Tags: Hadron, CERN, black hole, blackhole, end of the world.
Mod note-please don't remove these tags, it will ensure that people find this thread if they use the search button.

So, with the activation of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN just around the corner, and the untold discoveries it may bring, I've been getting rather excited.

I've been keeping track of this in new scientist and through my physics teacher, and all the potential off-shoot theories that may or may not be proved. I think BBC Radio 4 are going to broadcast on the day, you can listen live from the site if you don't get that station.

We've all heard the horror stories. The idea that it will spawn black holes and worm holes, deadly particles and sub-atomic strings. Who knows? But I think it'll be good, do you?

LHC Wikis and links:
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CERN homepage.
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Wiki the LHC.
LHC on CERN.
Wiki string theory.
Wiki Higgs Boson particle.
Wiki Black Holes.
Will the LHC make black holes?
Stranglets and how they won't occur.
Why it won't eat the universe.
Hadrons.
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Other links:
L.A.S.E.R.s
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Image Links:
Awesome Composite Image Of The 'Alice' Detector.
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And the Large Hadron Rap!

I thought the theory was that while there is the energy to spawn black holes, they'd be so small they'd simply evaporate harmlessly.
Makes it sound less exciting to some, but as a physics nerd I can't wait to hear about what happens. You reckon we'll find the Higgs?

Yup, mini-blackholes or also 'strange' particles that will RIP OUR UNIVERSE ASUNDER AAHHHAHAH!!

Strangelets!! Nooo!!
Indeed it is an exciting time for particle physics. We won't know if they've found the Higgs until, at least, next year though.

Yes, great topic. It is very exciting, slightly worrying at the same time, but you can't not be excited by what the results might bring.

Particle physics gives me a large hadron. (sorry... been done many times before, but I couldn't resist!)

The annoying thing about the LHC is it's name. Hadron Collider I'm fine with, but "large"?

Meh, the worst that could happen is that we will try to discover teleportation, and....

Nah, my saving throw against world destruction is pretty good, anything over 17.

Usually I'm not into colliding hadrons, but this is so very interesting.

I hope the world doesn't end.

afrophysics:
The annoying thing about the LHC is it's name. Hadron Collider I'm fine with, but "large"?

Because it's really, really big? Of course, none of us will know the results until at least next year (as someone said). Unless any of you happen to work there?

I'll edit the OP with links to resources about it, if you'd care to contribute please do, we could keep this up as an update thread.

HBrutusH:

afrophysics:
The annoying thing about the LHC is it's name. Hadron Collider I'm fine with, but "large"?

Because it's really, really big? Of course, none of us will know the results until at least next year (as someone said). Unless any of you happen to work there?

I'll edit the OP with links to resources about it, if you'd care to contribute please do, we could keep this up as an update thread.

No what I mean is because the word large is a bit.. dissapointing.

Some things to settle the paranoid among us:
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/space/2008/06/report-concludes-lhc-wont-eat-universe.html CERN's report concluding that the LHC won't eat the universe.

http://everything2.com/e2node/Strangelet - Definition of a strangelet and why it won't occur.

I would also like to mention something that I read a few months ago. In the LEP's(Large elctron-positron collider) life-time it collided about a trillion particles. On the moon a trillion particles a second collide at speeds necessary to create strangelets.
It would be extremely funny if a strangelet was created due to particles colliding on the moon at the time the LHC is switched on, in a dark sort of way.

afrophysics:
The annoying thing about the LHC is it's name. Hadron Collider I'm fine with, but "large"?

It is pretty big. CERN gives me a large hadron..

afrophysics:

No what I mean is because the word large is a bit.. dissapointing.

It would've been much better to call it Epic Hadron Collider. Updated the OP, thanks BardSeed. :)

I'll help beef the original post out some more. I have a site with lots of lovely information and also a CERN rap! It's actually pretty useful in explaining what's happening at the LHC. Also, I have some 3d images of the detectors.

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/LHC-en.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3iryBLZCOQ

http://www.petermccready.com

Integra:
I thought the theory was that while there is the energy to spawn black holes, they'd be so small they'd simply evaporate harmlessly.
Makes it sound less exciting to some, but as a physics nerd I can't wait to hear about what happens. You reckon we'll find the Higgs?

The Higgs particle is a LIE of the standard model of physics, MUHAHAHAHAA!

Although on a real note, maybe, maybe not - it'll be interesting the Higgs illudes physics and doesn't actually exist. Although Physics needs something to 'replace' General Relativity and Quantum mechanics that works when both are in play.

afrophysics:

HBrutusH:

afrophysics:
The annoying thing about the LHC is it's name. Hadron Collider I'm fine with, but "large"?

Because it's really, really big? Of course, none of us will know the results until at least next year (as someone said). Unless any of you happen to work there?

I'll edit the OP with links to resources about it, if you'd care to contribute please do, we could keep this up as an update thread.

No what I mean is because the word large is a bit.. dissapointing.

It could be slang and have nothing to do with size.

Cool Hadron Collider was too 80's and Excellent Hadron Collider was too "Bill & Ted".

HBrutusH:

It could be slang and have nothing to do with size.

Cool Hadron Collider was too 80's and Excellent Hadron Collider was too "Bill & Ted".

Big Ass Hadron Collider was too ghetto. Averagely Sized Hadron Collider was too modest.

Perhaps the 'Large' in this context is modifying the 'Hadron' and not the 'Collider'; as in they are smashing large hadrons together.

Here's the wiki entry on Hadrons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadron

Should clear everything right up...

We're never going to get any closer to glowy lasers and faster than light tracel unless we roll up our sleeves and study dem particles!

To quote comedian Frankie Boyle:

"I hope that when the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is activated our whole universe will dissolve into nothing and a sign will pop up which reads: 'Level 2' "

Lasers! Fusion! Science!

https://lasers.llnl.gov/

Sadly all the neat details of the Nova Laser project (predecessor to the above) have moved out of public view. They have neat pictures in glowy lighting, though.

Imagine a $10 billion underground ring-shaped tunnel, 27 km in circumference, so big that it stretches through both France and Switzerland: One ring to rule them all, the new Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, scheduled to come online around about August 2008.

A collider is the basic tool of particle physics. You take a stream of particles, accelerate them to really high kinetic energy levels, and slam them into a target. Depending on the experiment, all sorts of exotic things happen. Most experiments are to create new particles predicted by theory or to examine their behavior. The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, has two beams traveling in opposite directions around the 27 km circle, each accelerated to 7 TeV (trillion electron volts) of energy and traveling at 99.999999% of the speed of light, held in place by powerful magnets. All around the ring are different experiment stations. To perform an experiment, you turn on the experimental detector and use the magnets to collide the beams into each other head-on inside your detector, creating 600 million 14 TeV collisions per second. That's a pretty high energy level, and we expect to learn all sorts of new and exotic things about the universe. Most famously, we hope to find the theorized Higgs boson, the particle that creates mass; but the collider's various experiments will produce knowledge that will permeate virtually every science we have.

As you may have heard by now, some people have voiced concerns that particle collisions from the LHC will create tiny black holes. Black holes have such intense gravity that they consume everything around them, even light. And so, within a fraction of a second, this tiny black hole will consume the collider itself, France, Switzerland, and then the entire Earth, presumably followed shortly thereafter by our whole solar system. Clearly not a fear to be taken lightly.

The best known opposition to the Large Hadron Collider comes in the form of a much publicized lawsuit, filed in Hawaii by two individuals, science writer Luis Sancho and retired nuclear safety officer Walter L. Wagner, against the US Department of Energy, Fermilab, CERN, the National Science Foundation and Does 1-100. The lawsuit presents affidavits from the plaintiffs and five other individuals, stating their opinion that dangerous black holes could be formed and seeking to block operation of the collider until these fears can be adequately studied. It seems a reasonable precaution, given how incredibly gigantic and powerful the LHC is, and how Biblical the scale of the destruction it might wreak.

Yet, the Large Hadron Collider is but a donut compared to what the United States' Superconducting Supercollider would have been. The SSC, as it was known until its cancellation in 1993, would have had a circumference of 87 km and a beam energy of 30 TeV - that's more than three times the size of the LHC and more than twice the energy. And even the mighty SSC was but a Cheerio compared to the hypothetical Very Large Hadron Collider proposed by Fermilab, with a circumference of 105 to 650 km, and a beam energy of 40 to 200 TeV! So when you compare the LHC to other possible colliders, you realize that yeah it's crazy big, but it's not that big and it's nowhere near the energy levels that are possible. It's certainly not the "ultimate doomsday device" that some fearmongering detractors are making it out to be.

And, even after looking at other possible larger colliders, if you're still concerned that 14 TeV represents the pinnacle of danger, just look at the naturally occurring collisions happening all around us every day. Cosmic rays in the LHC's energy range are hitting the atmosphere constantly, and have been for 4 billion years, creating the same type of collisions that the collider will produce. Some of these, called Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays, have been measured at over 1020 electron volts, ten million times as energetic as the LHC's maximum energy. While that sounds like a staggering amount, it's about the kinetic energy of a baseball thrown at 100 kph. That's a lot for a single proton, but it's hardly the destruction of the planet.

So one way to think of this is that the Large Hadron Collider is just an impotent little Spaghetti-O compared to the greatest supercollider of them all: The universe. Nature's supercollider has been going for billions of years at energies millions of times higher than human scientists can dream about. So far, neither Earth nor any of the other planets, nor even any super-dense astronomical bodies like neutron stars, have suffered from particle collisions. In fact, according to Dr. Brian Cox at CERN, the universe conducts the equivalent of ten trillion lifetime runs of the LHC every second, and has been doing so for billions of years, with not a single observable consequence.

The main reason is that micro black holes of the type that particle collisions can create behave very differently than the giant supernova-sized black holes you see in movies. They don't eat anything. Instead, they explode with a tiny little micro pop. Most people have heard of Hawking radiation, which is emitted by black holes. As large black holes eat stuff, they also evaporate away as Hawking radiation. The smaller the black hole, the more energetic this evaporation. For a micro black hole, this evaporation happens at essentially the same instant it is created, or at least, this is what is theorized: Specifically, they would decay instantaneously into hadron jets and high PT leptons, which are one thing that we actually hope to see with the LHC. As for Sancho and Wagner's concerns, they are not the first people to conceive of these events; and whether they like to think so or not, the subject has already been studied - exhaustively, in fact - and it's been part of the plans since many years before they contrived their little lawsuit. In fact, four years before Sancho and Wagner filed their lawsuit, CERN completed its report based on decades of research into the safety of the collider, which concludes:

We consider all such objects that have been theoretically envisaged, such as negatively charged strangelets, gravitational black holes, and magnetic monopoles. We find no basis for any conceivable threat.

As a backup in case their black hole alarmism should fail, Sancho and Wagner also proposed a danger from strangelets created by the LHC. Strangelets are unusual particles composed of an eclectic mixture of similar numbers of up, down, and strange quarks. This so-called strange matter is one candidate for the dark matter in the universe. The theoretical threat from strangelets would be that their negative charge would attract and consume the positively charged nuclei of ordinary matter. However this supposition is based on a long chain of "ifs", a chain in which every link is broken. For one thing, most calculations of strange matter show that strangelets would have a positive charge. For another, strangelets can only be stable enough to exist at extremely low temperatures; and their creation in a particle collision would result in extremely high temperatures in which the strangelets must immediately decay. And even if somehow a collision did create a very cold, stable, negatively charged strangelet, it could only grow so long as its charge remained negative, which of course would no longer be the case after it had consumed a handful of positively charged nuclei; and it would then become a harmless particle of ordinary matter.

Unfortunately, the mass media isn't doing anyone any favors. News outlets continue to promote alarmism with headlines like this one from MSNBC: "Doomsday Under Debate", or this one from CNN: "Some Fear Debut of Powerful Atom-Smasher", claiming "The safety of the powerful collider has been debated for years". Absolutely untrue. There is no "debate" among knowledgeable particle physicists. There is plenty of fear mongering and ignorance, and also plenty of "cooler heads" who have been given this misinformation and are now issuing reasonable-sounding warnings like "the potential risks are so high that we should step back and investigate these concerns." These people advocating caution have neither valid theoretical arguments nor any information to refute the physicists' observations, and don't appear to have taken even the most fundamental steps to inform themselves about the issues they are so passionately pursuing. Instead, they make apocalyptic anti-science web sites like SaneScience.org and LHCFacts.org to spread misinformation.

You don't have "two sides" to science. There is no "listening to both sides". Science is not philosophy or opinion. Science consists of what we've learned so far. And one thing that we've learned so far, and validated with billions of years of universe-scale observation, is that a particle collider represents no plausible danger, and offers astonishing potential for furthering our knowledge. Hang onto your hats, because the Large Hadron Collider is going to bring unprecedented advances in medicine, clean energy production, unified field theory, computing, and astrophysics. Get on board for the ride!

Lick the screen and you can taste the PWNAGE seeping out.

That certainly stops the arguments before they start! Good job, I'm probably one of the few people to have actually read it.

I still think its Higgs is a LIE (inaccurate hypothesis)! (subject to further data)

Limasol:
You don't have "two sides" to science. There is no "listening to both sides". Science is not philosophy or opinion. Science consists of what we've learned so far. And one thing that we've learned so far, and validated with billions of years of universe-scale observation, is that a particle collider represents no plausible danger, and offers astonishing potential for furthering our knowledge. Hang onto your hats, because the Large Hadron Collider is going to bring unprecedented advances in medicine, clean energy production, unified field theory, computing, and astrophysics. Get on board for the ride!

Lick the screen and you can taste the PWNAGE seeping out.

Hear-hear! There is only one set of theorms, although I have to point out their are multiple hypothesis's, else we'd still think Newtons law of gravity was the best representation, etc.

Hypothesis's come first, then we hack off the ones that are observed to be wrong untill he have one that fits.

Then as we learn more we edit the theory, for example: Darwin didn't know of DNA, he only had whole animals to work with, when we discovered DNA we edited the theory of evolution, it now makes even more sense than before.

Odds are 3 to 1 this leads to an invasion from another dimension.

rossatdi:
Odds are 3 to 1 this leads to an invasion from another dimension.

And it would be awesome!

Great post, Limasol, thanks. :)

As I write this I'm actually in CERN. Been working here all summer, and just been introduced to Zero Punctuation and by extension the Escapist. (Yea we read it here too) I have a few things to say

1) The LHC (and its experiments which are the size of quite large buildings: only buried underground) is awesome. In regards to the fact if you see them you go wow.
2) Weather or not the thing is going to do anything at all is up for discussion. Some of the people here are your typical scientists AND they have been working together for 15 years. In some cases there have been feuds going on for 8 of those years. .. making sure everything has been plugged in becomes challenging in this situation. I must hasten to add IT WILL WORK! Darn it!
3) I don't think its going to blow up the world/ let Satin on to earth/ start with a load of time travelers popping back from the future.
4) However if any of those things happen I am looking forward to be on ground zero.

catch00:
As I write this I'm actually in CERN. Been working here all summer, and just been introduced to Zero Punctuation and by extension the Escapist. (Yea we read it here too) I have a few things to say

1) The LHC (and its experiments which are the size of quite large buildings: only buried underground) is awesome. In regards to the fact if you see them you go wow.
2) Weather or not the thing is going to do anything at all is up for discussion. Some of the people here are your typical scientists AND they have been working together for 15 years. In some cases there have been feuds going on for 8 of those years. .. making sure everything has been plugged in becomes challenging in this situation. I must hasten to add IT WILL WORK! Darn it!
3) I don't think its going to blow up the world/ let Satin on to earth/ start with a load of time travellers popping back from the future.
4) However if any of those things happen I am looking forward to be on ground zero.

And I'm immeasurably glad to welcome you to our forums! May you have many happy and well punctuated posts!

Anarchemitis:
We're never going to get any closer to glowy lasers and faster than light tracel unless we roll up our sleeves and study dem particles!

To the sciencemobile!

GothmogII:
Yup, mini-blackholes or also 'strange' particles that will RIP OUR UNIVERSE ASUNDER AAHHHAHAH!!

so theres no point in me going about opening a WoW account now then no?

meatloaf231:

Anarchemitis:
We're never going to get any closer to glowy lasers and faster than light tracel unless we roll up our sleeves and study dem particles!

To the sciencemobile!

can i drive?

rossatdi:
Odds are 3 to 1 this leads to an invasion from another dimension.

I'll take that bet

I do find it slightly funny that after all the years of scientific progress we've made, scientists are still banging things together to see what happens. Not to squit on what the great minds at CERN are doing, of course, I just find it kind of ironic. I suppose it is the most complex 'banging together' in the history of the world.

EDIT

Is is wrong of me to go under the cynical impression that whatever is discovered with the Hadron Collider will inevitably just be used to kill people in new and interesting ways?

One word: awesome.

It's good to have another physicist in the forum. Welcome.

j-e-f-f-e-r-s:
scientists are still banging things together to see what happens

Interaction involves 'banging things together'. Turn the heat on, and you're banging things together. Your 'fridge? Banging thigs together. Mix some cool-aid? Yep, you're banging things together. The world revolves around interaction, science is just finding out the specifics of the 'banging'.