Is anyone else curious about the results of the experiment this Wednesday? I find it funny that the people predicting the end of the world are probably the same people who believe the dinosaurs never happened and are terrified of finding out the big bang theory might be proven absolutely correct. Thoughts....

I'm excited about it.
The BBC are doing some sort of CERN/Big Bang Day thing, my ass will be glued to the couch.

I've not read too much about this one, but I have had the chance to see the collider at Fermi labs outside of chicago which was really sweet. These things are great and all, but usually the outcome of the experiements only sticks around for a few nano seconds...then again, particle physics was never really my thing.

I too find the 'end of the world' fanatics hilarious. Anytime we come up with something, it's always going to be the down fall of man, yadda yadda yadda.

They are running this thing at 1.9K though, that's awesome. Colder than space

going to have as much sex as possible on tuesday in case a micro blackhole destroys the world on wednesday

The BBC had a good article about the phenomenon, the scientists are even getting death threats.

If something does happen, it might even be welcome. This world is getting too boring and predictable. If it ends up ripping the universe a new spacehole and Earth ends up like Orguss or Rifts or something, with otherdimensional aliens and stuff rampaging around, it could be an interesting change.

Boring indeed. Bring on the elder gods. Ia Cthulhu Fhtagn.

I dunno.
I find it kind of odd that the main independent LHC countdown site
( http://www.lhcountdown.com/ ) -
which included links to lots of positive as well as negative info about this,
and which I've been keeping a weather eye on over the past couple of years of stops and starts -
has suddenly gone down now they're finally ready to actually do this thing.

Not to worry though, there's a simple clock here: http://quegrande.org/countdown/

Interesting that none of the scientists connected with this experiment can 100% guarantee it's safety.
Remember, one of the reasons for the Nagasaki bomb was that they couldn't quite believe the ferocity of the Hiroshima explosion, and they wanted to
DO IT AGAIN.
They may not get a second chance this time.

Estimates for the time it might take miniature Black Holes to eat our planet
range from 50 mins to about 50 billion years.

My favorite story however, is one scientist's prediction that probably they will switch it on, and the neighbor's garage door will go up and down.

See you on the other side.

If the scientists are really wrong, we won't have to worry about the presidential election any more and I won't have to pay off the mortgage on the house...Mister Mxyztplk and the fifth dimension, here we come...


On the flip side, this is pretty exciting in a science-geek sort of way...a lot of very big brains are going to be focused closely on this, and who knows what possibilities may spawn from it...they might discover that our entire universe is contained within a teardrop in the corner of a unicorn's eye...

And that the whole of our planetary history has taken place in one majestic, rainbow-leaping moment in that unicorn's life...

bring on the unicorns! pretty excited.

Not unicorns ...

... My Little Ponies ! :

They weren't looking closely enough. Those are actually real ponies crushed into miniature scale by the massive gravitational force of the black hole created within the collider.

I'm looking forward to the post-apocalyptic future, I'm going to be all like this walking down the street with my dog...

There was a CERN scientist being interviewed on the Krasny show a couple of weeks who didn't exactly come across assuringly, regarding some physicist's concerns. He admitted to a lot of "unkonwns" and got very excited when the possibility of "creating a black hole" came up. "Why we'd be delighted if we could create a black hole!" He went on to explain that it would be a very small, probably temporary black hole. Oh, well I guess that's okay then.

Quick! Collect more kaiju while you may!

Haha, Count, I always knew you were an apocalyptic fashionista.
I don't think a future is possible if this thing is successful. Space time continuom
Doesn't exist in black holes;)

Cool. I'll be sure to wave hello if I see you, Count.


"Da footcha iz aaawwwsum...!"

I keep thinking this thread is called "Large Hedoran Collector"

Pretty nuts, it's totally freaking my wife out, any "end of the world" stuff does, than I remind her our odds of dying on the way to work is greater and it calms her down.....until we head out towards work.

I'm pretty sure unless you are somewhat undestanding of hardcore physics this ain't gonna make a lick o' sense.
That would be me

Otherwise, whoopie.

PK, like me, you probably learned all the "hardcore physics" that you need to know from Star Trek...that said, I don't think you need to be a Hawking or Einstein to understand that these guys are "boldly going where no man has gone before"...

When accredited scientists start bandying about terms like "miniature black hole", it is hard for the layman not to wonder if we are opening up a can of whoop-ass on ourselves...

This is the stuff of sci-fi movies going on for real...I can just picture some dude in his cottage near the Franco-Swiss border, smoking a cigarette and drinking some wine, gazing up at his bare-bulb light, watching it grow dimmer and dimmer as the low throbbing pulse of the nearby collider rises to a high-pitched squeal, ducking as all of the metal objects in the place begin hurtling through the air on their way to a super-magnetic leak in the tube...

I recently finished a sci-fi series that peripherally involved a man-made black hole that destroyed a good portion of Paris resulting in a giant crater in the earth's crust exposing the magma in the core.

I mostly think it's a good sign for humanity (or, at least the European flavor of humanity) that we expend so much effort and intelligence and resources on this sort of basic research. I think they will find the Higgs boson ... but not tonight! Kickoff is at like 12:30AM tonight on the West Coast, right?

The history of particle physics would strongly suggest that CERN will find some of the things they were looking for, plus a great tall heapof other things which no one had expected or even imagined. At least, that's what's happened every previous time we have radically increased our ability to look. (The great advances in Science have only rarely come from the moments of "Eureka! I've done it!" -- Much more often it is the moments of "WTF, that's weird ... " that lead to the big discoveries.)

Certainly no decent scientist would, or could, give you 100% assurance that it is safe. The same scientist would also not offer you 100% assurance that the sun will be rising in the east tomorrow - "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong ... but that's the way to bet." (Damon Runyon) Before the Manhattan Project testing, there was a genuine concern that the reaction could ignite the atmosphere - That was (at the time) perhaps a more realistic threat than the fear that CERN will create a black hole lasting more than a tiny fraction of a nanosecond.

But, while we're talking micro, here's a little taste of macro for variety ...

This pic is from the Hubble Deep Field project. Some of the galaxies have the barred-spirals and other recognizable galactic shapes, some are just specks in this image, but every spiral or speck visible here is another entire galaxy like our own Milky Way, each one made up of hundreds of billions of suns. To get just the tiniest hint of how truly, mind-bendingly big the universe is, pull out a dime. Hold it out at arm's length.

This picture is of a sky sector that is the size of Roosevelt's eye on that dime at arm's length. And, this is not a picture of a globular cluster or some other dense region, it's what is pretty much out there in every direction we look. If they could take one photo of this size sector every single second, 86,400 pics per day, it would take nearly three years to cover the whole sky.

I simply love this picture, I've sometimes used it as wallpaper - Like fancy colored diamonds on black velvet, plus it serves as a constant reminder that all my problems don't amount to much.

I love this shit!
I am so excied about tomorrow.
Even if nothing comes of it, and to be fair, nothing will come of it for a while, until they have analyzed all the details, it will still be amazing. I love that they have pumped 5 BILLION pounds (which up until very recently was £10 billion!!!) into a chance.
I love inquisitiveness! I love that someone thought this was worth funding.

I love the idea of knowing more about what created this place we live in, all we know and are.

Bring on the LHC!


edit: oh yeah- http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/bigbang/

Relativity:

and for the gamers...



http://www.joystiq.com/2008/09/09/terrible-news-gordon-freeman-spotted-near-large-hadron-collider/

Those safety helmets calmed me down.