Does this scare anyone else?

[neonplanet40]

Yes but seeing as its never been tried before then it is possible we sould all be wiped out by the swiss and french? yes? Wow lucky that wasnt there when hitler came into power.....

[Emirzan]

Yeah I suppose so. I don't think this could be used by an evil super dictator type to kill people. It's either gonna destroy absolutely everything or (most likely imo) destroy nothing and make some sciency types very happy.

[Fraz]

and i bet some guy with 4 inches of butt cleavage showing will leave a screwdriver inside it....

Funny you mention that. Someone put a couple of beer bottles in the beam-pipe during the last big experiment at CERN - the LEP collider:

Wed, 26 Jun 1996 15:19:59 +0200

After a shutdown of 6 months during which the LEP vacuum system was opened
at many locations, the accelerator was started up on 14 June 1996.

After 5 days of machine studies it became clear that there was an obstacle
inside the LEP vacuum chamber close to Point 1. On the morning of 19 June
the vacuum system was opened and 2 empty beer bottles, some 5 metres apart,
were found inside the beam pipe. This incident has caused a 5 day delay in
the setting up of the accelerator and will result in a reduction of about
10% of the time available for running LEP2 at the W pair production
threshold (161 GeV) in 1996.

[Fraz]

Its an incredible feat of engineering, what are its uses going to be after the particle tests are completed? or is it purely just to do multiple tests of the same thing?

The experiment will be run for about ~8 years, doing pure particle physics. After this period is over, the accelerator will be upgraded to turn into the Super LHC, and will probably run for a further several years. The experiments will also be upgraded, to make use of new developments in electronics/detectors.

Once running with Super LHC is complete, I'm not sure what is next. We should have the International Linear Collider by then, but it will have a much lower energy than the LHC. The experiments themselves (Super CMS and Super Atlas, by then, etc.) will largely become an experiment in how to dispose of several tens of thousands of tons of highly radioactive waste.

[Fraz]

Some people have theorised (and they are only theories) that the collisions will involve such high energies that micro black holes could be created.

Micro... you're still thinking WAYYYYY too big!

If the LHC can produce black holes (which will depend on certain theories being correct - most notably that the effective Planck scale is of order 1 TeV, i.e. well within reach of the LHC's 14 TeV energy), it could well produce them at a rate as high as 1 per second.

These black holes will have a mass-energy of order 1 TeV - equivalent to the rest-mass of about 1000 hydrogen atoms, which is about 2e-24 kilograms. Now, if the sun turned into a black hole, it would have a Schwarzschild radius of about 3000 meters, and the sun masses in at about 2e30 kilograms. I'm probably doing the maths slightly wrong, but that puts the size of the LHC black holes at around 1e-50 meters. Other calculations I have seen put them as "big" as 1e-19 meters, or 0.1 atto-metres.

Wow. That's gotta be the worst calculation I've ever done. Only out by 31 orders of magnitude

Anyway, if Hawking is correct, and black holes do emit Hawking radiation, the LHC black holes should decay in ~1e-25 seconds, or ~0.1 yocto-seconds if you're a fan of your metric prefixes.

Even if Hawking is wrong - which is unlikely - the black holes will be TOO DAMN SMALL to eat anything as far as I understand it. And besides, they won't be anything that nature hasn't already done before with cosmic rays hitting the earth's atmosphere. Admittedly, in the case of the LHC, we will likely be creating black holes that are much more "stationary" than ones created via cosmic rays, but I'd still be incredibly surprised if any such black holes (which somehow don't decay due to Hawking being incorrect) have a velocity below that of the Earth's escape velocity. More likely that they will be highly relativistic and simply fly off into space.

[mediaboy]

But hungry things that eat things grow!

Besides, everyone knows that if everyone thinks something will happen it will!

[tigerboyce]

5 days to go! get your tin-foil hats ready and such

[Agent]

Can't wait

[samcross]

5 days to go! get your tin-foil hats ready and such

But it won't be set to full power until next year.

[Steve]

They're waiting for you, gordon. In the tesst chamberrr.

Is it me, or does that scientist in half-life mimic the speech of the G-Man at that moment?

[Fraz]

But it won't be set to full power until next year.

The end of the world has indeed been exaggerated. Basically, it's: LHC

Here are some details of what will hopefully be happening on Wednesday:

- The SPS (the accelerator before the LHC) will inject a single proton bunch into the LHC, and they will see if they can get it circulating at an energy of 450 GeV - about 1/16 of the full LHC beam energy. If they don't, then they can try again every 43 seconds, which is the maximum frequency of injection from the SPS.

- Once they have a single bunch circulating, this bunch will orbit the ring with a period of about 89 microseconds. We will be setting the triggers on the detectors to trigger automatically on bunch #1, and we will readout whatever occurs.

- Since there is no second beam to collide with, the things we'll be seeing will either be the beam colliding with stationary beam-pipe gas (beam pipe is under vacuum, but it's not perfect), or if the beam escapes confinement and hits the forward parts of the detectors.

So... physics-wise, no groundbreaking stuff will be happening on Wednesday. These "collisions" are well below the energy of the Tevatron, so nothing new will be seen. However, it's a major technical achievement that's been more than 15 years in the making. It's going to be a good day

[Stewart]

Yes it does scare the **** out of me.

Just thinking of what could happen if that thing decides not to play nice!!

Bet as soon as they switch it on, it goes - I need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle.

[Prufrock]

It scares the crap out of me. They partially turn it on one day after I'm due to pay Mr. Taxman some money. The question is...do I pay the taxman on Tuesday, or do I go spend all my cash on something enjoyable in anticipation that the world will be swallowed up on Wednesday? Ah, well...at least it will solve my Grox problem in Spore, I guess.

[AdamAnubis]

I want it to be turned on and it to create a cake. Just a cake appear there, in the LHC. Both for the amusement of portal, and to watch the worlds' reaction.
"We thought it would destroy the world! Instead, it brings cake!"

[Hunkulus]

I just hope it's useful....

[BlindMelon7]

I'm not sure if this has been posted yet:

http://quegrande.org/countdown/