http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=74044 Seen this on television all week, and it was one of those stories that made me go hmmm interesting (well something like that). Everyone (scientists) that has been on television are all saying nothing will or can go wrong (im sure something could go wrong, but maybe not the bad crap people might think). There saying if the experiments go fine that, in the near future, things like space travel might be a reality (like sci-fi movies to a degree) in say 50-80 years time etc etc (with matter being more understood) So black holes being created on out planet cool or not cool I think its cool, though it will be cooler to be alive in say 60s years time when these experiments and assessments are analyised and come into effect.
Nothing will go wrong with it - even though a lot of people go about saying "hahah we're all gonna die on wednesday." We've been looking at the ATLAS experiment a lot in physics recently, because it has produced about as much excitement as science can these days, and i think it will be interesting to see what it turns out with. Of course it will probably be upwards of a year before they even get anything from it, due to the massive amount of data produced. Im not holding my breath that what they discover about these particles will make space travel or anything kind of sci-fi possible though - most likely it will just be things only discussed in advanced physics which we cant put to any real use. You never kow though
Agreed. One of the blokes did say it would be by late 09 before we hear anything again. And im sure i'll have grey hairs before we actually hear anything of "oh so whats what it can do" stuff
It's okay. Hot dogs are made out of ass, nose hair, toes and all that leftover crap. If the world ends and you haven't had one, consider yourself healthier than the rest of us!
The BBC are showing coverage of the Hadron Collider tomorrow morning at 8:30. The oddest thing, is that it's being hosted by Andrew Marr... So if it does create a black hole, then we'll all get to see his ridiculous ears being sucked off
According to the quantum physicists, there's about as much chance of this experiment creating a 'mini' black hole as there is of our sun going supernova within the next 24 hours. Reason being, they are simply creating a qualitative and quantitative model of a perfectly natural event that happens all the time anyway. Yeah. Like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and, er, stars suddenly and mysteriously going supernova. I am not convinced. My advice? Don't start reviewing any extra long posts in the novel section, peeps.
Think it'll be a brilliant piece of equipment (provided it doesn't destroy all of us!) - might take ages for anything useful to come out but understanding more about physics is always useful. Wondering though whether it'll one day become the next 'split the atom' - resulting in some horrific weapon - but we seem capable of achieving that regardless of science. ..... and call me hysterical but I'm putting off all my annoying work until Thursday, just in case!
Have these so-called "scientists" predicting doom and gloom ever heard of the Hawking effect? It's impossible for such a small black hole to grow to swallow the earth. At that mass, a black hole radiates away mass as energy far faster than it absorbs it - explosively fast, in fact. The lifetime of the black hole MAY be long enough to observe with sensitive enough equipment, but the potential for a stable black hole is nil. Black holes with a considerably greater mass would in fact act as very spectacular bombs, releasing the total mass as a burst of energy in microseconds. But even the maximum mass-energy that could be pumped into a black hole created by a supercollider could not exceed the mass and energy used to create it. Worst case, total conversion of the pellets fired at the target takes out the building that houses the supercollider and a good chunk of the surrounding landscape, and the nearby area gets dosed with a nasty burst of gamma radiation..
I don't think anyone has to worry about a black hole bomb. WMD's have really fallen out of favor in the military circles of the western world (No point defeating the enemy if you destroy yourselves in the process right?). The only ones who don't seem to get that point are certain other parties who don't really seem to care to much if they destroy themselves in the process... Besides. The basic principle of nearly all military strategy is control. Control yourself, control your enemy, control the field of battle. Whoever is more successful at taking control, maintaining it, and properly exerting it on an opposing force will win. How do you control mass destruction? Hint: You can't. Once it gets going it really can't be stopped. But, anywho, a black hole neato . I think I've heard of this somewhere before. Though, i fail to see how a black hole will help us travel in space. As a general rule don't you want to avoid things that suck everything in and crush it into a pancake under extreme gravity?
A black hole generator is essentially a total conversion reactor. You pump in energy and matter, and what comes out is pure energy. You don't get a super-sinkhole unless you can pump in planetary masses. See my previosu post in this thread on the Hawking effect. So a controllable SBHG (supercollider black hole generator) could be a tremendous power source. That could in fact be an important step for practical space travel, as well as a new energy source on this planet.
So since when have scientists been right with their therys? They think nothing can go wrong, but their is always something that can go wrong. Do I think it will? Probably not, but do I think the potetial for the world to be distroyed exists... Yes. Scietists know little about black holes, they have tons of theriories but no actual prouf that they know anything about black holes.
There are experimental verifications of predictions that arise from the Hawking effect. It's not simply mathemagic. Scientists have learned a lot about black holes in the past few years. Enough to know that small stable black holes are not possible. There may be other dangers, to be sure, but the earth falling into a black hole created by a supercollider is not one of them.
Ah I see. I had always assumed that that was science fiction. One more question Cog. Is that a real word? Cause if it isn't, it should be .
Wow. You all just got schooled by Cogito in Quantum Physics. It'll be pretty cool to see what happens. Stuff colliding at speeds near the speed of light. Look at it this way: Two cars crash head on at 60 miles an hour. The total speed of impact can be assumed to be 120 miles an hour. If these particles travel at least half the speed of light when colliding, then that means the overall collision would be even faster then the speed of light. That counts for something right? I'd like to see something interesting happen. It says in the article I'm reading that it will create enough heat to melt a car. Maybe it will open new doors for energy and alternative fuel sources. But I'm pretty sure it won't create a lethal black hole. At least not to the whole world. If an accident does happen and something screws up, the incident probably won't effect the entire planet in an obvious way.
Sorry, but no. The way the velocities add using the mathematics of Relativity, the sum will still be less than the speed of light. An "evaporating" black hole sould still create quite a blast. But I agree, we aren't talking global disaster, just a huge bang withe a tremendous radiation burst. There won't be any radioactive residues though, at least not fron the blast itself.
This discussion seems eerily like the one that went on before splitting the atom. Would it create a runaway chain reaction that would destroy the world? When explained in laymans terms it sure sounded like it would, but it didn't.
There was a short story by I think Larry Niven where these people were on an expedition to mars and they found an alien device that was used to communicate across interstellar distances. It did that by manipulating gravity waves created from a contained, stable, mini-black hole. They accidentally turned off the containment field and the black hole fell straight down where it began bouncing around the inside of the planet eating up any atoms and molecules it happened to touch. It effectively began to slowly hollow out the planet, growing bigger and bigger on each pass through, and was causing all sorts of marsquakes and such.
I remember the story. It was written before the Hawking Effect was well understood, maybe even before Hawking discovered it. There was a novel by James P Hogan, Thrice Upon a Time. Part of the story dealt with a fusion reactor generaing microscopic black holes that began to orbit the center of mass of the earth, slowly beginning to erode it. (The description of "bugophants", massive microscopic holes leaving straight line tidal burrows therough people and objects, is well worth reading despite the flawed science). That book mentioned the Hawking effect, but undervalued its effect by many orders of magnitude.
It won't. BUT (and this is a pretty big but) if it could, there are 2 alternatives: -We prove some theories, hopefully we get to see some Higgins Boson. -OR we all get to see a giant black hole and the whole planet earth + humanity is consumed and the universe acts as if we didn't ever happen.
Only if the laws of physics are repealed by Congress as being too difficult to understand. (A state senate once legislated the value of Pi to be exactly 3 because the actual number was inconvenient to calculate with.. Fortunately, the law was voided).
That is why the government should stay out five things; Life, because politicians are technically the undead. What would they know ? Choice, because politicians are all robotic copy and paste jobs of random positions on different issues. Religion, because Jesus doesn't need to be sacrificed again Economics, because politicians really suck at it Science, because only undignified fools suck up enough to make it in politics XD
