Large Hadron Collider is now active

Remember, the most dangerous thing a scientist can say is, "Hm, that's interesting..."

Not to worry though, because as I have found, these guys are on the job.


Did I mention that they're super-serious, and give their work the utmost gravitas ?

We're all going to [strike]die!!![/strike] be just fine, I'm sure.   

This is so cool.

Aperture Science: We do what we must, because we can. 

Anything in which you must have a serious discussion on whether it will or will not destroy the world is bad...very bad. When you use words like "black holes", "dark matter", and "big bang" people are going to get a bit nervous. I for one am watching this thing very closely and will not be surprised if it brings about the end of the world.

You have been warned!

Europe is being devoured by the singularity !  Oh what fools we were!  What a world, what a world!

Seriously though, it's funny to me how worked up people are getting about the black hole thing.  I blame the media for misrepresenting the situation, really.  There's a world of difference between "Particles that have the density of a black hole before breaking apart" and "creating a black hole".  I believe it was a Mr. Clemens who said something about Lightning and Lightning Bugs. 

The same kind of concerns were brought up before the testing of the first nuclear bomb - that it would begin a chain reaction that would destroy all matter.  Since you're reading this, it probably didn't happen...

<<Since you're reading this, it probably didn't happen...>>

At least not in this singularity.

If our sun were to collapse into a black hole tomorrow (ignoring the processes that lead a star to becoming a black hole, and making a gross assumption that no mass was lost in the process), other than us freezing to death from lack of heat from the sun, nothing would happen to the actual earth, it would still orbit as if the sun was still there.  It is only within the event horizon where things get weird, and for a sun of our size that would be a fairly small volume, considering the current size of the sun.

The creation of baby black holes is mostly meaningless.  Most people think Black Holes are giant vaccuums where giant red killer robots named Maximillion get drawn into some weird alternate universe and spewed out.  Nope, they are nothing but very dense matter making a very high gravity gradient out of the formula g = Gm/r^2  big enough m, small enough r, and g becomes very very large.  The trick is the r where an event horizon would occur is often very small compared to the regular size of the collapsed material, so what the heck could a baby black hole suck in before it evaporates from hawkings radiation?  Not much.  The only real fear is that we are destroying (or at least trapping) information.  According to Hawkings' latest theory that makes our entire universe irrelevant.    So much for Zaphod Beeblebrox being the most important thing in the universe.

Anyway, I guess the hopes is to find the Higg's Boson, or perhaps clues to dark matter.  But as I pointed out to some of my students today, beware of the claims of magic hocus pocus, when radiation was discovered they thought that was magic, and people would pay a lot of money to bath in spas filled with water from a uranium mine so the radiation could 'heal' them.  The same crazy claims of quantum physics are made in movies like "What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?" I have people who I thought where fairly sane people taking this movie seriously.  For people like us it takes about 30 to 50 years before we truely begin to see where physics was going.  Will we throw out the standard model?  Will we be able to pull the higg's boson off of materials as a sort of inertia dampener that we hear about in science fiction?  Who knows?  After all, any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

What I find funny is that I found out today about this from my biochemistry teacher- she was telling us about how she didnt think it was a great idea but that if the world ended at least she wouldnt know...because she would no longer be there...the class gave a hearty laugh until they realized that she wasnt joking...

I continued to laugh...

Here is a handy link for those who are concerned about the earth's fate. Trust the interwebs to answer the question of if the Hadron Collider has caused the earth to self destruct.

LHC Monitor

Mike or Cameron,

isn't it also true that black holes can lay dorment, and pass us by without causing a blip?

Here is a handy link for those who are concerned about the earth's fate. Trust the interwebs to answer the question of if the Hadron Collider has caused the earth to self destruct.

LHC Monitor

LHC Webcam

I still prefer a black hole over...  [size=12pt]ZOMBIES[/size]!

WE'RE ALL GOING TO TURN INTO STRANGELETS!!!!!!!!!!

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Mike or Cameron,

isn't it also true that black holes can lay dorment, and pass us by without causing a blip?

I can't comment on that completely as I've never heard of that.  But my first reaction is that it is totally wrong.  Black holes are caused by uberdense mass causing an extremely steep gravitational gradient.  It's like saying that sometimes Black holes don't have any mass in them, and then suddenly they are full of mass.  While there are a lot of things I don't know everything about, this one just seems wrong...  unless it's being worded weird.

In the last two days I was pulled into a couple of social studies classes to explain that we weren't all going to die.

I may be completely wrong about this, but - isn't the amount of gravity exerted by a black hole still a function of it's mass, like any other thing made of matter?  If so, a tiny black hole, while very densely packed, would still have only the same amount of mass as the particle from which it was created right?  Therefor, it's net gravitational force would still only be the same as the original particle from which the tiny black hole was made?  I was a history major, so I may be clueless, but is there any big gap I am missing?  What I picture is that if you took two particles, which already exert x amount of force and "collided" them to make a very dense object out of those two particles, it should only be able to produce the same amount of gravitational force as the original two particles.  I thought the problems occurred in that space very close to a black hole, probably within the area that would have been occupied by solid matter were it not so tightly condensed, where the gravity exerted by the hole is extremely concentrated.  Am I right?  Does it really matter?  Is anyone still reading this?  Do I even care at this point?

Ah, a dormant black hole just has no mass to suck in. My fault.

Dormant implies that there is something that can go "active" in a black hole.  This is not the case.  A black hole that has not yet gone "active" is called a star.  Once it becomes a black hole, that's it, nothing really changes.

Now, what I think you're referring to Tom, is the idea that our planet is bombarded constantly by what are called "black hole fragments".  This has been used to explain ball lightning and other such phenomenon.  However, nothing has really been suggested that this is the case, and it is much more likely that something far less outlandish is the cause.  Black hole fragments without the mass to maintain the density required would fall apart quite quickly, and not last long enough to make it to our star system, much less our planet.

Noah,

  That is correct.  If the sun were to just become a black hole with the same mass as our sun (ignoring how it got that way, or if it would get that way), the Earth's orbit wouldn't change a bit.  We'd all freeze to death, but that's a different matter.  

Using the old g=GM/(r^2) to get the gravitational field, when the r becomes VERY small, the g becomes VERY big.  

My ROUGH calculations are that if the sun were to become a black hole instantly (ignoring all blow off from explosions and stuff) the radius of it's event horizon would be about 1.4 to 3km... or to say less than 1-4 miles across the diameter.  At the outer edge of this horizon orbiting objects would be traveling at about 2/3rds the speed of light, at the inner edge all objects would be stuck inside.  Either way, nothing would escape the outer edge of the event horizon, but you could (if you had some incredible energy supply to provide all the heat, light,etc needed to support life) live in that 3 mile wide area with out noticing anything particularly weird about the space you lived in.  Though I'm uncertain what radiation might be like in that area...

But when a black hole that's too small goes kaput, you get Gamma Radiation.

So, we'd be a very cold planet of Hulks, Red Hulks, Abominations, Leaders, and other hulk-brand variants.

I call dibs on Mr. Fixit!

Here is a handy link for those who are concerned about the earth's fate. Trust the interwebs to answer the question of if the Hadron Collider has caused the earth to self destruct.

LHC Monitor

All I can say to this is:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!  Omg, Matt, that tickled me when I clicked that link