CERN Large Hadron Collider, Nostradamus & the recent Dark Sky Phenoms!

First off, there is a lot of irrational fear about the LHC which is fueled by people thinking things which aren't true. A couple of examples:
-From one of the early posts by Tentickles: "They test the CERN HC on August 8th---> Propane Plant in Toronto explodes (cause still unknown)."
-The LHC (not "HC") has *not* been turned on for any tests yet. It is scheduled to turn on at a few percent of its nominal collision energy in early September, and they'll ratchet it up to its full energy sometime next year. They have tested components, but there have been no collision based tests.

-From another post by Tentickles: "I forgot to mention that the first time they turned the HC on they had about 17 MILES worth of magnets and hydrogen explode in the compound the HC is located in. That was on March 27th of last year."
-A US lab sent them some faulty magnets. When the magnets were turned on for tests at low temperature they broke ... but where does this "17 miles" number come from??

It is true that the LHC will be the world's most powerful collider. It is true that it will produce by far the highest energy collisions that humans have ever made. Some people are afraid that the collisions will be so powerful that they will create a stable Black Hole that will suck the planet up, or rip apart space, or do something else to destroy the earth. A lot of scientists have studied these ideas and find them to be pretty much impossible based upon their calculations ... but calculations aren't the reason they've decided the machine is safe. The real reason is because radiation ("cosmic rays") fly around through space and hit things with far greater energy than the LHC can produce. If the LHC were capable of doing something that would destroy the earth, the earth would have already been destroyed by these cosmic rays long ago ... or the sun would have been, or some other object we can see in the universe. We have never seen something like that happen.

Is this proof that nothing bad can happen? I guess that isn't really proof, so you can always find scientists who say they aren't 100% sure, but it's very strong evidence, so that's the reason the project is going ahead.

Originally posted by MrSheepish
-by Tentickles: "I forgot to mention that the first time they turned the HC on they had about 17 MILES worth of magnets and hydrogen explode in the compound the HC is located in."
-A US lab sent them some faulty magnets. When the magnets were turned on for tests at low temperature they broke ... but where does this "17 miles" number come from??

No magnets exploded. The structure supporting the magnets failed. The structure was not faulty of structural integrity, per'se, instead, a mathematical factor of force was left out of the equation in developing the supports. The fault was human error.

The only place the number "17" comes in for distance, is that the circumference of the LHC tunnel is 17km (not miles).



[edit on 14/8/08 by Misfit]

reply to post by MrSheepish


Anyone know exactly what a mini black hole Is?

Is a mini black hole less dangerous than a regular black hole ?

If a regular black hole sucks everything into it, squashing matter and light into oblivion, does that leave a mini black hole at the centre of a regular black hole?

This all sounds more dangerous than my ex wife.

Hi Moocowman,

Probably the simplest way to say it is that black holes form when matter gets *really close together* ... so close that gravity becomes powerful enough to prevent light from escaping. One way for this to happen is for so much stuff to stick together that it will eventually collapse into a black hole under its own gravity. This can happen to stars which are much more massive than our sun when they run out of fuel. But black holes that form this way are enormous. They can hardly be called "mini".

In theory you can also make matter get "really close together" by colliding one piece into another with enough force. The LHC probably won't be powerful enough to accomplish this, but under some hypothetical physics models this could happen. Such a black hole would be called "mini" because it was formed by two tiny bits of matter sticking together. People often imagine that black holes are things which suck in and feed off all matter around them. This can happen with large black holes because they're massive and so exert lots of gravity. But mini black holes are too tiny to exert any noticeable gravity, so they wouldn't be powerful enough to suck anything in.

I'm not sure how dangerous your ex wife is, but there are two main reasons why you shouldn't lose sleep over mini black holes. 1) The same theories which predict that it might be possible for mini black holes to form at the LHC also predict that the mini black holes would disintegrate almost immediately through "Hawking Radiation" (I don't understand how this works so I can't explain). 2) Even if the theories are wrong and black holes are stable, they won't be able to grow large enough to suck up the planet. If that were possible this would have happened already through cosmic ray collisions as I explained in my previous post.

Hope that made sense. Let me know if you're confused about what I said.

Hi Misfit,

That's probably what he was talking about. The LHC is about 17 miles around (not kilometers), but the magnets which broke didn't really explode (as you mentioned), and it was just a handful of magnets that broke (can't remember how many), not all of them around the entire circumference. Sounds like Tentickles was pretty confused ...

reply to post by indigothefish


You can read my posts for the information you seek.

-ChriS

Here is a news story about CERN from March that I don't think alot of people know about. This is all over the internet now, but I haven't seen anyone mention it yet here in the thread..

cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com...

www.vnunet.com...

What I'm referring to has come to be known as the "doomsday lawsuit" in which the CERN scientists have been slapped with a lawsuit over the whole doomsday scenario.. Pretty ridiculous..

And as the msnbc story states, this guy has done this before.. He filed a lawsuit against scientists involved with the "Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider" around 2000.

This is a little more background on the original lawsuit against the RHIC. Same kind of concerns, same gripes and complaints, same kind of lawsuit. The entire idea is to shut down operations at these facilities through legal means. And if you read the following text, you will see it sounds pretty familiar.
www.upto11.net...

Fears among the public
Before RHIC started its operation, there have been fears among the public, that the extremely high energy could produce one of the following catastrophic scenarios:
RHIC creates a black hole
RHIC creates a transition into a different quantum mechanical vacuum
RHIC creates strange matter that is more stable than ordinary matter

The hypothetical theories are complex, but they predict that at least the Earth and the Solar System would be destroyed within few seconds. However, the fact that objects of the Solar System (e.g. the Moon) are bombarded with cosmic particles of significantly higher energies than that of RHIC for billion of years, without any harm to the Solar System, were among the most strking arguments that these hypotheses were unfounded.
The other main issue in the controversy is the demand by the critics of RHIC to physicists to show an exactly zero probability for such a catastrophic scenario, which the physics cannot provide. However, by following the same argument of the critics, and using the same experimental and astrophysical constraints, the phyiscs is also not able to demonstrate a zero probability, but just a upper limit for the likelihood that tomorrow Earth will be striken with a "doomsday" cosmic ray, resulting in the same destructive scenarios. By choosing the standpoint to argue with upper limits, RHIC would still modify the chance for the Earth's survival by a extremely marginal amount.

The debate started in 1999 with an exchange of letters in Scientific American between W. L. Wagner, World Botanical Gardens, Inc. and F. Wilczek, Institute for Advanced Study to an previous article by M. Mukerjee (1999) in Scientific American. The media attention unfolded with the article in U.K. Sunday Times of July 18, 1999 by J. Leake www.wisdomofsolomon.com... closely followed by the U.S. media. The controversy mostly ended with the report of a committee convened by the director of Brookhaven National Laboratory, J. H. Marburger, ruling out the catastrophic scenarios depited (R. Jaffe et al., 2000). W. L. Wagner tried subsequently – as he attempted with various accelerators before – to stop full energy collision at RHIC by filing federal lawsuits in San Francisco and New York, but without success (see e.g. www.msnbc.com...).

On March 17, 2005, the BBC reported that researcher Horatiu Nastase believes this has indeed occurred. news.bbc.co.uk... However, the report is very likely to be the product of the journalist's misconception. Both the original papers of H. Nastase arxiv.org... and the New Scientist article www.newscientist.com... cited by the BBC states that the correspondence of the hot dense QCD matter created in RHIC to a black hole is only in the sense of a correspondence of QCD scattering in Minkowski space and scattering in the AdS5 × X5 space in AdS/CFT. RHIC collisions therefore might be useful to study various quantum gravity behaviors within the AdS/CFT, but the described physical phenomena are not the same.

Yet we never saw this doomsday event unfold because it was all speculation from the very beginning. There could also very well be some other motive behind these lawsuits that we aren't hearing about.. But as for the RHIC, it never destroyed the earth...

-ChriS

[edit on 15-8-2008 by BlasteR]

[edit on 15-8-2008 by BlasteR]

Nostradamus is very interesting and authors have done a great job of of opinionated speculations when deciphering his writings. All of which has made most of them a good living doing so.

Originally posted by MrSheepish
The LHC is about 17 miles around (not kilometers)

Yep, you're right, my confusion.

miles or kilo's, inches or cm's ........ I rrrreally wish the states would go to metric and get the confusion over with !!

Since when can you sue before the deed? Maybe I can use that against my neighbors dog BEFORE he bites me..

Paranoia is one thing but how does this even get to court?

:shk:

Originally posted by BlasteR But as for the RHIC, it never destroyed the earth...

Can you prove this? Since time rifts are supposed to be involved in this... maybe we just haven't felt the effects yet?

Yes, yes, some of what I wrote was wrong. In my defense though I posted some replies early in the morning when tired.

Certainly CERN should be of great concern. Fundamentally, unintended consequenses may come into play. Are humans wise enough to account for all probabilities. What of the Earth's elecrtromagnetic fields coupled with unleashing terawatts of man made energy? Can they combine to create trophic level shockwaves? We must be careful with the ripples we create in the pond>>>

reply to post by Tentickles


lol i think if there were an event of any bad that will cause doomsday all

who knows anything about it would quit the goverment and there wouldnt not

even have 1 procent chance it will be kept secret!!! we must think logical now guys.

The amount of electromagnetic energy created at CERN will be very minor. Even if you stand directly above a collision point (they are buried underground) with your pockets full of metal, you will not feel any force exerted on them. Similarly, no electromagnetic radiation will be capable of escaping from the collision sites. There is one kind of non-electromagentic radiation which can escape: neutrinos. But these neutrinos are not dangerous. They interact so weakly that 99% of them pass through the earth without touching anything. In fact, the sun creates far more neutrinos, and trillions of them pass through your body every second without you knowing. There is nothing to fear from them.