http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/06/30/doom ... index.html

Curious if anyone else here lacks confidence in this? This gives me the heeby jeebies. Quantum physics is highly debated and barely understood/tested.

Even a 1 in 50 million chance of destroying the world is too high, IMO.

We need to get the AIDS healthcare worked on that, pronto.

I listened to a show on NPR where they had one of the scientists involved in this project discuss this "chance."

It's just sensational headlines, and has nothing to do with reality, would be the short answer he gave to this supposition. In fact, he went as far as to say that there simply isn't any chance, as far as we know, that this could happen.

On the other hand, if it did happen, and we all disappeared, who cares? If everyone dies in an instant, all over the world, absolutely nothing we're doing right now has any kind of meaning. It's not going to hurt anyone we've left behind if we haven't left anyone behind. We just... cease to exist. At least I won't have to pay the damn gas bill anymore.

Some thought that a nuclear detonation would burn off the atmosphere.

It's not like flipping off a light switch. It isn't an instant snuff of the planet, it would take time and be devastating.

Notwithstanding, I'm not OK with ceasing to exist.

This thread is already a perfect example of why I love this board sometimes.

I personally am rooting for the physicists to accidentally open up a dimensional rift that allows some variety of zombie and/or robot super-race to take over the earth and use human kind as a power source of some kind.

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Knowledge without reason is useless.

http://boxrockssocks.blogspot.com/

Are these the same people who still mourn the losses of all the sailors who fell off the edge of the world?

It's a classic human reaction; fear what you do not understand. This debate has been raging on for the entire duration of the development of the LHC

I'll just let Dr. Michio Kaku lay it down for you.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/ ... lephysics1

The LHC is re-producing something that occurs every day, in a manner in which it can be measured. I would think the system would vaporize before anything globally catastrophic could occur.

It's mass that gives a singularity its effect. These mini-black holes would be created on a subatomic scale with the substitution of enormous energies in the place of that mass. The rate at which that energy is lost is greater than the energy they can produce to sustain themselves.

An 80-100 megaton bomb has already been detonated in our atmosphere. The LHC does not approach that kind of energy, and we are still here.

Sarissa Candyangel

I love how your defensiveness over your own ignorance has you embracing even more ignorance. :p

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Well, it is a long shot, but I fully support the end of the world. Bring on armageddon!

Really, let's talk about the real issue. Even if this device doesn't cause the end of the world, if it opens a portal to another dimension, we could open the gates of hell for evil monsters to spill out, wreaking havoc and slaying at will.

My only goal is to have the HIV healthcare worker standing there, ready to infect those aliens and thus, save the world.

... It was tongue in cheek, Rugen

Or splash water on them.




AIDS water.

You gotta admit, it would be pretty cool if it made a Black Hole that swallowed the Earth.

You had me at "atom smasher".

What a great name. Finally, we got a scientist in there with some hair on his chest.

We? This is CERN. Our atom smasher was cockblocked. We get no atom smasher!

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Where would these super-particles come from? Or all that mass, to make the Killer Black Hole? Were these people awake one day in a high school science class?

That's really the point of it all. People take theories and try to apply known science to them to scare people. When the theory came up of creating enough force with the collider to create a micro black hole, what little we know of black holes (giant spinning nom noms with extreme gravitational force) was instantly applied by the general stupid public to create the scare of a threat that does not exist (excusing the uncertainty principle).

Assume that when Stephen Hawking changed his mind and said there probably aren't any quantum black holes, no one heard him. A black hole a few atoms wide would still have no visible effect on anything around it. We used to think the Tunguskga explosion was a small black hole passing through the planet; there was a search for the exit point for a while. Now we know that was a meteor (found the acid-rain layer from the assload of nitrogen oxides reentry would have created), but there was nothing all that implausible about a small black hole reentering, the atmospheric friction causing the "explosion", but the mass itself passing through the core with no discernable effect. It would rob us of a few dozen tons on its way through, and neither it, nor we, would notice the difference. Now Hawking says that while there's nothing that says an existing quantum black hole couldn't continue existing, creating one is basically impossible. Something about the math equates to negative quantities of energy near the site, and as far as we understand, that's impossible.

Just to niggle a bit: while the philosophical implications of quantum theory are indeed highly debated, the theory itself has been exceedingly well tested (experimental measurements of fundamental constants agree with theoretical predictions to fifteen digits of precision and counting, making QED the single most accurate scientific theory to date). We know that quantum mechanics works, we know exactly how it works, we just don't know what the fuck it means.

Reminds me of Stephen King's story "The mist" (not that shitty movie either...)

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Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

Dr Strangelet - or how I learned to stop worrying and love the relativistic heavy ion collider.

I have a crowbar and a chainsaw. I'm prepared for the wormhole to open. You can feel bad for me for not wanting AIDs infected dentists ramming their fingers down my throat all you want.

I'll be the guy whacking Imps and cacodeamons while wearing green concrete body armor not caring.

That's not how I understand it. The string theory is just that- a theory, not a principal. Scientists are still trying to figure it out.

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

String Theory != Quantum Mechanics or rather, in this case, Quantum Electrodynamics

Sarissa Candyangel

Feh, another cutoff.

The purpose of the LHC is to explore string theory, but the basis for the doomsday theories lies in quantum mechanics which is quite well defined. We just have no concept of 'how' it works physically because it is in large part probabalistic.

Sarissa Candyangel

We've been hearing predictions of doom for centuries. Why do we still even acknowledge these people?

because people are fucking retarded

Now the ad hominem attacks start coming.

Regardless, I'm not saying anything will go wrong. I'm not suggesting that we are doomed if we do this.

What I AM saying, is that if there's a remote chance of "the high-energy particle collisions producing phenomena dangerous to the Earth, such as the creation of micro black holes, strangelets, vacuum bubbles and magnetic monopoles", is it worth the risk? At least, until we understand it better?

I am aware that teams of scientists have evaluated and re-evaluated the safety of LHC, and found little to no risk involved. However, I will admit I'll be less stressed out after they switch it on and nothing goes wrong, heh.

The LHC is the means by which we can understand it.

If it makes you feel better, particles many thousand times more energetic hit our atmosphere every few hours; and have for millions of years. When particle accelerators are capable of meeting or exceeding those energies, then I'd say concern would be justified.

Sarissa Candyangel

That's just the thing. We understand enough to have already made the judgment as a society that the risk is worth the benefits. It's the same thing with the AIDS workers thread. Do these activities increase the risk to you personally? Of course, but this is NOT QED for your argument, my friends.

Often society must make decisions about what is best for people in the aggregate or in the long term as opposed to what is good for individuals or in the short term. It happens every day, and you can probably come up with plenty of examples for yourself. Deciding which of these risks is worth taking is most often the province of the law.

The reason why the American justice system will laugh the case out of court regarding the CERN components coming from America is because we as a society have made a judgment that significant scientific progress is more important to us than the ridiculously small chance that something will go wrong on a meaningful scale. The reason why we don't have a law against AIDS infected workers is because we as a society have decided that allowing people to function productively as medical professionals in our economy is more important than any tiny risk they might pose to those they treat through their HIV status.

The people making the argument that the activities in these threads should not take place because they raise the background level of risk on an almost theoretical level are taking an individualist philosophy to a ridiculous extreme. The fact is that our interests individually must occasionally be subsumed in favor of the interests of society. Just because you get a little squeamish about odds you don't even really understand does not mean that other people should just stop in their tracks.

Finally, just remember: you're a beneficiary of this principal as much as you're burdened by it; to sustain your life as you know it, you unavoidably put others to risks that they might not like either. We can examine these risks and argue about whether they're balanced with the benefits, but we can't claim they're unjust merely because they're there.

_________________
Knowledge without reason is useless.

http://boxrockssocks.blogspot.com/

*principle

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Knowledge without reason is useless.

http://boxrockssocks.blogspot.com/

Sounds like the plot to a bad Star Trek novel.

Remote in this sense is equivalent to saying there's a remote chance that a Chicago Cubs team will issue forth from the nether that's capable of winning the World Series 10 straight times.

Seriously, no sarcasm intended (beyond busting Cubs fans' balls). There's a "remote" chance of this occurring.

Like Sarissa said, quantum mechanics and string theory are two vastly different theories. QM has been around for a century and has been exhaustively tested. String theory is an as yet untested attempt to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity. Despite its prominence in pop culture, string theory isn't taken particularly seriously in the physics community, particularly among experimentalists. This is because string theory has enough free parameters that it can explain any physical phenomena - even contradictory ones - and hence makes no falsifiable predictions. So, in its current state, string theory is not a scientific theory. It's an interesting mathematical construct with great potential, but as yet it is not science.

The LHC is not a string theory experiment. String theory experiments do not, and cannot at present, exist. The LHC is a high energy physics experiment designed at improving our knowledge of particle physics, and smoothing out some kinks in the Standard Model thereof. It may provide a heuristic for choosing which string theory (there are dozens) is the most viable, but it will not contradict any of the string theories.

So the physics behind the LHC is well known. Rest assured that it is safe.

I hope they do the test run on a Monday, it would suck to get wiped out right before a weekend.

The ice-nine scenario is a pretty interesting one once you dig into the nuts and bolts of it. Wasn't there a movie or some such based on that?

Book by Kurt Vonnegut. Cat's Cradle, IIRC.

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True but I was thinking of a TV show or a movie. Figured it out though, it was an episode of Odyssey 5 which appeared on SciFi at one point.

The countdown is approaching.

Read a pretty cool article about the changes for various discoveries. Worth a read, fairly entertaining..

http://cosmicvariance.com/2008/08/04/wh ... -lhc-find/

Oh, and the pictures from this site are the best I've seen.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/0 ... lider.html

Damn that shit is intimidating looking. =O

According to Wikipedia:


So we need to wait until October 21st for the end of the world, dammit.

I'm going to build a Hadron Collider in my backyard and beat them to it.

Pretty cool interactive from MSNBC:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26562876/

So this is where all that money went that I have been applying for...? an Atom-smasher!?

Sigh.. my Quantem Leap project will just have to wait.

We're still alive!

Woot!

We have time still, they haven't collided anything yet.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Van, you're definitely a "the-glass-is-half-empty" kind of person, heh.

Fixed

Sarissa Candyangel

That video was fucking awesome!

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Everyone can now take a deep breath and relax for a couple of months...

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/09 ... index.html

sigh

Oh hell

Scientists Not So Sure 'Doomsday Machine' Won't Destroy World
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,483477,00.html

Wow, more retarded reporting from Fox News.

CHECK AGAIN!

That is great..

Gah, the suspense.... it's killing me. Will spring never come?

Enjoy

Truck-mounted laser shoots down spy drone
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... nline-news