Large Hadron Collider Goes Live September 10th 409
Naznarreb writes "CERN announced today that the first attempt to circulate a beam through the Large Hadron Collider will be on September 10th, 2008. You can read the press release here. They also announced the event will be webcast live. According to the release, they're just planning to run a few tests laps, not smash any particles, so the world won't be ending quite yet." And despite that September 10th date, according to the BBC, "On 9 August, protons will be piped through LHC magnets for the first time."
They start smashing particles the next day (Score:3, Interesting)
It's always 9:11 (Score:1, Interesting)
Perhaps this explains why I regularly "just happen" to look at the clock at precisely 9:11 at least 6 times a week. It used to give me chills and now it's just pissing me off. It's been happening for a few years and I actually started to purchase survival shit before the last two 9/11s. I think this one has a higher probability of being something of significance. On a lighter note, it's probably just some massive coincidence that I keep looking at the clock at 9:11...
Top 10 Ways to DESTROY the Earth!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Sucked into a microscopic black hole
You will need: a microscopic black hole. Note that black holes are not eternal, they evaporate due to Hawking radiation. For your average black hole this takes an unimaginable amount of time, but for really small ones it could happen almost instantaneously, as evaporation time is dependent on mass. Therefore you microscopic black hole must have greater than a certain threshold mass, roughly equal to the mass of Mount Everest. Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader. [I love that part].
Method: simply place your black hole on the surface of the Earth and wait. Black holes are of such high density that they pass through ordinary matter like a stone through the air. [Yeah, so then how will I place it *on* the Earth. Lousy instructions.] The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the center of the Earth and all the way through to the other side: then, it'll oscillate back, over and over like a matter-absorbing pendulum. Eventually it will come to rest at the core, having absorbed enough matter to slow it down. Then you just need to wait, while it sits and consumes matter until the whole Earth is gone.
Highly, highly unlikely. But not impossible.
Earth's final resting place: a singularity of almost zero size, which will then proceed to happily orbit the Sun as normal.
Source: "The Dark Side Of The Sun," by Terry Pratchett. It is true that the microscopic black hole idea is an age-old science fiction mainstay which predates Pratchett by a long time, he was my original source for the idea, so that's what I'm putting.
Re:September 10th? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, if it had the degree symbol between the 2 and the K.
He didn't put the degree symbol between the 2 and the K because it isn't "2 degrees kelvin" it's "2 kelvin", like "2 kilograms" or "2 meters"
Seeing it on the ISS (Score:5, Interesting)
Could you imagine what it would be like to be on the ISS when the earth is destroyed by a LHC mbh.
The earth would fold up, only a 1% consumption would be needed to make it impossible to land on the earth and survive, but if the earth all went in a few hours or less. wow. And with the angular momemtum of the earth, the mbh would have to rotate on the earth's axis and the mbh would send its radiation beams away from the iss so the iss could be survivable from that prospective. Also, the aero drag would be gone and so orbital reboost would not be needed. I wonder how long they could survive? Also, since the mass of the earth/mbh doesn't change, all those nasty time-drag effects won't happen at the orbital distance of the iss.
It would make a nice sci-fi short story noir if a multi-year survival could be speculated.
Regards.
Re:Get your affairs in order, people (Score:5, Interesting)
Honest question about Hawking Radiation - how do we know it really exists? As far as I know we've never directly observed a black hole and we've certainly never created one in the lab, so where is the experimental evidence to support it? Shouldn't you say that we THINK Hawking Radiation would destroy said black hole?
Re:Top 10 Ways to DESTROY the Earth!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
You, like most other people, just dont understand how fucking small the schwarzshild radius of such a black hole would be.
If all the energy of both particles gets converted into mass, and all the matter end up in a tiny black hole, this will have an energy of 5TeV max, which is less than 10^-22 kg. ...
Now the schwarzschild radius is 2*m*G/c^2.
This results in about 10^-50m, about a billion trillion times less than the planck lenght (which already tells us that this aint you normal black hole anymore).
Even if it could exist at that size, looking at the crossection it could travel all the way to the center of the earth and just missing every matter.
In fact, taking this tiny size into account, i dont think a proton or neutron could even get into
Re:Get your affairs in order, people (Score:5, Interesting)
A black hole with the mass of the Earth has, at one Earth-radius, a gravitational attraction of 1g. (In other words, if you were on the far side of the moon, and the Earth suddenly turned into a black hole, you wouldn't notice.) Closer, it would be much higher. Half an earth radius from the black hole it'd be 4g, a quarter of an earth radius it'd be 8g, etc --- one kilometre away it'd be 4 million g, and one metre away it'd be 3x10^14 g. That's gonna hurt.
So if somehow you were to magically create the 5x10^41 Joules of energy necessary to create a black hole the size of the Earth, on the Earth, I suspect we'd probably know immediately, subject to light speed limits, as the direction of down shifts abruptly followed a few seconds later by the disintegration of the planet and collapse into a accretion disc of white hot plasma. That is, those parts of the Earth that are not blasted outwards by the collapse event, which is what astrophysicists would call 'violent'.
(Of course, *now* I realise that you were actually originally talking about the end result after the consumption of the earth by a tiny black hole, but I've done all the maths now, dammit. So I'm going to post anyway. Besides, once the tiny black hole reaches about .1 earth mass it's still going to be pretty spectacular.)
Re:September 10th? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, to be even more anal, the plural form "kelvins" should only be used to indicate temperature intervals (differences between temperatures); when indicating specific temperatures, the singular form is used. Take a gander at this section of the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] for examples.
And remember, there's always a bigger pedant out there somewhere. :-)
Re:Get your affairs in order, people (Score:3, Interesting)
H-C---C-H