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Large Hadron Collider Question

INRM

Philosopher
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I was reading in a magazine that one of the goals of the LHC was to actually create micro-black holes.

Was this actually true?
 
I don't believe it was a goal, per se, but it was one of the things that might not be completely impossible for it to do. If it did, they would be of no consequence to us in a safety sense, however. There is absurdly highly energetic radiation from space that collides with the atmosphere constantly that could do/has done anything the LHC will do and more, however, it does so at random spots over the surface of the globe in an unpredictable pattern. The LHC allows us to watch a large number of highly energetic reactions in one place.
 
What magazine? Vouge?

As JasonPatterson said, there are much more energetic collisons happening all the time in the upper part of our atmosphere. The LHC just allows us to pick and choose when and where those collisons happen, and watch them. That's the really hard part.
 
INRM said:
I was reading in a magazine that one of the goals of the LHC was to actually create micro-black holes.

Was this actually true?
Click to expand...

No. The goal of the LHC is to determine the origin of electroweak symmetry breaking.

If the LHC produces "black holes" it will be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science and a revolution in our way of thinking about the world. Among other things it would imply that there are extra dimensions of space, that they are relatively large, and probably that our world is confined to a hypersurface in that larger space.

Unfortunately it is also extremely unlikely.
 
I agree with Sol. The LHC wasn't designed specifically with this in mind, but if it happened it'd be pretty damn cool.

And even if the LHC did create such micro-BHs, in the worst case scenario nothing bad would happen. Linky.
 
MattusMaximus said:
And even if the LHC did create such micro-BHs, in the worst case scenario nothing bad would happen. Linky.
Click to expand...

You shouldn't say stuff like that. Now I'm thinking that if we're really lucky with the LHC candy will rain down from the sky.
 
BTW, here's some current news on LHC:

Particles are back in the LHC!
Last weekend (23-25 October) particles once again entered the LHC after the one-year interruption following the incident of September 2008. Particles traveled through one sector clockwise and one anticlockwise. ALICE and LHCb, the two experiments sitting along the portion of the beam lines in question, were able to observe the first effects of real beams in the machine.
Click to expand...
 
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