The Large Hadron Collider

[CaleyD]

Seems to have stirred up a fair bit of debate on the radio today.

What's people's thoughts, and has anyone spotted a blackhole in their back garden yet?

Personally, I have a kind of geeky interest in these kind of things. It never fails to amaze me what advances are being made in technology, physics etc. and although there's no obvious benefit from it right now I believe we'll be sitting in a few years time praising it as the birth of something we, as yet, can't imagine.

[CaleyP]

i think its interesting...especially the fact that its stirring up a few concerns from a few scientists. however, todays tests seem to have gone well. but they were only testing the beams going in one direction at a time...clockwise first then anti clockwise.... but i guess we wont know exactly how well its really gonna go until they try out with both beams going at once colliding into one another....hmmmm....sparks will be flying..

Edited September 10, 2008 by CaleyP

[Guest couchpotato]

I just hope we dont get any dyslexic scientists working on the large hadron collidors or their could be more than black holes :o

[Yngwie]

My ears pricked up when it was mentioned that Switzerland might disappear, but then someone set the record straight and I lost interest.

A total geek ex-flatmate of mine went out to work in that CERN place, but our paths haven't collided since.

[Yngwie]

has anyone spotted a blackhole in their back garden yet?

Well, Switzerland lost at home to Luxembourg tonight

[CaleyD]

I just hope we dont get any dyslexic scientists working on the large hadron collidors or their could be more than black holes :o

New York Times......Oops!!!

[CaleyP]

after reading that no wonder that there are a few concerns....how do we know what will happen if a black hole is created....is someone just chucking a guess out there that it will just evaperate...haha we're fecked...

[Dmacca]

The scale fo the project and the money thrown at it suggest to me that theres alot more to it than meets the eye, could it be a new weapon to keep America in contol of the world or even space.

[Yngwie]

It's an entirely European controlled and funded project.

But if you want conspiracy theories, CERN is central to the plot of one of Dan Brown's novels.

[SMEE]

Am not sure they wanna be dabbling with things like this. Whos to say what could hapen. Imagine they did re-create the big bang and it went out of control. Were Doomed Captain Manwairing!

[Charles Bannerman]

For goodness sake, this speculation about a black hole is complete rubbish.... like suggesting that a drop of water on your thumb will drown you.

It's either the creation of some red top tabloids who know exactly how gullible and cerebrally challenged most of their readers are... or a complete myth put out on the quiet by the CERN people themselves who are laughing like drains about the mass of publicity it has generated for their project.

[BornCaley]

For goodness sake, this speculation about a black hole is complete rubbish.... like suggesting that a drop of water on your thumb will drown you.

It's either the creation of some red top tabloids who know exactly how gullible and cerebrally challenged most of their readers are... or a complete myth put out on the quiet by the CERN people themselves who are laughing like drains about the mass of publicity it has generated for their project.

Hmm, im not sure the black hole theory is "complete rubbish"...if you read anything about quantum mechanics, then it is theoretically possible to create one in that type of environment. My problem with it is its all speculation. This machine will do little to explain the birth of the universe, even if it did manage to create some sort of cosmic event or the mysterious "god particle"...it will still be up for speculation and counter-speculation...Just like so many other mysteries in the world ( JFK, Jack the Ripper, Gordon Strachan)

Bottom line is its only a simulation,,,nothing on earth could produce the type of energy required to generate a black hole or any other cosmic soup, We are humans after all not gods.

like you Charles...im a uber geek about this..so hope it can at least explain why we never see baby pidgoens, lol

[Jay_7]

Just to set the record straight here, they are not trying to recreate the big bang. They are trying to recreate the conditions immediately after the big bang. There's a huge difference there.

All the scaremongerers are latching on to what Stephen Hawking has said in that a collision can potentially create a black hole. Obviously I'm paraphrasing a little here but the key word in that is "potentially". Also what everyone has failed to pick up on is the rest of what Hawking said on the subject. The bit where he said if a black hole was to be created, it would be 200,000 times smaller than a penny and would collapse on itself in a fraction of a second. In other words, not only would the black hole created not be big enough to even capture anything to feed itself on and grow, but it wouldn't be stable enough to be open for long enough to do anything of note.

Essentially the purpose of the experiment is to steer us in the right direction for the answers to things like "What is mass?" and "What holds the universe together?" and to explain things like dark matter.

What puzzles me, is we're pouring money into answering questions like that but we still don't know much about the deepest parts of the worlds oceans.

[CaleyD]

The potential for creating a "Black Hole" is far from myth and even the experts say that it is possible...if not in fact likely. However in my limited understanding of what a Black Hole actually is, and based on what i've heard about them in relation to the LHC, not only would they be minuscule, but the environment is not suitable to sustaining their existence for anything more than millionths of a second.

As has been said, these kinds of collisions happen hundreds of thousands of times every day in our atmosphere, and the energy creating them is far greater than the energy being used to re-create a simulation of it within the LHC.

Also, if you read up on what exactly they are attempting to do, they are not looking to re-create the big bang and if the experiment they are conducting is successful it will tell us little about what caused it, what they are hypothesising is that the energy release/change or whatever happens will, in theory, create conditions similar to those that existed millionths of a second after the big bang. This is a scaled test and nowhere near the size of what they believe kick started the Universe.

You just need to listen to guys like Hawking and you'll soon become aware that the there's very limited chance of them finding the Higgs (God) Particle or them getting the information needed to form the "Theory of Everything" and that the best many of them are hoping for is the unexpected. They know they will see certain things and get certain results....it's the stuff they can't foresee that's of most interest as this is what increases knowledge and expands thinking.

Yeah, there's a certain element of "we don't know what will happen" which generates a fear of the unknown and whilst I am of a mind that they wouldn't be doing thee experiments if they had even an inkling it would destroy the world in it's entirety....so what if it does? It's not as if anyone is going to be around to worry about it afterwards

[CaleyD]

What puzzles me, is we're pouring money into answering questions like that but we still don't know much about the deepest parts of the worlds oceans.

This is something which doesn't puzzle me at all.

"Man" by its very nature is programmed to survive....much like any other animal. We know that our planet has a finite lifespan and that survival beyond the existence of the planet means finding a new home or a means of surviving in space.

Put simply, our curiosity for what lies in the deepest part of the oceans is outweighed by our instinct to survive.

[Jay_7]

What puzzles me, is we're pouring money into answering questions like that but we still don't know much about the deepest parts of the worlds oceans.

This is something which doesn't puzzle me at all.

"Man" by its very nature is programmed to survive....much like any other animal. We know that our planet has a finite lifespan and that survival beyond the existence of the planet means finding a new home or a means of surviving in space.

Put simply, our curiosity for what lies in the deepest part of the oceans is outweighed by our instinct to survive.

I haven't actually thought of it like that. There have been various things I've heard about this potentially being the key to things like Nuclear Fusion and even time travel but I haven't looked into what the physics behind those theories are. The Fusion theory is more obvious than the time travel one as essentially Nuclear Fusion is how to maintain a small star and not turn it into a black hole, but the time travel one seems a little far fetched for me.

[CaleyP]

i think its funny how us normal people with normal brains are trying to second guess these genius's they have working on the LHC. all i said earlier in this thread was just a mess around, i have no doubt that they have complete control in what they are doing and wouldnt be doing any experiment that could possibly destroy the earth. all someone needs to do is chuck in the word 'destroy' and there we have it....HYSTERIA

[The Mantis]

If the whole thing turns out a flop maybe we could send Rossco over and just for a laugh give him a wee thrill belting round that thing at pace.

[CaleyP]

If the whole thing turns out a flop maybe we could send Rossco over and just for a laugh give him a wee thrill belting round that thing at pace.

[CaleyD]

What puzzles me, is we're pouring money into answering questions like that but we still don't know much about the deepest parts of the worlds oceans.

This is something which doesn't puzzle me at all.

"Man" by its very nature is programmed to survive....much like any other animal. We know that our planet has a finite lifespan and that survival beyond the existence of the planet means finding a new home or a means of surviving in space.

Put simply, our curiosity for what lies in the deepest part of the oceans is outweighed by our instinct to survive.

I haven't actually thought of it like that. There have been various things I've heard about this potentially being the key to things like Nuclear Fusion and even time travel but I haven't looked into what the physics behind those theories are. The Fusion theory is more obvious than the time travel one as essentially Nuclear Fusion is how to maintain a small star and not turn it into a black hole, but the time travel one seems a little far fetched for me.

Depends on how you view time travel. If it's the belief that we can go back and visit a point in time which has already occured....then even the most radical scientists find it hard to prove that one. However, I think it's the Special Theory of Relativety which suggests that a body in motion travels slower through time than a body at rest (or something like that). Experiments have been done to prove this to a certain extent....i.e. If you take a clock and leave it in one place, then place and identical clock on a plane and fly it around the earth then when it gets back to the first clock the times no longer match and the one that's been on the journey will be showing slower. By taking that to the extreme, scientist have a theory that if you can build a ship which travels fast enough then you can send people to the edge of the Universe and back within their lifetime....the only problem is, their lifetime (although it may have only seemed like 50 years) has been many millions of years in "earth time".

Flip that on it's head and try and come up with the opposite scenario for sending someone back in time. You would need to devise some kind of "reverse speed" which goes slower than standing still....that's just not possible, I can't even imagine a "slower than stationary" scenario. Even if you could come up with a theory for that, then you also have to conclude that if you want to send someone back 50 years in "earth time" then it's going to take millions of years of "their time" to do it.

Time travel going forward....yes, and we are already doing it, although not to any great extent. Every time you step on a plane, travel in a car or even walk down the street you are "in theory" traveling forward in time in relative to where you set off from.....how's that for mind boggling?

I'm sure someone smarter than I will be along to put me right if I have messed up on anything, but that's my whole understanding of the 4th Dimension.

I'm not sure how all of this ties in to the LHC and any thoughts that it might enlighten us any more in respect of travelling at, or near, the speed of light. All I know is that the Speed of Light is a really strange thing, and if I remember correctly back to my Physics days the speed of light never changes. i.e. If you were travelling at the speed of light and you shone a torch in front of you then you would expect that it would produce no beam as you were travelling at the same speed as it so it could not get ahead of you.....but it does, and if you measure that beam whilst sill in motion then it will still register as "the speed of light", and even if someone not travelling at the speed of light was to measure the speed of the beam from your torch, it would only measure as the speed of light and not twice the speed of light which is what you might expect. I'm quite logically minded, but I just can't get my head around that one.

There's obviously something "magical" about the speed of light, or what causes light to behave in the way it does which we don't yet fully understand. However, if we can fire a Proton at near the speed of light and cause a collision which will take particles beyond that speed then we might go some way towards understanding how to do it, or what's required to do it. Although I don't believe it will ever lead to true time travel (as opposed to the relative time travel I mention above), it might give us a better understanding on how to "cheat" or "freeze" time and in turn we'll be able to send people far in to space and bring them back, not only within their lifetime, but within the lifetime of those who have sent them and remain behind.

There you go....it may be a load of gobbledygook....but that's how my head processes these things and what my understanding of it all is.

[Guest couchpotato]

The first webcam footage of whats goig on in Cern......very interesting

the hardon collidor in action!

[Scarlet Pimple]

Yngwie

You are not quite correct about the financing...Canada has sunk $100,000 into the CERN project apparently and has about 150 scientists ( I recall) there at the moment.

Remember the "Canadarm" on the space shuttles.--we are no stiffs when it comes to these kinds of projects .

[caley100]

This time travel thing is a bit mind boggling eh, It gives my missus a real headache...

I leave to go to the football on a saturday, so in theory i should be gone 2 maybe 2 1/2 hours, so when i come home 5 hours later smelling of drink my excuse is time travel/time slip.

However the same rule applies to women who go shopping for an hour and come back 3 hours later.

[Jay_7]

Perhaps the torch thing could be that the speed of light isn't actually a constant at all. If you were travelling at the speed of light and shone a torch in front of you to produce a beam, perhaps the speed of that light is a multiple of the speed you're travelling at?

[Guest Spectre]

Well the whole point about Special Relativity is that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light and in fact only massless particles can travel at the speed of light.

So if you take two spaceships travelling RELATIVE to earth at 3/4 the speed of light in opposite directions (so one coming towards us and one going away), ordinary ("classical") mechanics would say that RELATIVE to each other they are travelling at 1.5 times the speed of light.

However this turns out to be wrong. If you measured the speed of one spaceship from the other, you would find that it is travelling towards you at more than 3/4 but less than 1 times the speed of light. (There is a formula.)

Similarly if you took a torch and shined it out of the spaceship, the light beam would still approach every other body in the universe at exactly the speed of light, irrespective of how fast that body was travelling relative to the spaceship.