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New Heavy Ion Collider could "destroy the earth"
Posted by
Hemos
on Sun Jul 18, 1999 12:15 PM
from the honey-i-destroyed-the-earth dept.
from the honey-i-destroyed-the-earth dept.
Sith Lord Jesus writes "According to an article in the London Sunday Times, a new nuclear accelerator designed to recreate the Big Bang might possibly--*possibly*--cause the earth to "disappear in the twinkling of an eye." Oops. " This reminds me of the some the fears that the folks in the Manhatten Project had-almost zero chance of anything occuring, but the notion of creating a black hole on the surface of the Earth is a strangely appealing one, from a sheer comedic value POV.
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Re:Physicist steps in... (Score:1)
So I think I know what I'm talking about.
--Bob
Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Take anything that a physicist named "Bob" says with a grain of salt. If the guy thinks that there is actually some General named "Failure" reading his hard drive and doesn't recognize it as an ERROR CODE then he is NOT a physicist. Maybe a wannabe like the majority of the people on this newsgroup but definately not a real one.
I, however, am a REAL physicist and I know lots of things about strange corks. They infect anything that comes into contact with them much like a virus. The infected corks in turn infect others until ALL of the stuff in the universe is strange. This has all happened before and it will all happen again. Ever been to SanFransisco or Puyallup? If so then you know what I'm talking about.
Quarks (Score:1)
If that's the case, I'd assume that the new mass comes from the energy that was put into seperating them in the first place, but it's been a while, and I really don't remember for sure. Anyone who knows their stuff want to clear this up?
Valve predicted this would happen! (Score:1)
Guess I'd better dig out the old crowbar.
Re:Where would chain reaction energy come from? (Score:1)
The assumption is that "our" world is not the real ground state of hadronic matter; it might be something else where strange quarks are just as light as the other quarks; this vast increase in phase space would effectively lower ground state energy. Just kinda the same effect that happens when you open an undercooled bottle of mineral water: it instantly freezes all through.
The Murdoch Times is not even original (Score:2)
when I was starting as a graduate student in
physics. I got such a kick out of it I told
everybody I thought I could scare. Since then,
I've seen demonstrators picketing just about
every particle accelerator I've been to, in two
continents. The mechanism keeps changing to apply
to the lab being picketed, but the outcome is
always the same: the Universe is doomed!
I remember about 6-7 years ago, some guy was
camping outside Fermilab, distributing leaflets
to cars entering the site, trying to warn the
world how the proton-antiproton collider would
create a black hole that would swallow everything
(now, what does this remind me of?) The world
failed to pay sufficient attention, the
temperature hit 100 F that summer in Illinois,
and he left in disgust ("Go ahead, destroy the
Universe - see if I care"). There are limits to
what one can do to save the world in spite of
itself.
It looks like the tabloids are running out of
royal scandals - everybody is dead, divorced,
or behaving themselves. Time to branch out into
science?
Re:ummm, is there a point to this? (Score:4)
First of all, far, far money is spent on finding cures for horrible diseases than on high energy physics. For twenty years, the fight against horrible diseases like AIDS has soaked up research money like you wouln't believe (I think it may have been nealy 1/2 the NIH budget at one point). Personally, I don't see that we are too much better off.
As for what is learned as a result of these high energy experiments, just in the last few years we have learned that the neutrino has mass, the standard model is insufficient, we are beginning to study asymetries such as CP violation (which will explain why the universe exists), why things have mass (or at least we will have found this in the next few years with the discovery of the Higgs bosons). We know that Einstein's theories of gravitation are incomplete. I could give you an incredible list of what these experiments have and will bring to mathematics, physics and astronomy in the future.
If however, you are not interested in any of that, surely these things are important for their technological spinoffs. High energy experiments...
brought us the world wide web. Web commerce soon will exceed the money spent on high energy physics.
is the largest application of superconducting technology anywhere. Were it not for such experiments, we would not currently have superconductor based products, like MRIs.
Particle accelerators are now often used as treatment for certain cancers and blindness. Funny to think it, but these days every major hospital in the country has a particle accelerator.
Particle accelerators and storage rings are currently used as a source for x-ray or neutron studies of materials. They are used by virtually every company that makes something, from GM to Intel.
High energy physics pushes the limits of computation, finds better algorithms, expands clustering and distributed computing technologies. The fastest computer in the world is currently used for nuclear computations.
The demands of detectors push the limits of silicon and nano technologies. Curretly they are building silicon devices many times smaller than places like Intel even have the technology to do. They pioneer the use of other materials such as synthetic diamond for semiconductor devices (which are functional at far higher temperatures than silicon).
These are just the examples that come to mind off of the top of my head.
In short, in addition to their value to science, these high energy experiments push the envelope of every technology they use. The spin offs of these experiments alone are many times greater than their cost.
Answers to pressing scientific questions. Big, big, big technological spinoffs. You would be very hard pressed to find any better use of the money or manpower. I'd say that the fight against "horrible diseases" is a bigger waste of everyone's resources, but who knows, one day it might produce results, or at least make some progress that would make it worth the time and money.
The problem is that they're scientists (Score:5)
Back in the 70s when the first recombinant DNA experiments were taking place, there was a public outcry, mainly a result of politicians stirring up people for political reasons. They dragged a bunch of biologists into court and asked them the probability of creating dangerous organisms, as some scientists had suggested. Of course, the biologists who were about to do the experiments had carefully researched this possibility and come to the conclusion that it was extraordinary- but of course, not nonzero. When they testified, they were repeatedly asked if such a thing could never happen. They had to answer no, of course not, there is always a probability of anything happening.
Well, the experiments were banned for several years. No one in the world had any problems with inadvertant creation of dangerous organisms, and now recombinant dna experiements are commenplace. But think of the progress that was lost!
Remember that scientists are people too, and don't want the earth to collapse any more than you do. Saying that something has a small probability is about the safest assurance you can hope for, at least from a real scientist. Articles like this that attempt to use scare-mongering to whip up readership, at the expense of science, are very dangerous for everyone.
Re:The problem is that they're scientists (Score:1)
I guess there will always be men in power who knows next to nothing about science. But who will try to halt the advancement of mankind to serve their own ends.
But alas so far they have all failed.
Re:Big Bang? (Score:1)
If someone had asked 70 years ago what quantum teory was good for. No one could probably give him an answer. But look now we have computers.
Re:Plan 9 from outer space... (Score:1)
It was about grave robbers from outher space, who resurrected the dead.
Re:Plan 9 from outer space... (Score:1)
Re:bah. you've seen too much jurassic park (Score:3)
The agricultural industry is pretty messed up. There is not any good control over Monsanto and the like who are cramming new genes into plants as fast as they can.
The genes in the altered plants cross with wild-types. The recommendation is to keep a "buffer" zone of empty land around the modified plants. Yeah, like any farmer is going to leave several fields clear because it might have an impact on surrounding wild-types.
That really bad part, however, is things like:
1. All those genetic crops have some kind of antibiotic resistance gene (used in the laboratory to select for transgenics). Eat enough of the crop and eventually you're going to get bacteria in your gut with the resistance, too.
2. They're inserting genes which cause constitutive expression of pesticides. This will breed resistance in under 5 years. It's just idiotic. And, of course, these pesticides they're inserting are natural pesticides (various enzymes) which are the kind used by organic farmers. Organic farmers will not have viable pesticides for much longer. There are other options, such as breeding insects to eat the problem insects, but it's complicated and expensive.
Summary: The agricultural industry is short-sighted, dangerous, and not under any real governmental regulation. The USDA is a joke, and the FDA usually doesn't get involved (too busy with the drugs).
The whole industry is running on the assumption that science will fix the problems they're creating faster than the farmers can make new problems. It will collapse eventually.
Forever Peace (Score:2)
Anyways, I find it interesting that the news story and a recent sci fi novel have the same premise.
Its just stupid (Score:3)
On a side note though, there was a book that came out a year or two ago, Cosm that dealt specifically with these issues at that specific accellerator I think. Its sci-fi, but I thought it was entertaining. Worth reading if you can get it at the library. Hell, its Gregory Benford, so you can't go THAT wrong.
Unlikely. (Score:2)
(as I recall), in quantum physics, the probability of *anything* simply vanishing without a trace, for no known reason is a non-zero percentage. It's admittedly very small, but not non-zero. It's the same here. I could fart, and rearrange the quarks around me into some heretofore unknown configuration, and oblitherate the planet.So the solution is that I should never fart (and neither should anybody else!). Heh.
Seriously, we're in far more danger of our government deciding to do some "nuclear testing" on foreign soil and starting WWIII (thus ending the world), than we are of a bunch of physicists doing it.
Besides... it's the job of evil overlords and certain north-american based governments to cause the destruction of mankind - not a bunch of physicists. Everybody who reads comic books knows that.
--
Physicist steps in... (Score:4)
Just to make things clear, I'm a grad student in physics, working on the BaBar experiment (at SLAC in SanFran). My analysis involves kaons, which are bound states of strange quarks and up/down quarks. And yes, physics has produced many, many kaons over the years. So I think I know what I'm talking about.
--Bob
Consider this (Score:2)
There is a nonzero chance that YOU do not exist.
Re:whow.. how'd you get a 2? (Score:2)
The worst case scenario (Score:2)
Once created, the metastable vacuum would spread out at the speed of light, eventually deflating the entire Universe. Puts little piddly concerns like the Earth into perspective, huh?
Still, I'm not loosing any sleep. If there were any real chance of this happening, odds are it would have happened millennia ago. Personally, I can't wait until this thing starts producing data. Science rocks.
72 lb's of PU is not that much (Score:2)
Re:cosmic ray energies (Score:5)
The question of exactly where all of these insanely high energy particle come from is a deep mystery. Proposed answers include: Gamma Ray Bursts, Active Galactic Nuclei, interactions involving Magnetic Monopoles or Cosmic Strings, the decays of super-massive relics from the big bang, etc. For more info on these rare events, see the Pierre Auger Observatory website at www.auger.org [auger.org].
Now 2.5*10^7 TeV sounds like an incredible ammount of energy compared to the .1 TeV/nucleon of RHIC, but since the cosmic rays are hitting essentially stationary nuclei in the Earth's atmosphere as opposed to the head-on collisions of RHIC, most of the energy just goes into the kinetic energy of the collision debris rather than into producing interesting physics. The relevant figure is the center of mass energy of the cosmic ray and target nucleus system. It turns out that this is equal to sqrt(2*m*E), where m is the mass of the target and E is the mass of the cosmic ray. Supposing that the target is a Nitrogen nucleus, we get sqrt(2*.014 TeV*2.5*10^7 TeV) or roughly 10^6 TeV. The corresponding figure for RHIC 2*(200 nucleons)*(100 GeV/nucleon)=4*10^4 TeV. The cosmic ray events win, but only by a bit more than an order of magnitude. (Note that this is all very much "back of the napkin" calculation, and may not be exactly right, but it's close.)
That was fun, but what does it all mean? Well, from the RHIC documentation, I figure that RHIC will have roughly 10^15 bunch crossings in each full year of collision running. Assuming that there is less than one collision per beam crossing (it makes it much easier to figure out what's going on in each collision), RHIC will produce an order of magnitude fewer collisions, with an order of magnitude lower energy density than these cosmic rays that bombard the Earth naturally. While a more careful analysis may change some of these numbers by a bit, it seems pretty unlikely that RHIC will destroy the Earth, when all of these cosmic ray collisions obviously haven't.
Re:Igniting the Atmosphere (Score:2)
Plutonium is not the most toxic substance known to man. There are many biological toxins that are much more dangerous. There is a paper on the subject here [llnl.gov], written by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It contains actual scientific facts, not eco-loonie propaganda as propagated by Helen Caldicott and Karl Grossman.
Re:Big Bang? (Score:3)
They're not trying to create a new big bang; there's not even a prevailing theory on 'why' the big bang happened in the first place, or what took place in the first (miniscule) fraction of a second. However, a lot of theories, both cosmological models and GUTs (Grand Unified Theories) depend on what happened in the high-energy conditions that existed only in that first second, during which -- for instance -- our basic forces congealed out of the morass. So, recreate the high-energy conditions, and you can investigate the theories experimentally.
That said, recreating big bang conditions isn't even the primary aim of most accelerators; the high-energy conditions required to isolate particles simply happen to be the exception rather than the rule in the universe today, while the big bang was one circumstance in which they were the rule.
-spc
Where would chain reaction energy come from? (Score:2)
But the article just says that matter may be transformed into 'more strange matter'. What does this actually mean?
Re:dusting the atmosphere (Score:2)
You've got the details mostly right. It discusses using a radioactive dust as a weapon (probably since when the story was written, it was believed "impossible" to build an ICBM). Planes would "dust" cities to destroy them. Different dusts would have different strengths.
After ending WW II using the dust, every country in the world is supposed to turn its planes over to the UN. Whenthe stand-in for the Soviet Union turns in their planes, they dust the US instead. Moscow is then destroyed, and Manning (the head of the program) becomes world dictator.
There's a lot more, but just get a copy of the story. It's a good read.
-jon
Funniest thing I've ever read... (Score:2)
Who'd a thunk it?
Re:back holes as communication devices (Score:2)
Re:do you want to take the chance?! (Score:3)
No one knows their names and such, but if your the first person to die by such an odd event, i think it'd get written down and published a lot.
(Standing in line to the afterlife)
ME: Hey man, how'd you get here?
Other: Hit by a bus, you?
ME: First person ever known to be swallowed by a black hole.
Other: What a way to go.
-Yogger
Actually, to wipe out JFK Jr. (Score:2)
some sort of space-time warp, plane comes into contact with it and *POOF*...gonner.
It's possible...just not too probable
.
----------------------------
Dammit Jim...It's "U-N-I-X",
How in the world did this get published...? (Score:2)
on
interactions are ~ the same energy, so if this
could happen, it would've happened.
Also, the comment about a "black hole forming"
seems to be psuedo-science crap - a 'miniature'
black hole would not even have the gravitational
field to draw anything *into* it - it would have
to rely on chance interactions to grow larger,
and considering that its Schwarzschild radius
would be smaller than the known radius of a
proton by *huge* amounts, I don't even know
if it *is* possible for it to absorb anything.
Also, as soon as it absorbed any particle, it
would be unstable due to charge-angular momentum-
mass limitation. The short answer: black holes
aren't dangerous. Huge amounts of mass are
dangerous. We don't have huge amounts of mass here.
No danger.
The 'strangelet' pair formation is curious.
I don't know enough about subatomic physics/
quark theory to actually know what this
actually is, but stupid physics tells me that
you can't just randomly break strangeness
conservation, so instead of forming just
strange matter, you'd need strange-antistrange
pairs, and thus baryon-antibaryon pairs. Which
means in order for these 'strangelets' to
convert something to strange matter, the
corresponding antiparticle would have to be
present - i.e. strangelet + p + pbar ->
strangelet + whatever the particle is with
(ssd) rather than (uud). (or ssc, or sud, etc.)
plus its antiparticle. Considering the vast
baryon-antibaryon asymmetry (see any antimatter
lying around? I didn't think so.) this isn't
a danger at all.
What I want to know is how this got published.
Granted, I haven't much gotten into graduate
physics yet, but this is really poor stuff at
face value.
Patrick
Good Plutonium Document (Score:2)
Re:"time is a two-way street" (Score:2)
With our full share of atmosphere we'd have a much higher pressure and greater greenhouse effect. We also would have much more silicon and fewer metals available at the surface. Plate tectonics might also not be operating, so our present cycling of carbon and water back to the surface might not be happening. The Earth's core might also not be rotating and generating magnetism the way it is.
Our planet would be more like Venus. But it is not because the Moon is there but rather how the Moon appeared there.
Re:do you want to take the chance?! (Score:2)
Other: Then you should be in that line over there, with the other beings with cosmological endings.
Re:Book about this (Score:2)
Re:Physicist steps in... (Score:2)
But do you have a Physicist Bob T-shirt?
Re:next summer's blockbuster movie (Score:2)
That is how "Sledge Hammer" dealt with the previous season's finale where the hero dealt with a problem involving a nuclear bomb.
Not a problem (Score:3)
Re:Not a problem (Score:3)
Black holes suck (Score:2)
"Look George, those crazy earthlings just turned their planet into a black hole."
I wonder if the black holes already in the universe were caused by other civilizations trying the exact same thing once upon a time. It could be just another milestone in the evolution of a culture -- language, machinary, heavy-ion smashing....
"Word is that earthlings have finally reached the heavy-ion smashing stage. I wonder if they'll be able to control it?"
"
"Whoops, guess not. Better put some orange cones around what used to be their solar system."
It's not funny to you, but somewhere there's a hyper-intelligent lifeform that thinks it's hysterical.
seti (Score:4)
Black holes don't "suck" (Score:3)
This article contains a similar fallacy: "black holes suck in..." They do not, they *cannot* reach out with some mysterious force to yank unsuspecting atoms to their death.
They *do* have gravitational attraction, of course, but we're talking about a miniscule mass. Any singularity with this mass will be indescribably small, and even if it survives Hawking radiation it will only rarely hit a proton or electron just right to effect capture. I'm reminded of Rutherford's experiments shooting electrons at gold foil -- and in that case the few bounces where due to an electrostatic force many orders of magnitude stronger than gravity.
The dangers from such a black hole are non-existent. The risk of strange matter contaminating the earth are harder to quantify... but where are the strange *stars* from the same effect?
Re:Physicist steps in... (Score:2)
The concern isn't about strange quarks; it's about a proposed state of matter called strange matter. Now I should disclaim here that, though I'm a physics grad student too, I don't know what I'm talking about, at least not firsthand... but I've heard people discuss it in seminars, so this is intended to distill those vain assertions, half-truths, and self-important obfuscations.
The basic idea is that nuclear matter as we know it--that is, stuff made of up and down quarks--is not the true ground state of QCD (the theory which models the interactions of quarks and such). It's possible that there is a stable state of matter which includes up, down, and strange quarks, all bound together; in fact, it's possible that that state is more stable than one which involves just up and down. Now normally we don't see this stuff, because there's a high energy barrier between our Plain Old Everyday matter and this strange matter. But if you get a high enough collision energy, you can tunnel through or just slop over the barrier; and then whammo! the strange matter overtakes the POE matter, like ice nine dropped into water. (Someone call Dr. Strangelove--we've got to guard our POE!)
For background, see this page [uni-frankfurt.de] and its links. If you want to wade through the hard stuff, try R. J. Holt et al., Physical Review Letters vol 36 page 183 (1976), and E. Witten, Physical Review D vol 30 page 272 (1984).
Elsewhere, coyote-san asks, "where are the strange stars from the same effect?" Strange stars are entire stars made of strange matter. People are looking for them, but so far there's no positive evidence. One of the problems, as I understand it, is that nobody really knows how they'd look different from plain old garden variety neutron stars.
The black hole possiblity sounds sexier, but I think strangelets are cooler. :)
jon
Re:Igniting the Atmosphere (Score:2)
First, get your facts straight. NASA isn't launching anything in August. Cassini, which NASA launched last year, will be making a close pass to Earth in order to get a gravity boost on it's way to Saturn.
In any case, your description of the plutonium risk is a massive exaggeration. Plutonium is primarily dangerous if you breath it in as dust after managing to survive the atomic explosion that spread it around in the first place. If you do that, it is about the most toxic substance known to man - it will settle into your bones and just start spawning cancers.
NASA probes, OTOH, are using ceramic pellets to encase the plutonium. No dust. You could probably even handle the pellets (for a short while) without ill effects.
The biggest threat you face from Cassini is if it re-entered and happened to hit you on the head as it crashed.
Sheesh. You'd think someone who posts on Slashdot would know a little science.
--
Run for your Life !! (Score:2)
This is exactly what Nostrademous said in one of his visions :
"Humanity shall destroy itself within the first months of the 2nd Millenium. The Sword of thy death shall be known as RHIC*"
*Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
I swear that this is an absolutely authentic translation from his old text, I haven't modified the slightest word.
Murphy...
Well it's one way like the other to stop Microsoft from the World Dominition, but isn't it a bit too much ?
Re:Physicist steps in... (Score:2)
So I think I know what I'm talking about.
Well, drawing from what many people have been saying here, there is of course a nonzero probability that you don't.
Even if there was a black hole created... (Score:2)
And if I remember right, Stephen Hawking showed recently that micro black holes 'evaporate' almost immediately; the smaller they are, the faster they vanish
Why it's not a problem (Score:4)
The vacuum is full of virtual particle-antiparticle pairs, constantly forming and annihilating, with a mass-time product less than the uncertainty principle's magic number. When a pair occurs near an event horizon, one of the particles can tunnel deep enough into it to be annihilated by its antiparticle below the horizon, allowing the partner to escape - as if the particle below the horizon had tunneled out. (If there isn't an antiparticle available, there isn't energy available to kick loose the particle that didn't penetrate the event horzon. So it falls in, too, and the virtual particle-antiparticle pair disappear back into the vacuum.)
So black holes evaporate. Bigger black holes have a bigger separation between the mass and the event horizon, and thus a lower mass density just under it. So the smaller the black hole the faster it eveporates. "Evaporate" means emit a spray of energetic subatomic particles.
If I have the constants right, a stellar-sized black hole emits the odd particle now and then, a mountain-mass black hole is a good approximation of a nuclear power plant's core, and so on. But radiation reduces their mass, so the faster they radiate, the faster they shrink, and the FASTER their radiation increases, until the event horizon suddenly disappears and the remaining particles come blasting out of the former cage at nearly lightspeed. It goes BANG big-time - because this happens when there's still a lot of stuff in there. Current high-end H-bombs would blush with envy.
A black hole with the mass of a couple heavy ions would have a very short lifetime, even as compared with other subnuclear processes. Making one that would have a lifetime in seconds would consist of creating a density of matter that would push stuff through the event horizon faster than it tunnels out. That's equivalent to making a BIG atomic fireball and squeezing it down to the size of a single nucleus.
So we might see black holes as screwier-than-usual short-lived composite particles acting as intermediate steps in sunuclear reactions. But we shouldn't see a baby black hole falling quietly out of the accellerator and eating the earth.
Of course, my understanding of the model could be wrong. B-)
Or the model could be wrong. In which case, other predictions from it (such as the hole forming in the first place) are also up for grabs.
Appocalypse Now (Score:2)
So January 1st, y2k, we won't need to worry about computer failures - they're putting this thing in full swing.
Reminds me of a quote from some field commander in the US civil war:
"At this range they couldn't hit an elephant!" Those were his last words.
That's Bad (Score:2)
"Ok, important safety tip. Thanks Egon."
Once apon a time.. (Score:2)
He didnt know.
And so he flipped the Switch-
And never found out.
I read that in a Heinlein book, I dont know where he got it from, it sounded like he was quoting, too.
Personally, as the story continues, I would not want to flip the switch.
How the story continues is that there is so much risk, although so much gained, they send it into space and eventually move it to the far side of the moon.
But if we create a Black Hole that isnt far enough.
And what do we gain? Knowledge is not worth more than the Bystander's family.
If you want to learn, that's fine, But let's learn something else first, Like Mass Transference via Matter/Energy conversion or Hyperspace. I have some theories on that Involving ZeroG, Vacuum, and Kelvin0... but that's another post
Then set up a lab in a distant corner of the galaxy, beyond the fringe, and do whatever you want.
Before risking a farm by building a channel, you get consent of the farmer. Before risking the Solar System by building a research facility, you get consent of the solar system. Wich means building a few mars rockets and Jupitor Shuttles to check all the areas unknown...
"..And other such nonsence.."
I'm not done, but that's it for now.