The Big Bang

[TTR Dr Payne]

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinio...65.html?page=2


I couldnt stop laughing while reading this article, but it still is an interesting read.

It's a whiz-bang experiment, with a downside that could really suck

Graham Phillips
April 13, 2008
Page 1 of 2 | Single page
Other related coverage

* Black hole lawsuit
* World's largest experiment set to go off with a Big Bang

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WILL the world end later this year? In mid-August, in a chamber deep underneath the Swiss-French border, physicists will switch on a machine that might produce the first man-made black holes. Normally only found in outer space, these high-gravity objects have a reputation for devouring all matter in their vicinity — and they only stop when the food runs out. Could the Earth's first black hole also end up being its last, after it sucks in the chamber, the physicists, and the entire planet?

The possibility has had some press lately because two people are so concerned by this whoops-apocalypse scenario they've taken legal action against CERN, the European agency doing the experiment. The two litigants claim researchers haven't done the appropriate risk assessments for this mother of all science experiments.

The experiment will be carried out with the most powerful atom-smasher ever built — the Large Hadron Collider. In a few months' time, the machine will push bunches of subatomic particles round and round a 27-kilometre-long ring at almost light speed, and then bring them into a head-on collision. Rising from the debris of the impact, according to some theories, could be minuscule black holes.

Now, the CERN scientists calculate that the baby black holes' existence will be fleeting. So fleeting, in fact, they'll evaporate almost the instant they form, long before they've had a chance to gobble down the collider or any physicists. (Although they will hang around long enough for measurements to be made, allowing researchers to make some remarkable discoveries about the cosmos.) The physics community says the chance of the particle accelerator inadvertently becoming some sort of doomsday device is almost zero. But the interesting thing is, the probability is not exactly zero, so critics argue the possibility can't be ruled out absolutely.

If you're familiar with risk assessment forms, you'll have noticed there's no section for calculating accidental Armageddon. But, in what must be one of the strangest papers published in the science journal Nature, a couple of mathematical physicists have come up with a way to roughly estimate the probability that a tinkering physicist will slip up and obliterate the world. It turns out the chance of such a cosmic calamity in any one year is less than a trillion to one. But is that risk low enough?

Dealing with low risk is an issue that not only applies to atom smashers: it's relevant to every new technology that's developed. Whether it be genetically modified foods, mobile phones or new medical procedures, no matter how much testing is done it's simply not possible to prove that anything is 100% safe.

Critics point out that one way of putting any risk into context, including the collider risk, is to work out just how bad the consequences of an accident would be. Having your entire planet slurped into a hole in the space-time continuum is a fairly high-impact outcome. And, according to an even more extreme (but highly speculative) theory, that may not be the worst of it.

The atom-smasher could unexpectedly cause what physicists innocuously describe as "a transition to a lower vacuum state". The consequence of this brand new vacuum state would be a wave of obliteration emanating from the Earth at the speed of light that would eventually annihilate the observable universe. Now that'd be a cosmic cock-up!

Should the physicists be stopped from switching on their machine? Well, it's important to keep in mind that there are plenty of wild theories out there in physics, and most of them are eventually proved untrue. Plus, odds of less than a trillion to one are pretty low. For example, the chances of civilisation being destroyed by a killer asteroid from space are way higher.

And the Nature paper outlines another scenario that is far more likely than any scientist bringing on doomsday. It turns out nature has her own atom-smashers. Particles travelling near the speed of light are continually whizzing through the galaxy. These cosmic rays crash into the atoms in our planet's atmosphere with an impact far greater than will be achieved by the CERN atom-smasher.

Nature's atom-smashing experiments have been going on for the 4½ billion years the Earth has been around and no world-ending black holes have been created so far. Indeed, the paper in Nature estimates that the risk of one of these natural particle colliders ending the world is 1000 times greater than the chance of us doing it.

Of course physicists should be able to switch on their collider and start making some of the remarkable discoveries about our universe that await. The machine promises to explore exciting territory: finding more of the cosmos' fundamental building blocks, for example, and perhaps even unearthing new hidden dimensions.



http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080910/ap_on_sc/big_bang

GENEVA - The world's largest particle collider successfully completed its first major test by firing a beam of protons around a 17-mile underground ring Wednesday in what scientists hope is the next great step to understanding the makeup of the universe.
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After a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen at 10:36 a.m. indicating that the protons had traveled the full length of the $3.8 billion Large Hadron Collider.

"There it is," project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap.

Champagne corks popped in labs as far away as Chicago, where contributing scientists watched the proceedings by satellite. Physicists around the world now have much greater power than ever before to smash the components of atoms together in attempts to see how they are made.

"Well done everybody," said Robert Aymar, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to cheers from the assembled scientists in the collider's control room at the Swiss-French border.

The organization, known by its French acronym CERN, began firing the protons — a type of subatomic particle — around the tunnel in stages less than an hour earlier.

Now that the beam has been successfully tested in clockwise direction, CERN plans to send it counterclockwise. Eventually two beams will be fired in opposite directions with the aim of recreating conditions a split second after the big bang, which scientists theorize was the massive explosion that created the universe.

The start of the collider — described as the biggest physics experiment in history — comes over the objections of some skeptics who fear the collision of protons could eventually imperil the earth.

The skeptics theorized that a byproduct of the collisions could be micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

"It's nonsense," said James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN, before Wednesday's start.

CERN is backed by leading scientists like Britain's Stephen Hawking in dismissing the fears and declaring the experiments to be absolutely safe.

Gillies told the AP that the most dangerous thing that could happen would be if a beam at full power were to go out of control, and that would only damage the accelerator itself and burrow into the rock around the tunnel.

Nothing of the sort occurred Wednesday, though accelerator is still probably a year away from full power.

"On Wednesday we start small," said Gillies. "A really good result would be to have the other beam going around, too, because once you've got a beam around once in both directions you know that there is no show-stopper."

The project organized by the 20 European member nations of CERN has attracted researchers from 80 nations. Some 1,200 are from the United States, an observer country which contributed US$531 million. Japan, another observer, also is a major contributor.

The collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the tunnel.

Smaller colliders have been used for decades to study the makeup of the atom. Less than 100 years ago scientists thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of an atom's nucleus, but in stages since then experiments have shown they were made of still smaller quarks and gluons and that there were other forces and particles.

The CERN experiments could reveal more about "dark matter," antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. It could also find evidence of the hypothetical particle — the Higgs boson — believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.

Some scientists have been waiting for 20 years to use the LHC.

[Imonati]

Haha it happened today

[TTR Dr Payne]

yea the first test of it has already happened, but from what I read the first test was just having the things spin in one direction, they didnt actually have two spinning in different directions colliding with each other which could possibly have some killer effects, or so some say, lol. That test from what I recall reading I believe is supposed to happen next year some time.

[IllBashU]

holy shit! we are all going die!

[Imonati]

Hopefully you do

[paintba||er]

LOL, there are so many more likely ways for us to become extinct...I mean, there are volcanoes that are overdue for an eruption, and that if they were to erupt, anything within a 100,000 miles would be instantly obliviated , and the rest of the world would be filled with ash. So if you were lucky you would instantly die, and the rest of you would slowly and painfully suffocate.

That's a lot more likely, and a lot more terrifying than a black hole thing...

[IllBashU]

hopefully that wont happen....

other way.

US will start a nuclear war which would be worse.

[paintba||er]

Russia has more nuclear weapons...

And of course, some über 1337 h4xx0r could "write" a human virus. It's just like binary, except that it's base 4 instead of base 2.

[IllBashU]

no it doesn't...

United States


10,455

Russia


8,400

China


400

France


350

Israel*


250

United Kingdom


200

India**


65

Pakistan**


40

North Korea***


8

TOTAL


20,168

http://encarta.msn.com/column_nukes_...sgotnukes.html

[paintba||er]

Your source sucks dick. I believe that the US and Russian government are better sources.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ear_stockpiles

[IllBashU]

WIKI isn't a good source. anyone can change it.

[paintba||er]

Idiot...That's why there are SOURCES! Wikis are a great source if you aren't an idiot. And as you can see, the sources for both the Russian and US numbers are very reliable.