Angels & Demons in real life

Diabeetus · Jun 30, 2008

It seems like I read about this somewhere before...

I love reading stories about scientific stuff like this. I hope something cool happens.

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

MEYRIN, Switzerland (AP) -- The most powerful atom-smasher ever built could make some bizarre discoveries, such as invisible matter or extra dimensions in space, after it is switched on in August.

But some critics fear the Large Hadron Collider could exceed physicists' wildest conjectures: Will it spawn a black hole that could swallow Earth?

Or spit out particles that could turn the planet into a hot dead clump?

Ridiculous, say scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French initials CERN -- some of whom have been working for a generation on the $5.8 billion collider, or LHC.

"Obviously, the world will not end when the LHC switches on," said project leader Lyn Evans.

David Francis, a physicist on the collider's huge ATLAS particle detector, smiled when asked whether he worried about black holes and hypothetical killer particles known as strangelets.

"If I thought that this was going to happen, I would be well away from here," he said.

The collider basically consists of a ring of supercooled magnets 17 miles in circumference attached to huge barrel-shaped detectors. The ring, which straddles the French and Swiss border, is buried 330 feet underground.

The machine, which has been called the largest scientific experiment in history, isn't expected to begin test runs until August, and ramping up to full power could take months. But once it is working, it is expected to produce some startling findings.

Scientists plan to hunt for signs of the invisible "dark matter" and "dark energy" that make up more than 96 percent of the universe, and hope to glimpse the elusive Higgs boson, a so-far undiscovered particle thought to give matter its mass.

The collider could find evidence of extra dimensions, a boon for superstring theory, which holds that quarks, the particles that make up atoms, are infinitesimal vibrating strings.

The theory could resolve many of physics' unanswered questions, but requires about 10 dimensions -- far more than the three spatial dimensions our senses experience.

The safety of the collider, which will generate energies seven times higher than its most powerful rival, at Fermilab near Chicago, has been debated for years. The physicist Martin Rees has estimated the chance of an accelerator producing a global catastrophe at one in 50 million -- long odds, to be sure, but about the same as winning some lotteries.

By contrast, a CERN team this month issued a report concluding that there is "no conceivable danger" of a cataclysmic event. The report essentially confirmed the findings of a 2003 CERN safety report, and a panel of five prominent scientists not affiliated with CERN, including one Nobel laureate, endorsed its conclusions.

Critics of the LHC filed a lawsuit in a Hawaiian court in March seeking to block its startup, alleging that there was "a significant risk that ... operation of the Collider may have unintended consequences which could ultimately result in the destruction of our planet."

One of the plaintiffs, Walter L. Wagner, a physicist and lawyer, said Wednesday CERN's safety report, released June 20, "has several major flaws," and his views on the risks of using the particle accelerator had not changed.

On Tuesday, U.S. Justice Department lawyers representing the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation filed a motion to dismiss the case.

The two agencies have contributed $531 million to building the collider, and the NSF has agreed to pay $87 million of its annual operating costs. Hundreds of American scientists will participate in the research.

The lawyers called the plaintiffs' allegations "extraordinarily speculative," and said "there is no basis for any conceivable threat" from black holes or other objects the LHC might produce. A hearing on the motion is expected in late July or August.

In rebutting doomsday scenarios, CERN scientists point out that cosmic rays have been bombarding the earth, and triggering collisions similar to those planned for the collider, since the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago.

And so far, Earth has survived.

"The LHC is only going to reproduce what nature does every second, what it has been doing for billions of years," said John Ellis, a British theoretical physicist at CERN.

Critics like Wagner have said the collisions caused by accelerators could be more hazardous than those of cosmic rays.

Both may produce micro black holes, subatomic versions of cosmic black holes -- collapsed stars whose gravity fields are so powerful that they can suck in planets and other stars.

But micro black holes produced by cosmic ray collisions would likely be traveling so fast they would pass harmlessly through the earth.

Micro black holes produced by a collider, the skeptics theorize, would move more slowly and might be trapped inside the earth's gravitational field -- and eventually threaten the planet.

Ellis said doomsayers assume that the collider will create micro black holes in the first place, which he called unlikely. And even if they appeared, he said, they would instantly evaporate, as predicted by the British physicist Stephen Hawking.

As for strangelets, CERN scientists point out that they have never been proven to exist. They said that even if these particles formed inside the Collider they would quickly break down.

When the LHC is finally at full power, two beams of protons will race around the huge ring 11,000 times a second in opposite directions. They will travel in two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder and emptier than outer space.

Their trajectory will be curved by supercooled magnets -- to guide the beams around the rings and prevent the packets of protons from cutting through the surrounding magnets like a blowtorch.

The paths of these beams will cross, and a few of the protons in them will collide, at a series of cylindrical detectors along the ring. The two largest detectors are essentially huge digital cameras, each weighing thousands of tons, capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.

Each year the detectors will generate 15 petabytes of data, the equivalent of a stack of CDs 12 miles tall. The data will require a high speed global network of computers for analysis.

Wagner and others filed a lawsuit to halt operation of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state in 1999. The courts dismissed the suit.

The leafy campus of CERN, a short drive from the shores of Lake Geneva, hardly seems like ground zero for doomsday. And locals don't seem overly concerned. Thousands attended an open house here this spring.

"There is a huge army of scientists who know what they are talking about and are sleeping quite soundly as far as concerns the LHC," said project leader Evans.
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PeteyPirate · Jun 30, 2008

Maybe this device will allow you to go back in time, before this thread would have been a D-B.

Ace · Jun 30, 2008

"Obviously, the world will not end when the LHC switches on," said project leader Lyn Evans.
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Yeah, well, thanks for jinxing Earth just the same, dammit!

ThomsonONE · Jun 30, 2008

Instead of spending $5.8 billion on a toy for a few physics professors, can't we spend that money and devote the brainpower to finding a clean fuel source?

Grimace · Jun 30, 2008

ThomsonONE said:

Instead of spending $5.8 billion on a toy for a few physics professors, can't we spend that money and devote the brainpower to finding a clean fuel source?
Click to expand...

Get with the program. With this thingy, we can bend space and travel through black holes. That 45-minute commute? Ha! More like .000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds.

Armchair_QB · Jun 30, 2008

Grimace said:

ThomsonONE said:

Instead of spending $5.8 billion on a toy for a few physics professors, can't we spend that money and devote the brainpower to finding a clean fuel source?
Click to expand...

Get with the program. With this thingy, we can bend space and travel through black holes. That 45-minute commute? Ha! More like .000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds.
Click to expand...

alleyallen · Jun 30, 2008

Armchair_QB said:

Grimace said:

ThomsonONE said:

Instead of spending $5.8 billion on a toy for a few physics professors, can't we spend that money and devote the brainpower to finding a clean fuel source?
Click to expand...

Get with the program. With this thingy, we can bend space and travel through black holes. That 45-minute commute? Ha! More like .000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds.
Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Maybe so, but our clothing will be better. Bank on it!

Armchair_QB · Jun 30, 2008

AlleyAllen said:

Armchair_QB said:

Grimace said:

ThomsonONE said:

Instead of spending $5.8 billion on a toy for a few physics professors, can't we spend that money and devote the brainpower to finding a clean fuel source?
Click to expand...

Get with the program. With this thingy, we can bend space and travel through black holes. That 45-minute commute? Ha! More like .000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds.
Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Maybe so, but our clothing will be better. Bank on it!
Click to expand...

Better than that? Yeah, right...

alleyallen · Jun 30, 2008

Armchair_QB said:

AlleyAllen said:

Armchair_QB said:

Grimace said:

ThomsonONE said:

Instead of spending $5.8 billion on a toy for a few physics professors, can't we spend that money and devote the brainpower to finding a clean fuel source?
Click to expand...

Get with the program. With this thingy, we can bend space and travel through black holes. That 45-minute commute? Ha! More like .000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds.
Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Maybe so, but our clothing will be better. Bank on it!
Click to expand...

Better than that? Yeah, right...
Click to expand...

OK...maybe not better than Uhuru's skirt, but the man tunics? Ugh.

dixiehack · Jun 30, 2008

This thread was much cooler when I thought it was about Aussie rules football.

Songbird · Dec 9, 2009

No man-made black hole yet ...

GENEVA (AP) — The world's largest atom smasher has recorded its first high-energy collisions of protons, a spokeswoman said Wednesday.

Physicists hope those collisions will help them understand suspected phenomena such as dark matter, antimatter and ultimately the creation of the universe billions of years ago, which many theorize occurred as a massive explosion known as the Big Bang.

The collisions occurred Tuesday evening as the Large Haldron Collider underwent test runs in preparation for operations next year, said Christine Sutton of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN.

Two beams of circulating particles traveling in opposite directions at 1.18 trillion electron volts produced the collisions, she said. The Atlas "experiment," one of four major detectors in cathedral-sized rooms in the collider's underground tunnel at Geneva, had part of its equipment turned on and could register collisions.

"They recorded a handful of collisions, and one of them looks quite nice, so it's on their Web site," she said.

Sutton said the collisions occurred when the machine was ramped up briefly to 1.18 TeV. That same level set a world record for proton acceleration in November, when Geneva's particle beams traveled with 20 percent more power than Fermilab near Chicago, which previously held the record.

The operators plan many more collisions at lower energies so the experiments can calibrate their equipment and prepare for more advances ahead.

CERN then plans more collisions at 1.18 TeV to give all experiments the opportunity to record data at that level, but new scientific discoveries are not expected before next year when the beams are ramped up still higher, to 3.5 TeV.

That will be 3.5 times more energy that has been reached at Fermilab, previously the most powerful collider.
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Pancamo · Dec 9, 2009

The most recent issue of Vanity Fair has a story on the collider.

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Angels & Demons in real life

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