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Large Hadron Collider.

diachi

diachi

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Today, most of the ' lesser educated ' people in my school were worrying incase the world got sucked into a black hole that would be created by the LHC, I had to explain several times that it would NOT create a black hole that would suck in the Earth.

So what do you guys think about this, what do you think will happen when the LHC is fired up ? Do you know anyone who is scared about it being turned on ?

Personally I think it's all very interesting, and I'm looking forward to seeing their results?

-Adam
 





I'm not really sure what I think will happen... I mean, if they end up being able to observe the higgs boson, it'll just be more stuff to study. I don't think it's going to produce very many extraordinary results, although it will be very cool if they find out what they think they can find out if they succeed.

*sigh*

college physics is gonna be super. :P
 
Black holes, eh, just another crack pot idea.  (And I'll never have to eat those words: if they're right, we won't be around to see it  ;))

But these theories have been around forever.  There were people who knew that first atomic bomb would set the atmosphere on fire and kill all life on earth.  Didn't happen.  Then, there were people who knew that it would happen with the first hydrogen fusion bomb.  Didn't happen.

There were/are people afraid that one of the atom smashers would create a strangelet that was stable/stable enough to come into contact with normal matter.  This would have the interesting effect of the strangelet turning the normal nucleus it touched into strange matter, which would then turn whatever matter it touched into strange matter, and so on until the entirety of earth was nothing but a bill ball of strange matter.  Poeple thought it would happen at the RHIC in the US, and it hasn't happened yet.  Some people think it may happen at the LHC, but I guess we'll find out.  It's really based on a hypothesis that hasn't been proven yet, but some people believe in it.

Some also believe that "magnetic monopoles" or "vacuum bubbles" could end the world and be created by the LHC, but huge studies have been about the LHC and the safety of what will happen when they fire it off at full power.


Really though, the thing can be dangerous even without all the far-fetched loosely-based-on-physics.  When at full power, the beam of particles is carrying roughly the same energy as a high-speed train.  The magnets doing the steering are holding enough energy to equal 2.4 tons of TNT.  It's insane.  
 
I do know people who are worried about it, but the same people:

bought generators and large amount of bottled water when Y2K was coming
saved all that stuff because they now think the world ends in 2012 (something to do with the Mayans)
think the government watches them through their TVs
think the US government is hiding UFOs somewhere
think Jesus is coming to save them but smite all of their neighbors
think every email they send is being read by a government employee somewhere
think the vast majority of the universe was put there so we'd have pretty lights at night

With these people in mind, I'm kinda hoping the LHC makes a black hole that sucks in the earth, but sadly I think all that will happen is we will further the depths of human knowledge about the universe.
 
It can't help but remind me of back in the day, they thought the hydrogen bomb could potentially destroy the earth because they thought it may be possible that the reaction would never end. With this in mind, they tested it anyway :P just shows how dispensible the earth really is to them. :-/ One of the creators of the LHC said a black hole IS possible, but the chance is so minute that they're not worrying about it.
 
pullbangdead said:
There were/are people afraid that one of the atom smashers would create a strangelet that was stable/stable enough to come into contact with normal matter. This would have the interesting effect of the strangelet turning the normal nucleus it touched into strange matter, which would then turn whatever matter it touched into strange matter, and so on until the entirety of earth was nothing but a bill ball of strange matter... it hasn't happened yet.
Click to expand...

Are you sure?

How would you know?

(I'm taking the devil's advocate position here, but: If both your measuring instruments and the thing they are measuring are affected equally, the discrepancies would cancel out and the instruments would read the same as they did before. From inside the system there would be no way to tell.)
 
Can someone explain this whole thing? I've never heard of this LHC until now. I just tried looking up all this stuff... but I got confused in a mess of Kaons, Proton Synchrotron Boosters, strangelets, quarks and gluons.
I have a basic idea of what's going on, but these things are not in my vocabulary. I know that the collider slams particle beams together... but what the hell is a strangelet?

:P
 
Is a strangelet not something like anti-matter or dark matter ? I don't know all that much about particle physics, I think strangelets are made entirely of strange quarks, where as normal matter is made of up and down quarks, and if they come together the normal matter changes into strange matter .... Strangelets are only theoretical, and if real are only though to exist in neutron stars.
 
Foobario said:
[quote author=pullbangdead link=1220462301/0#2 date=1220464560]There were/are people afraid that one of the atom smashers would create a strangelet that was stable/stable enough to come into contact with normal matter. This would have the interesting effect of the strangelet turning the normal nucleus it touched into strange matter, which would then turn whatever matter it touched into strange matter, and so on until the entirety of earth was nothing but a bill ball of strange matter... it hasn't happened yet.
Click to expand...

Are you sure?

How would you know?

(I'm taking the devil's advocate position here, but: If both your measuring instruments and the thing they are measuring are affected equally, the discrepancies would cancel out and the instruments would read the same as they did before. From inside the system there would be no way to tell.)
[/quote]

Because all matter as we know it would change forms, it would cease to exist in any form that we know and we, in fact, would cease to exist in our current forms. Atoms would no longer be protons-neutrons-electrons, the whole plant would be one big amalgamation of quarks, and would not arranged into subatomic particles and atoms. Earth would become a quark star, not a planet. Since atoms still exist, this hasn't happened. And it's only a hypothesis that it even can happen, not even up to theory level yet.



RA_pierce said:
Can someone explain this whole thing? I've never heard of this LHC until now. I just tried looking up all this stuff... but I got confused in a mess of Kaons, Proton Synchrotron Boosters, strangelets, quarks and gluons.
I have a basic idea of what's going on, but these things are not in my vocabulary. I know that the collider slams particle beams together... but what the hell is a strangelet?

:P
Click to expand...

The Large Hadron Collider is basically the biggest, most powerful earthly particle accelerator every built. It is being started up this month, and will be smashing together the largest particles yet smashed on earth in the search for theoretical particles, such as the Higgs boson, to help further prove our current theories about physics. On the biggest scale, it will be smashing lead ions (which are HUGE, particle-wise) together, which will be at least some of the highest-energy particle collisions to date. (Basically, we're talking atoms or subatomic particles hitting each other with kinetic energies on the same scale as high-speed trains colliding head-on at full speed, over and over and over for certain lengths of time). But since it's the biggest yet and is as-yet terrestrially unreached territory, it scares a lot of people because of the unknowns there, like creating little black holes and strangelets that will destroy the earth. Not just end all life, but literally the case the earth to cease to exist as normal matter if these ideas were correct.
 
Diachi said:
Is a strangelet not something like anti-matter or dark matter ? I don't know all that much about particle physics, I think strangelets are made entirely of strange quarks, where as normal matter is made of up and down quarks, and if they come together the normal matter changes into strange matter .... Strangelets are only theoretical, and if real are only though to exist in neutron stars.
Click to expand...

Yes, a strangelet is a little tiny bit of strange matter, which is matter that includes strange quarks. It is just a "liquid" clump of quarks, rather than having the quarks arranged into subatomic particles and atoms like all normal matter we have ever encountered.
 
There you go pullbangdead gave you the answer.

What exactly is it that you do anyway pullbangdead, you have such a good knowledge of physics, guessing you did a physics degree of some sort ?
 
pullbangdead said:
Since atoms still exist, this hasn't happened.
Click to expand...

If *everything* changed, including the tools we use to measure whether or not everything changed, we might not even notice such a change.

The beauty of these theories is that if they *can* happen, they may have *already* happened, and we might not even notice as long as everything remained internally consistent. What you are calling 'atoms' may have been someones strangest and most fearful theory in a universe we can't even imagine... maybe *their* LHC *did* make everything change, and that's where we live now.

Everyone likes to draw the starting line right behind themselves and the finish line right in front of themselves... in 'reality', if there is such a thing, we might not even be on the same map we think we are on.
 
No measurement would be required to tell if the matter in your hands is strange matter or normal matter.  Strange matter would not be a solid (my misunderstanding), it would not be made of atoms, it would contain no subatomic particles.  Both are made of quarks: but with "normal for us" matter, quarks are arranged into subatomic particles, and those subatomic particles are arranged into atoms, and those atoms are arranged into all matter as we know it.  If we threw strange into the equation, all those arrangements that give matter its form would cease to function.  It would be one big clump of quarks.  Carbon, gold, lead, water: none of them would exist anymore, the whole thing would be a mix of up, down, and strange.  It's not a change from normal gold to strange gold, it's a change from gold to NOTHING except for a clump of quarks not arranged in any way.  The detector you speak of would not just turn from normal to strange, it would cease to exist in any meaningful way.  We have atoms, I have "seen" (with an electron microscope) them, therefore we are not made of strange quarks, at least that's how the current hypotheses go *as I understand it*.

Nice, short read: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_n9_v135/ai_7420229


We have to draw the finish line right in front of us, that's all we know.  And all matter becoming strange, that would be the finishline, because humans (not just humanity) would cease to exist in our current form.  All that we know is the map that we are on, we don't know how to get to any others.  We may be past the finishline of some other map, but matter becoming strange would be the complete end of our road.  Maybe the beginning of something else, but the end of us.  And really, at least in my view, that's getting across the line from physics and getting more into philosophy.  




Diachi,
Honestly, most all of my particle physics knowledge (which is admittedly very limited) comes from the internet, attached to lots of reading other things (the science-y popular press, ala Nature, Scientific American, etc.).  I would not be surprised to be completely wrong about some things if someone who knows better comes around. I just speak to the best of my available knowledge and pick up whatever I can by listening, reading, talking to others.  My undergrad degree is in materials science, which has a decent amount of physics in it by nature, but not really this kind of physics.  But it's admittedly interesting.  We jsut have to remember that the LHC can't end the world, because the Mayans already pegged that at 2012.
 
Well your knowledge of physics certainly surpasses mines, although I learn most of what I know from reading on the internet aswell. But I want to improve my knowledge of physics further, and after I leave school I want to go study physics in University, probably optical or laser physics.

Physics just intrigues me.

We'll just need to wait and see what happens about that 2012 thing, I doubt it will ever happen then though .

-Adam
 
i heard something about a pole shift? of which case the earth will go out of orbit and uh the solar system will uh collapse or something :D
 
Thats the planets electromagnetic poles your thinking of :P And it would take away the earths magnetic barrier, that stops all the nasty cosmic rays if they swapped they would all get through, killing most of the people on the planet , but we'd still stay in orbit, so that makes everything okay ::) And your 'fro would offer some protection too :D
 
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