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Large Hadron Collider feedback needed

PadainFain said:
I missed Brian Cox's talk at TAM on Saturday (damn you alarm clock!) but someone tweeted that he said:

"Anyone who thinks the LHC will make blackholes is a twat".

I do not know if this is verbatim! :p
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Close. The actual quote was "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat.". Originally published in the Telegraph. Some people may find my signature strangely familiar.
 
LHC is safe for two partickles coliding but if three colide we will havfe one more of that big bang and disroy evrything. If careful taking is done for only two partickes then evryone is safe. Again this is exampel of that alaw of the 3.
 
Skamandros said:
LHC is safe for two partickles coliding but if three colide we will havfe one more of that big bang and disroy evrything. If careful taking is done for only two partickes then evryone is safe. Again this is exampel of that alaw of the 3.
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Considering that protons are made of 3 particles, and there are proton collisions happening right now in various accelerators, it's a miracle we're still here, isn't it?
 
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What is the actuall arguments from the people who are saying that it cant go wrong? I have heard like 2 or 3 people who says they think it might go wrong and they are not particle physicists if im right.

All i heard them saying is it, oh it may create black holes, strangelets etc. But not why or how.

Does someone know their arguments?
 
They don't have any arguments.

For example, there is a class of very hypothetical theories in which the force of gravity increases very rapidly below the scale of the size of a proton. If those theories are correct and the parameters are tuned just so, the LHC will produce gravitational resonances as well as ordinary particle physics resonances. Those gravitational resonances are extremely unstable and short-lived; they fly apart within a tiny fraction of a second (much like the ordinary particle physics resonances the LHC will certainly produce). People refer to them as "black holes" (even though they are neither black nor holes) because they are the distant cousins of the astrophysical black holes we see at the centers of galaxies. Roughly speaking, a hypothetical LHC "black hole" is to a real black hole as an electron is to the earth, and behaves as differently.

Because they are called black holes and everyone knows black holes are dangerous, some people are afraid of them. That's about the extent of the argument.
 
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Note to everyone, we're still here even though the Tevatron at FermiLab in Batavia, IL (just down the road from me) has been performed practically identical experiments to those in the LHC for 20+ years now.

But I'm sure that, any day now, the Tevatron will generate something which will kill us all - I'm sooooo worried :rolleyes:
 
Are they smashing the same kind of stuff together in the tevatron that they will do in the LHC? or any other accellerators?

Is it just the energys that is different?
 
Wallmott said:
Are they smashing the same kind of stuff together in the tevatron that they will do in the LHC? or any other accellerators?

Is it just the energys that is different?
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More or less, yes. The Tevatron is a proton-anti proton collider, and the LHC is a proton-proton collider (but at considerably higher energy).
 
This article is quite funny in light of this thread, ie, his theory that we are one of the only universes left in the multiverse thanks to the LHC going wrong all the time (ie the universes that it switched on ok in are destroyed by it)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/19/cern-higgs-boson-particle

However, any comments on the "ripples from the future", nature abhoring the higgs etc? Could this be even vaguely plausible?
 
Wallmott said:
Have they done any proton to proton collission before in any other accelerator?
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Reality Check said:
Yes, e.g the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider collides ions. Ions contain protons.
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1) RHIC also runs with plain ordinary protons. (They can polarize them, which no other collider can do.)
2) The Intersecting Storage Rings, the first collider of any sort, was pp.
3) A large number of fixed-target experiments have shot beams from proton accelerators (the Bevatron, AGS, SPS, Fermilab's booster and Main Injector) into stationary proton-rich targets which amounts to the same thing.
 
Shouldn´t the other accelerators already created the things that Walter L Wagner etc fears if it was possible? Or is it a magical limit at 3,5 TeV where he thinks they will be created?

Also i was wondering, Cern are using the cosmic ray argument, but are they really the same? Does not cosmic ray hit things that are standing still? And the LHC will have two things moving towards each other and then collide. And the cosmic rays is just one thing moving. Or am i totally wrong?
 
Wallmott said:
Shouldn´t the other accelerators already created the things that Walter L Wagner etc fears if it was possible? Or is it a magical limit at 3,5 TeV where he thinks they will be created?

Also i was wondering, Cern are using the cosmic ray argument, but are they really the same? Does not cosmic ray hit things that are standing still? And the LHC will have two things moving towards each other and then collide. And the cosmic rays is just one thing moving. Or am i totally wrong?
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Yes, LHC produces slower-moving collision products than cosmic rays do. However, WW isn't worried about particles that fall to the center of the Earth and never interact---he's worried about particles that fall to the center of the Earth and ingest matter, i.e. about mini-black-holes with a nonzero cross section with electrons and nuclei.

It turns out that this nonzero cross section, IF it is large enough to cause the "eat the earth" behavior, is also large enough to cause fast cosmic-ray-generated black holes to stop on their way through many stars and planets. So the CR argument works despite the speed difference.
 
At what TeV energy is it that WW and the other guys thinks that it is possible for mbhs and strange matter etc to be formed? Maximum energy of 14 Tev? or are they afraid of any TeV energys?
 
Wallmott said:
At what TeV energy is it that WW and the other guys thinks that it is possible for mbhs and strange matter etc to be formed? Maximum energy of 14 Tev? or are they afraid of any TeV energys?
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Wallmott, your question seems to assume that WW is thinking about the physics. He's not, he's reading the science section of the newspaper and projecting science-fiction fears onto it. If the paper reports that someone is building a 14 TeV collider, that's what he's afraid of. If the paper had reported that someone was building a 1 GeV muon collider, that would presumably be what he's afraid of.
 
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