimensions: 9 space dimensions and one time dimension. (The other 6 space dimensions are hidden by one explanation or another, for example by being "curled up" on an extremely small scale.) Some physicists tout string theory's mathematical elegance and its ability to integrate gravity with the other forces of nature. The widely accepted Standard Model of particle physics does not include gravity, which is one reason why it does not predict that the LHC would create a gravitationally collapsed point — a black hole — while string theory does.

[...]

So the first thing a micro-black hole would do is leave the planet safely behind. But there are other, even stronger reasons why scientists believe the LHC poses no threat to Earth. For one, a black hole created in the LHC would almost certainly evaporate before it got very far, most scientists believe. Stephen Hawking, the physicist who wrote A Brief History of Time, predicted that black holes radiate energy, a phenomenon known as Hawking radiation. Because of this steady loss of energy, black holes eventually evaporate. The smaller the black hole, the more intense the Hawking radiation, and the quicker the black hole will vanish. So a black hole a thousand times smaller than a proton should disappear almost instantly in a quick burst of radiation.

Click the link for the full story wih more valid points.

[Megas Methuselah]

Damn, I was looking forward to Nuclear Winter!

Yeah, I was kind of daydreaming of a romantic adventure with this hot girl where we have to struggle to survive and, well, yeah... Total let-down, wasn't it?

Thx for the link, Viking.

[Yoyoma1910]

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[General SupaCrunk]

No, nothing will happen.