Hadron Collider.. A real 'Half-Life' in the making?

[tunsty]

Okay, maybe not, but I came across this article,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7468966.stm?hadron - on the Large Hadron Collider and the concerns being put forward by some people, that it may be dangerous.

What really caught my eye was the 'Unforseen Consequences' mentioned a few lines down...
am I the only one who remembers 'Unforseen Consequences' from the first HL game?


Makes you wonder... is there anybody called 'Freeman' working on the project by any chance? :eek:

 

[Funkwerkz]

That CERN stuff is really too risky.

Some scientists say, a tiny gate will be opened for the time travel. My comment is, if that gate gets opened, we will face dangers from both past and future. It's also said that a black hole will be formed if the energy that comes after the experiement is too much to hold, will make an intense form of anti-matter energy which leads to the black hole. That energy might be stronger than the one in the nukes. Like radiation, this anti-matter energy can cause undesired mutation of all organic beings on Earth. Good bye humanity!

However, i'm hopeful for that experiment. With that anti-matter energy, we don't need lousy rockets that would bring us to Mars in an average time of 6 years, 1st stage (newly developed prototypes) anti-matter powered spacecrafts will bring us to Mars in 3 or 4 weeks.

 

[Kil4Thril]

Half Life was one of the greatest games of all time. As for the experiment, I'll get back after I read more...

 

[youwanttoshagme]

Being someone who does work in the sciences, the LHC shouldn't cause any dangers (at least none that 99.9% of the global population should be worried about). The argument of "dangers form the past and future" is currently extremely remote. There is a risk that the energy used may rip space time, but it isn't that great. And if it does rip, (relatively speaking) that time will become a marker in which our future selves maybe able to go back to. Our past selves will be unable to use it, as the technology won't have been invented (can you time travel now? Does anyone now or in the past have a time machine??). Any possible rip is likely to be very small in all quantifiable terms, and random in its placement. For "something" to use the rip, is a extremely long shot (your more likely to score a whole in one on every hole on a golf course while winning every national lottery drawn that day all at the same time).

As for the argument that Funwerkz comes up with simple doesn't work out, due to the amount of material accelerated. In a nuclear device (of any type), the material required is in the order of kilograms, with a uncontrolled chain cascade reaction. In the accelerator, the material accelerated is in the oder of atoms to pico-moles. When the particals used collide, the annihilation of the matter used will produce (hopefully) the theoretical particals that we are looking for (Higgs bosons etc) and radiations that will be detected in the large detector sections. The energy required to accelerate the particals to their collisions speeds is huge, however the energy released (depending on the amount and type of material produced) maybe very small and faint.

The argument over the formation of black holes is very circumspect as the nature of mini-black holes is very theoretical. In some theories (which the media love to pick up on) the small mass of the black hole may cause an exponential growth, eventually consuming the entire solar system. However (and what the media don't like to pick up on), it is more likely that the Hawkins radiation released will make the black hole evaporate before it can form, so very unlikely to expand beyond a millimeter. These theories are still very topical and may be solved with the switch on of the LHC.

 

[angelfire1972]

From Scientific American February 2008:
They call it the terascale. It is the realm of physics that comes into view when two elementary
particles smash together with a combined energy of around a trillion electron
volts, or one tera-electron-volt. The machine that will take us to the terascale—the ring-shaped Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN—is now nearing completion.
To ascend through the energy scales from electron volts to the terascale is to travel from the familiar world through a series of distinct landscapes: from the domains of chemistry
and solid-state electronics (electron volts) to nuclear reactions (millions of electron volts) to the territory that particle physicists have been investigating for the past half a century (billions of electron volts).
What lies in wait for us at the terascale? No one knows.
But radically new phenomena of one kind or another are just about guaranteed to occur. Scientists hope to detect long-sought particles that could help complete our understanding
of the nature of matter. More bizarre discoveries, such as signs of additional dimensions, may unfold as well.
Physicists are also drawing up plans for a machine intended
to succeed and complement the LHC more than a decade hence, adding precision to the rough maps that will be deciphered from the LHC’s data.
At the end of this “journey” to the terascale and beyond, we will for the first time know what we are made of and how the place where we briefly live operates at bottom. Like the completed LHC itself, we will have come full circle.

 

[calpoon]

wouldn't let me rep you shagme, but thanks for the scientific perspective, instead of just resorting to witch hunt fear based assumptions about "dangerous" people trying to find out about the nature of the world and the universe.

sure people have the capabilities to fuck things up, but nature has the capability to cause changes far greater than anything we ever could (and if these changes destroy us and the world and the solar system, we see it as a bad thing, but shit happens. I already talked about this in the end of the world thread.) The point is that people can't do anything that is unnatural. By splitting the atom and by atom smashing we aren't creating "new" matter, you can't create new matter it is impossible. We are just discovering combinations of sub-atom particles that always existed, but we never knew about them or saw them before.

There is no fabric of the universe, that's just a metaphor, and so you can't create a rip in it. you can create a temporary shift, such as black hole or worm hole, but these things require energy to generate. If one of them was accidental made, the way to get rid of it would simply be to turn off the power source that is generating it. Like shag said, everything is acted upon by tidal forces (that is gravity) from radiation left over from the beginning of the universe. This is what causes the worm hole to close and the black hole to evaporate.

if you are interested we've discussed black hole phenomenon at more length in another thread specifically one the subject.

 

[dave_rhino]

I'm hoping for the worst.

I have a crowbar in my garage that I've been dying to get some use out of.

 

[stainedblueyes]

Half Life was one of the greatest games of all time. As for the experiment, I'll get back after I read more...

We just need to find some chap named Gordon and give him a crowbar to beat the crap out of the abominations pouring from other planes of existence... easy!

 

[mongo18]

Crowbar, pfffft. I have a Stanley Fubar 2 AND 3, I'm resonance cascade proof!

 

[gunslingingbird]

Trying to unlock the secrets of anything is always a risky endeavor. Doing it on such a large scale isn't only putting the scientists in charge at risk, it's putting everyone on Earth at risk. While the possibility of creating a black hole that swallows the world is remote, it's still there. I really think they should stop messing with something as volatile as particle accelerators.

 

[D-rock]

I don't think I would get too worried. There are higher energy particles that are formed all the time in space that LHC won't surpass or even reach, so we shouldn't have to worry about some high energy particle piercing our universe and dropping the entire thing into the vacuum.

If for some reason a black hole could form by smashing two small particles together the fact that black holes dissipate and loose mass over time and they loose it faster the smaller they get means any sub-atomic scale black hole would have a good chance of vanishing almost as fast as it could be created. For all we know mini-black holes might be a lot more abundant in nature than we know anyhow.

 

[gunslingingbird]

I don't think I would get too worried. There are higher energy particles that are formed all the time in space that LHC won't surpass or even reach, so we shouldn't have to worry about some high energy particle piercing our universe and dropping the entire thing into the vacuum.

If for some reason a black hole could form by smashing two small particles together the fact that black holes dissipate and loose mass over time and they loose it faster the smaller they get means any sub-atomic scale black hole would have a good chance of vanishing almost as fast as it could be created. For all we know mini-black holes might be a lot more abundant in nature than we know anyhow.

That's true, but there is still a possibility of creating something larger that could do more damage than a black hole at a subatomic level, right?

 

[Dean Wormer]

The energy required to do any sort of harm to this planet would be on the order of an exploding star. Don't be so arrogant (or scared) to think that man can create anything remotely approaching that scale.

 

[trunk_monkey]

I trust the scientists, it's not like they just put together a super collider without examining the theoretical side of the experiment in heavy detail. That would be an awesome meeting if it did though...it'd probably go like this.

Can I have millions of dollars to build a super collider that may or may not be the death of man?

I don't see why not? *Strobe lights kick in and cash drops from the ceiling to Queen's We Are the Champions*

 

[Legzman]

I hope they fire that fucker up soon!

 

[Torre82]

Over at stile project I saw a couple videos of hardon collidings.

Not to my liking, tho. I quickly went to the Lucy Thai vids.

 

[Legzman]

don't ever post links to gay shit again, thanks :thefinger

 

[Torre82]

don't ever post links to gay shit again, thanks :thefinger

::clicks link:: Oh so there is a site at gay dot com. It's not very sexual, tho. I think you're just overreacting. Imagining all the asspounding and viagra-popping that *might* happen at that gay club down the street from you. Dont worry, your secret's safe with me! Noone else can read this!

 

[Legzman]

where's senob? I'll take him!

 

[Torre82]

where's senob? I'll take him!

::cough::

You mean like take him.. or more like.. take him?