LHC Flips On Tomorrow 526
BTJunkie writes "The Large Hadron Collider, the worlds most expensive science experiment, is set to be turned on tomorrow. We've discussed this multiple times already. A small group of people believe our world will be sucked into extinction (some have even sent death threats). The majority of us, however, won't be losing any sleep tonight."
Reader WillRobinson notes that CERN researchers declared the final synchronization test a success and says, "The first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC will be made this Wednesday, Sept. 10 at the injection energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV). The start up time will be between (9:00 to 18:00 Zurich Time) (2:00 to 10:00 CDT) with live webcasts provided at webcast.cern.ch."
Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Funny)
Correct. No boom today. Boom tomorrow. Always boom tomorrow.
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Informative)
No boom tomorrow either:
"First beam circulated" != "First collisions"
Also, beam will be circulated at injection energy (450GeV) and not accelerated to the design collision energy. Even if they did circulate beam in both directions *and collide them* (a separate activity) the total energy of collision would still be less that half of what the tevatron at Fermilab, USA, has been doing for many years. If *that* were a problem we'd already be
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Funny)
If *that* were a problem we'd already be
Oh crap, it was a problem!
I think we should ask reader WillRobinson (Score:4, Funny)
Can you tell us if there is any DANGER! DANGER WILLROBINSON!
Re:I think we should ask reader WillRobinson (Score:5, Funny)
Did you see my robot flailing its arms around? Was it screaming danger! danger!?
No not yet as noted above on the amount of energy used. Ill be sure to let ya know when its necessary.
As reported by CERN [web.cern.ch] announced the success of the second and final test of the Large Hadron Collider's beam synchronization systems which will allow the LHC operations team to inject the first beam into the LHC.
Some very cool pictures there too. Now what they mean, is a bit beyond my skills.
Now if I could just get that LHC song [slashdot.org] out of my head ...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Check out the youtube comments on the video you linked to. Much more entertaining than the video.
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Interesting)
No boom tomorrow either:
"First beam circulated" != "First collisions"
I duno, when the beam needs a Dump Block [ieee.org] consisting of an 8M long, 10ton graphite rod encased in 1000 tons of concrete, and even then has to be directed around in a pattern to keep from burning through it because it is "capable of melting a 500-kilogram block of copper," Id say boom possible, but not likely. I just wouldnt want to be in the tunnels with something like that racing around held in place by magnets, if one nearby turns off, BOOM you either turn into the incredible hulk, get zapped off to another world [wikipedia.org] or simply vaporized like that 500kg block of copper.
tm
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Nobody is in the tunnel while the beam is on, except cockroaches. Since the particles are moving in a circle they are as if accelerating constantly and consequently they as charged particles constantly give off radiation, in the gamma range somewhere. The whole tunnel is constantly bathed in lethal levels of radiation.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Interesting)
Mod the above as +10 Informative since most news outlets completely missed this point in their coverage.
The *actual* doomsday will occur when the first collisions occur in one to two months. [uslhc.us]
Much cooler than a black hole would be Death By Strangelet [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Phew! I was worried that I overslept and missed the Strangelet singularity! Talk about stating the obvious.
Wikipedia: -1 Redundant
Obligatory Car Analogy (Score:5, Informative)
Imagine a road that goes in a circle.
Now, tomorrow, they're going to put ONE CAR on the road
and drive it moderately fast to make sure the road is intact.
Then they will proceed, in future tests, to drive that ONE CAR
faster and faster around the circular road to make sure the road holds up.
On "collision day", the add a SECOND CAR driving in the
OPPOSITE DIRECTION on that circular road.
Then they drive those two cars REALLY REALLY FAST and crash them head-on
into each other.
The point is to try to understand the cars and how they are put together
by analyzing the parts that go flying off in the collision, and the speed
and direction that those parts went flying.
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Funny)
No, no, it's perfectly safe. They're just going to have Gordon move the sample into the test chamber...
- David Stein
Video's Down Already - Black Hole Successful (Score:3, Funny)
Either that, or they're just slashdotted...
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Funny)
The guy in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt1Yo610lG0 [youtube.com] explains it all.
Yes, it is a STARGATE TO HELL ! Doom fans, rejoice ! Happy ! Happy !
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Even I have had some crackpot ideas, some probably more fu*ked than this video. Like how we can explain past lives by analyzing the energy memory.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Presumably you've never visited Time Cube [timecube.com] before... it's a whole 'nother level of crazy. Just one visit will permanently destroy your ability to be surprised by anyone's level of insanity.
- David Stein
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Informative)
wikipedia is wrong or was edited for hilarity. in the books, it's actually "big mistake of '38"
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
wikipedia is wrong or was edited for hilarity. in the books, it's actually "big mistake of '38"
Actually, I performed that edit, but it's the '38 that's wrong. I was just reading The Rise of Endymion last night, and it clearly says "Big Mistake of '08", page 92, near the bottom. And that's coming from the AI on the Consul's ship, so it ought to be reliable ;-)
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:4, Interesting)
Apparently Simmons is not consistent!
5 occurrences of "Big Mistake of '08" in Rise of Endymion. [google.cl]
2 occurrences of "Big Mistake of '08" in Endymion. [google.cl]
1 occurrence of "Big Mistake of '38" in Fall of Hyperion. [google.cl]
No references to any year in Hyperion. [google.cl]
It looks like '08 is the clear winner.
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Funny)
I like Terry Pratchett's take on this sort of 'low risk' experiment (from 'The Science of Discworld'):
"Well ... in the unlikely event of it going seriously wrong, it ... wouldn't just blow up the university, sir."
"What would it blow up, pray?"
"Er ... everything, sir."
"Everything there is, you mean?"
"Within a radius of about fifty thousand miles out into space, sir, yes. According to Hex it'd happen instantaneously. We wouldn't even know about it."
"And the odds of this are...?"
"About fifty to one, sir."
The wizards relaxed.
"That's pretty safe. I wouldn't bet on a horse at those odds," said the Senior Wrangler.
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Funny)
I kind of like this LHC doom.
It's not the kind of doom where people tell you the best thing you can do about it is to buy MREs, take a gun out into the mountains, bug out and prepare to defend your MREs from hungry zombies for the next six months.
Personally, I think the best response is probably PANIC SEX!!!
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Funny)
Big ba-da-boom
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The LHC won't be doing anything that isn't already happening in the upper atmosphere due to cosmic rays anyway.
This is true, but what if watching what is going on - changes what happens? Isn't this one of the mysteries of quantum physics?
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Funny)
Only if the LHC is propelling cats.
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Funny)
With any luck these tests will finally let Schrodinger's cat rest in peace. Never again having to exist in the zombirific dead and alive state.
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Funny)
With the speeds involved I think it's safe to say it will exist as a thin film of... cat. 27km long.
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Informative)
One of the main fearmongers concerning the LHC is Otto Rossler. He's a 68-year-old biochemist whose initial career was respected and conventional, but in recent years has veered into promoting his own "Theory of Everything" that contradicts the Theory of Relativity. According to Rossler, (a) Hawking radiation doesn't exist, and (b) microscopic black holes created by cosmic rays are moving so fast that they pass right through the earth, whereas LHC black holes will be trapped by earth's gravity and destroy the planet.
What's really happening is that Rossler and others like him are using the LHC as a soapbox to promote their particular brands of pseudoscience. From what I've read, any debate with Rossler quickly leads to him promoting his own pet theories, rather than any rational examination of the risks.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Does he explain how a proton is going to acquire enough mass into a small enough radius to turn into a blackhole without using lorenz transformations, E=mC^2 and relativistic weirdness?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
From what I've read, any debate with Rossler quickly leads to him promoting his own pet theories, rather than any rational examination of the risks.
No, no, you don't understand. Nutcases like this know that a thorough understanding of their enlightened pseudoscience is fundamental to any rational examination of the risks. They're trying to help you. Really.
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Interesting)
Microscopic black holes would evaporate in a very small amount of time due to Hawking radiation..
Are you willing to gamble the existence of the universe on that untested hypothesis? Yes?
By the way, every biology article gets tagged "whatcouldpossiblygowrong?" An article showing that artificial DNA self-associates was tagged that. No chance of killer viruses from that, yet it got the tag. Here we have a scientific study with some people actually claiming it will end the earth. They may be idiots, but people who worry about DNA strands creating vampires like in I am legend are just as idiotic. What gives?
I personally say it's only because no movies have yet taken the idea of LHC and mangled it into nonsense to use as a plot device the way they've used killer artificial viruses. And that's probably only because "complete oblitheration of the world" is a pretty boring plot.
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:4, Informative)
Even if they don't evaporate, black holes don't produce a stronger gravitational field than other objects of the same mass. As long as the law of conservation of matter holds (or even if the amount of matter in the LHC triples) we should be fine.
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is really the big problem here: we like to imagine black holes as object that suck everything in, but that's only true of black holes that have star-level masses. A black hole sounds impressive until you realize it could weigh as much as a proton. At that scale, it's gravitational pull isn't really going to be big enough to be a big deal on the femtoscale. And at that collapsed size, there is no reason that it will go and contact anything it can suck in.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you willing to gamble the existence of the universe on that untested hypothesis? Yes?
Sure, you could reply to this post thinking that nothing will go wrong; but are you really willing to gamble the existence of the universe on this untested hypothesis?
See, that's the problem with this whole line of reasoning: the idea that as the conception of danger increases, the less risk we are allowed to afford. And since everything has some risk, there is, afterall, all kinds of things we don't know anything about; and for all you know responding to this very post may bring about the end of the unive
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Interesting)
First, we actually have to be in the right range to create the black holes. This is very, very unlikely - it requires large extra dimensions, something allowed for but not expected in theory.
Then there's Hawking radiation. While there's no reason to believe it doesn't exist (and several to believe it does), it hasn't been experimentally verified. If it doesn't exist, or if a black hole radiates much slower than expected, any created holes could survive long enough to actually absorb more matter.
This [arxiv.org] PDF has the interesting math behind all of this.
Note: No, I'm not even saying they're right. I'm simply stating what their argument is for it. There's a lot of problems with those arguments, and I'm on the "destroy the world? Yeah, right?" side. I'm actually having an LHC get-together tomorrow night, and plan to have an Mad Scientist "End of the World" party on October 21, when they're having the first high-energy collisions.
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:4, Insightful)
The anthropic princiiple strikes again (Score:3, Funny)
At least in this instantiation of the multiverse, nothing universe-destroying will happen. There will undoubtedly be many - perhaps an infinite number - that will be destroyed. But since I will be telling you I told you so, ipso facto it didn't happen here.
Else we'll never know - nor care.
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. (Score:5, Informative)
A counter to the argument that any subatomic black holes the LHC produces would behave differently than those produced in cosmic ray collisions in the upper atmosphere is the existence of neutron stars. Cosmic rays are constantly colliding with these objects as well.
Neutron stars present a gravity well surpassed only by that of black holes, so even subatomic black holes moving at relativistic velocities are likely to be pulled in. The densities of neutron stars are such that if it is indeed possible for a subatomic black hole to grow to macroscale by encountering nearby matter, there would be no place likelier. After billions of years of cosmic ray bombardment, one should expect at the very least to find lots of black holes with masses between the Chandrasehkar and Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limits (roughly, between 1.4 and 3.0 solar masses), implying that these events are the ultimate fate of neutron stars.
That is not what is observed however; there are in fact no known black holes with masses in that regime, while there are a lot of neutron stars. And it would take much longer than the current lifetime of the universe for a 2 solar mass black hole to evaporate by Hawking radiation, so if they were ever made, they should still be around.
So either subatomic black holes are not produced in energetic collisions of cosmic rays, which is good news because those energies are far greater than what the LHC will produce, or subatomic black holes very, very rarely or never survive to consume massive objects, which is also good news.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't say that. Just keep quiet and when we're all still alive on Thursday, the naysayers will just go away.
Uh oh (Score:5, Funny)
Everyone out of the universe... QUICK!
Re:Uh oh (Score:5, Funny)
Reader WillRobinson notes.. 450 GeV (0.45 TeV) .. Zurich .. live webcasts ..
Someone should inform him of the DANGER!
Death threats (Score:5, Funny)
Why would you send death threats to someone you think is going to destroy the world? If he was afraid of dying, he wouldn't be destroying the world, right?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Death threats (Score:5, Funny)
No kidding. We should be saving our death threats for where they matter: idle.slashdot.org.
Re:Death threats (Score:5, Insightful)
Insightful?
Logical fallacy is fallacious.
A threatens B because A believes B's experiments will destroy the world. B believes this is not the case.
There is no indication that B does not fear death.
B most likely falls in line with the general stance on death - B probably doesn't want to die.
Cyclical (Score:4, Funny)
Perhaps real intelligence will know *not* to switch it on in a few more cycles of this.
Well, it's been nice knowing you all. I'm just off to steal some Porsches (no Ferarri garages nearby), and loot, and plunder booty.
End Of The World Party (Score:5, Funny)
Re:End Of The World Party (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'll chip in towards that, here's a check.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
plenty of wives and girlfriends would like one good bonk before then as well
They'll probably want to take care of their headache and get a good night of sleep more if their past reactions are any indication.
Only in a single direction (Score:5, Informative)
They will be only sending a beam around the LHC in a single direction at about 7% power. It will be about a month before they send a beam in the other direction and have a collision. I think it is about a year before they will be up to full power.
It's going to be OK they said (Score:5, Funny)
No possibility of a resonance cascade they said. Put the crystal thing into the spectrometer they said. The whole thing blew up my place of employment and I started Unforeseen Consequences with nothing but a crowbar for a while.
Moral: Keep your crowbars close and your guns closer and don't trust the scientists.
Re:It's going to be OK they said (Score:5, Funny)
You say that as a joke, but it may be more likely than you think [kuvaton.com].
Re:It's going to be OK they said (Score:4, Funny)
I like how the guy seems to be regarding the "instructions" taped to the LHC with some amusement.
You know, the ones that were taped over some OTHER scientists note(and with seemingly opposite instructions, note the opposing arrows), and with "danger" tape to make it more "official".
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Come on scientists, seriously... (Score:5, Funny)
You guys can't blow up the Earth! It's where I keep all my stuff!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complains and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now.
In your local time zone (Score:2)
warping reality already (Score:5, Funny)
The weirdness has already begun if 9:00 to 18:00 Zurich Time is 2:00 to 10:00 CDT.
Am I the only one hoping for... (Score:2, Funny)
IMPENDING DOOM!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:IMPENDING DOOM!! (Score:4, Funny)
I just got a picture of a terrorist entering heaven and 100 male geeks are there waiting for the terrorist.
Terrorist: "These are not the virgins I was thinking of"
"They're waiting for, Gordon, in the test chamber. (Score:4, Funny)
Intercom 1: (feedback)"Testing, testing. (coughs) Everything seems to
be in order."
Intercom 2: "All right, Gordon. your suit should keep you comfortable
through all this. The specimen will be delivered to you in a few
moments. If you would be so good as to climb up and start the rotors,
we can bring the anti-mass spectrometer to 80 percent and hold it there
until the carrier arrives.
Intercom 2: "Gordon, are you not hearing me? Climb up and start the
rotors, please.
Intercom 2: "Very good. We'll take it from here."
Intercom 1: "Power to stage 1 emitters in 3,2,1. I'm seeing predictable
phase arrays."
Intercom 1: "Stage 2 emitters activating...now."
Intercom 2: "Gordon, we cannot predict how long the system can operate
at this level, nor how long the readings will take. Please, work as
quickly as you can."
Intercom 1: "Overhead capacitors to one oh five percent. Uh, it's
probably not a problem, probably, but I'm showing a small discrepancy
in... well, no, it's well within acceptable bounds again. Sustaining
sequence."
Intercom 2: "I've just been informed that the sample is ready, Gordon.
It should be coming up to you any moment now. Look to the delivery
system for your specimen."
Time to get to work... (Score:5, Funny)
I need to hurry up and finish work on my black-hole shelter...
the world is not going to end (Score:5, Funny)
I owe far too much money for that to ever happen.
Wasn't this already covered by Ghostbusters? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wasn't this already covered by Ghostbusters? (Score:5, Informative)
Dr. Egon Spengler: There's something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don't cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.
0.45 TeV (Score:5, Funny)
Shouldn't that be 0.439 TeV? (450 GeV / 1024)
Explains the silence, they all did it before... (Score:5, Funny)
Flipping the switch commentary... (Score:2)
- Samuel L. Jackson (Ray Arnold), Jurassic Park
Remember what we were taught? (Score:5, Funny)
Back in the old days of the cold war, in the schools,for preparation of a nuclear bomb falling, we would get under our desks because they are obviously made of some kind of material that can withstand radiation and a giant percussion wave. I'll bet those desks can withstand the LHC black hole too. Only school children and teachers will be left.
Re:Remember what we were taught? (Score:5, Informative)
I didn't miss the joke -- I LOL'ed, I promise -- but speaking as a CERT instructor [citizencorps.gov]: you were told to get under your desks not to protect against a blast near enough to cause vaporization, but to protect against a possible collapse of a building damaged by an otherwise-non-lethal pressure wave. Yes of course if the bomb detonates right above you, you're toast, and if the bomb detonates far enough away that the pressure wave can't cause building damage then you're cowering under your desk for nothing. For the huge chunk of distance-from-ground-zero in between those two extremes, though, your chance of surviving a building collapse is much greater if you have a personal void to hide inside -- like the area under a desk. That's why your 'nuclear bomb drill' and your 'tornado drill' are so similar: you are increasing your odds of survival, being successfully located and extracted by search and rescue teams, in the event that part of your building collapses.
Re:Remember what we were taught? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, it could. It could also be argued that the aim was to prepare future interns for service under the desk of Bill Clinton.
Just because an argument COULD be made, doesn't mean it should. If you truly think that your suggestion is a rational one, I'm willing to bet you'd feel right at home with those weirdos from ANSWER.
Let's make another bang (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The best laid plans...
More likely it will punch a hole in the (Score:5, Funny)
You'll know it too. You'll wake up one day with a Black President or with an old geezer and a MILF for a VP.
Then, and only then, will I worry!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
For Sydney Slashdotters (Score:5, Informative)
Doctors Karl Kruszelnicki and Kevin Varvell are giving an LHC lecture [usyd.edu.au] at the University of Sydney tonight. 7pm at the Footbridge Theatre. Varvell is a contributor to the ATLAS detector. Kruszelnicki is always fun. It includes a live cross to CERN. The lecture was to be in the school of Physics but has had to be transferred to a larger venue due to popular demand.
Radio 4 coverage in the UK (Score:5, Informative)
For some reason, the BBC are making a big thing of this, and providing a lot of coverage and related programmes on the Radio 4 station.
The BBC provide a listen again service for those of you who are distant but interested. Check out the programmes here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/bigbang/ [bbc.co.uk]
Assuming that the world isn't swallowed up by a black hole from the experiment, that is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/science/15risk.html [nytimes.com]
Most expensive science experiment ever? (Score:4, Informative)
The International Space Station [wikipedia.org] gets that (dis)honor, with an estimated cost of $25.6B (US) from 1994 to 2005, not including shuttle costs - and that's just NASA's budget.
So, from that perspective, the LHC is a bargain. And it's probably still cheap compared to what the Superconducting SuperCollider would have ended up costing.
Re:Most expensive science experiment ever? (Score:4, Funny)
I'm just mad that the Europeans are going to beat us to destroying the Earth.
What every happened to America #1?
It would server them damn Europeans right if the LHC _didn't_ destroy the Earth and we managed to do it with Global Warming (sorry, Global Climate Change) instead. Ah, they'd probably just hide out in their circular tunnel, tweaking their precious proton stream until they got it right... ...stupid geniuses...
Regular status updates can be found here: (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Thankfully, there is an RSS feed so you know in real-time if the Earth has been destroyed:
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/rss.xml [hasthelhcd...eearth.com]
But, what if the end of the world affects my DSL? Is there an option for SMS?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You missed the comment
<!-- oh shit bears -->
Go look up how that is to be rendered in the html4 spec in the event of the earth's destruction.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the earth yet?</title>
<!-- the first person to ask for an RSS feed gets a free black hole in their junk
ok FINE here
-->
<link rel="alternate" title="Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the earth yet?" h
Have the nuts not noticed? (Score:3)
Fermi Paradox? (Score:3, Insightful)
Is this the answer to the Fermi paradox? [wikipedia.org]
If, given the expected number of star systems with planets capable of supporting life (which although may be a low percentage of stars still isn't nil), and given that evolution eventually results in intelligence (or at least there's a decent probability it does), then there should be plenty of other intelligent civilizations (certainly including post-Singularity civilizations). But there (apparently) aren't.
So either we're first, out of all those star systems...
Or just perhaps intelligent civilizations all eventually delve into the field of particle physics and build colliders... then wink out of existence in spontaneous black holes.
Don't worry... (Score:5, Funny)
LHC has all the latest safety systems... in the event of an actual black hole or strangelet event...
they simply full the lever and hit the button!! [isv.uu.se]
It says.. "Black Hole/Stranglet CRASH button - In case of imminent world destruction, break glass and press CMS ABORT button"
(Yes, that's really in the LHC control room LOL)
Time loop (Score:3, Funny)
Somehow I was immune to its effects and have been reliving this day over and over and over, at least 100 times now!
I've been watching Groundhog Day [imdb.com] and 12:01 [imdb.com] to try to work out what's happening and how I can stop it but... oh crap here it goes ag~~~
Particles of far higher energies occur naturally (Score:4, Informative)
Has anyone here read about the "Oh-My-God particle" [fourmilab.ch]? A proton detected in 1991 with an energy of 3.2±0.9×10^20 eV - that's 51 Joules, an energy you'd expect for a macroscopic object and 10 million times more than the maximum the LHC can produce (7 Tev).
The linked page has some of the relativistic properties calculated for that proton including that "After traveling one light year, the particle would be only 0.15 femtoseconds -- 46 nanometres -- behind a photon that left at the same time."
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Informative? Well, I suppose his did tell us his birthday. My birthday is February 24th, 1980. Now mod me up!