Will CERN make black holes that will consume the Earth?

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by Lancer
Well that was an anti-climax. Every page of this steaming pile someone accused me of trying to get KH back. Now you're back and its a steaming pile.

You have seriously misunderstood KH - he doesn't care about steaming piles unless he have created them through proving their lack of knowledge, inadequacy etc.

To be honest, I don't think he cares much about them after that

[Lancer]

Ooooo KH, he's really something, OOoo, he knows physics, he can tell us what's up, Ooooeewww, KrazyHorse, he's da maaannn...

Well. I got news.

[Theben]

New news?

[Lancer]

"May or June" before they start cracking out death and destruction.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081021/ap_on_sc/eu_sci_particle_collider_1

Sidelined CERN collider gets a new, formal sendoff
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Digg Facebook Newsvine del.icio.us Reddit StumbleUpon Technorati Yahoo! Bookmarks Print By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS, Associated Press Writer Alexander G. Higgins, Associated Press Writer – Tue Oct 21, 12:38 pm ET AP – Robert Aymar, CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research, Director-General, speaks during the official …
Slideshow: CERN Large Hadron Collider GENEVA – The world's largest scientific machine may have malfunctioned soon after its spectacular start and still be out of action. But that didn't stop dignitaries, donors and diplomats from inaugurating the broken atom smasher Tuesday with pomp and pageantry.

Taking particular pride was Robert Aymar, director general of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

"When CERN chooses to be audacious, amazing things can happen," Aymar told government ministers, scientists and diplomats gathered for the event.

A 100-voice Welsh choir sang. An orchestra played. German Research Minister Annette Schavan proclaimed the inauguration of the ailing machine a great day for international science.

The atom smasher — called the Large Hadron Collider — is the result of a project that began two decades ago. Parts of it were built in various countries around the world. Financial contributions came from the 20 member nations of CERN as well as Russia, Canada, India, Japan and the United States.

The purpose is to smash protons from hydrogen atoms together at high energy and record what particles come off the collisions, giving scientists a better idea of the makeup of the smallest components of everything in the universe, including the Earth and the human beings on it.

Aymar conceded there was great disappointment the collider had been sidelined by an electrical problem within days of its startup Sept. 10. CERN has blamed the shutdown on the failure on a single, badly soldered electrical connection.

The damage will take much of the planned winter shutdown to repair. But the hope is the machine, which fires beams of protons at near the speed of light inside a 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel, can be back in action as planned next spring.

Aymar said the machine would return to use after scientists have "made sure the LHC will not suffer such damage again."

"The LHC will profoundly change our view of the universe," he said.

Scientists have taken the setback in stride, stressing that particle colliders always have such problems in the startup phase and pointing to the LHC's unprecedented success in sending beams around in both directions within a few hours on the first day.

"Frankly it was a surprise that it worked the first time without a glitch," Raymond L. Orbach, U.S. undersecretary for science at the U.S. Department of Energy, told The Associated Press.

"I have no doubts they'll get back into operation within three to four months," said Arden L. Bement, director of the U.N. National Science Foundation, who attended the inauguration with Orbach. "The machine is pushing the frontiers of science in almost every system and subsystem. So there's been a lot of stretch and there's risk involved, but without the risk you can't really do the science."

The Large Hadron Collider is the biggest atom smasher ever built. German Research Minister Annette Schavan said it will be at the center of the world's largest community of researchers — some 9,000 scientists who plan to work on it.

The setback underscored the complexity of the US$10 billion collider, installed under the Swiss-French border on the outskirts of Geneva. Because the equipment operates at temperatures colder than outer space, it took a month to warm the damaged section enough for human beings to be able to look and work inside.

The massive electromagnets that guide the beam appear to have escaped damage, according to CERN spokesman James Gillies. But 29 of the magnets will likely have to be brought to the surface because insulation and other parts around them were damaged.

The fault occurred nine days after the launch of the collider.

The organization performs maintenance during the winter, when the cost of electricity rises and makes it too expensive to run the machine. But scientists lost about two months of ironing the kinks out of the equipment so they could move more quickly toward collisions in the spring.

The collider, which CERN calls "the largest and most complex scientific instrument ever built," can make the collisions between atoms occur at energies seven times higher than ever before possible.

That will help scientists probe even deeper into the mysteries of matter, showing them on a tiny scale what happened one-trillionth of a second after the so-called Big Bang, which many scientists theorize was the massive explosion that formed the universe. The theory holds that the universe was rapidly cooling at that stage and matter was changing rapidly.

The collider uses superconductivity — the ability of some metals to conduct electricity without any resistance in the extreme cold — to operate the electromagnets at high efficiency to guide the beams of protons until they collide.

The failure was caused by an electrical arc that punctured an enclosure holding the liquid helium used to keep the collider cold, said a CERN statement. Some six tons of helium leaked out as a result.

The remaining 114 tons of liquid helium in the collider was unaffected by the leak, said Gillies.

The failure also sent "soot-like dust" into the firehose-size pipes through which the beams of protons are guided, he said. The pipes, which are supposed to be an extreme vacuum inside so that nothing will obstruct the proton beams, will have to be cleaned.

Physicists have used smaller, room-temperature colliders for decades to study the atom. They once thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of the atom's nucleus, but the colliders showed that they are made of quarks and gluons and that there are other forces and particles. And they still have other questions about antimatter, dark matter and particle mass they hope they can answer with CERN's new collider.

Plans are now to put proton beams back into the collider by May or June, Gillies said.

[Main_Brain]

Its back and so far Earth hasnt been destroyed yet. Although it did start to rain at noon when supposedly the protons successfully collided. Fingers crossed =)

[Japher]

it probably caused a butterfly to flap it's wings!

[Winston]

They're obviously faking it.

[MikeH]

Will all the idiots who thought the sky was going to fall on our heads now admit how dumb they were? Probably not.

[Dinner]

It will never happen.

[MikeH]

If anyone says "just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it couldn't" I am going to perform an experiment on them

I'll set up a sledgehammer so it's anchored at the handle end and can freely swing down into their face. Then I'll say, the physics tells me the hammer will hit you in the face every time but psycho anti-science nut jobs on the internet have produced some pseudoscience bull**** designed to fool the ignorant layman that says that there's a good chance that it might not hit you in the face.

Then we can perform the sledgehammer into the face experiment and repeat it until they trust the physics.

[Drake Tungsten]

To be fair, the physics involved in a swinging sledgehammer are far simpler and better understood than the physics of the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator.

[Drake Tungsten]

They also haven't ramped the LHC up to anything near its designed energy yet.

[MikeH]

To be fair, the physics involved in a swinging sledgehammer are far simpler and better understood than the physics of the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator.

This is the point I was trying to make.

Simpler? Possibly... if you treat it as a simple mechanical model.
Better understood? Depends. I suspect the majority of the world's population couldn't accurately explain the physics behind either. And we don't really know how gravity actually works.

The point being I have never performed the sledgehammer in the face experiment, but that doesn't mean I can't predict know what will happen to your face with a great deal of accuracy through my observations of other experiments and phenomena.

Exactly the same thing as the LHC. We mostly know what will happen, but there are a few unknowns. Like we have a rough idea what shape your nose will go...

[Dauphin]

Like we have a rough idea what shape your nose will go...

It may make you look like a black swan.

[Aeson]

If anyone says "just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it couldn't" I am going to perform an experiment on them

I'll set up a sledgehammer so it's anchored at the handle end and can freely swing down into their face. Then I'll say, the physics tells me the hammer will hit you in the face every time but psycho anti-science nut jobs on the internet have produced some pseudoscience bull**** designed to fool the ignorant layman that says that there's a good chance that it might not hit you in the face.

Then we can perform the sledgehammer into the face experiment and repeat it until they trust the physics.

There is a "good" chance that it might not hit you, and it's sound physics. It's just overwhelmingly unlikely.

(You'd understand why it's "good" the first time it convinces someone you don't like to take the test.)