what do you think about the LHC experiment which covers a large area?

if they make a black hole then we're gone before we even know it
might not concern you since you're too busy playing wow and *edit and warned by jlhaslip* but I'd hate for these nerds to destroy everyone's life just to please their curiousity , we all wanna know what's going on when there isn't risks involved
some say it's completely safe some say it's the end of the world and if it's the second I'm grabbing a Silenced Gun and some C4 and heading down there

oh and by the way , it's gordon freeman who's in charge , Halfe life was nothing but a prophecy and it's true

Oh man i love the "end of the world" conspiracy.... people dont seem to understand the vast energies and masses required to start a black hole. I dont fully either, technically no-one does but i know this: To make a black hole you would need to squeeze the sun down to something that could fit in your hand. Then you would have a blackhole (maybe my numbers are off, but you get the idea) and if you can make a machine on earth that can do that, then yes, you are going to end the world.

It started as a joke, a geeky joke, and now people believe it! Its silly! They crash two particles together, create plenty of energy and some new matter, or a particle called the god particle (so called because they think it was the first matter to ever exist) no-one is in danger unless you happen to be sleeping inside the thing.

Haha creating a black hole.
Thing is, though, they're not really trying to make a black hole. They just want to see what happened straight after The Big Bang. They're interested in how our universe formed. And hey, aren't we all? It's always interesting to read scientific theories as to how our universe appeared out of nowhere.
I doubt CERN (the ones doing the project) can create a black hole. Unless you look at the Dan Brown version of CERN, I don't think they'd have the equipment to create such massive gravitational forces.
More intriguingly, though, in a black hole something strange happens to space and time. Maybe you survive the black hole and end up in another era. Like, in the time of the dinosaurs or maybe in the Year 5000. It would be pretty cool if it wasn't for the fact that the Earth would no longer exist in the future because we'd just compacted it into a black hole. As for going to the past, well, bringing a computer and a plasma screen TV and a Mercedes Benz and a passenger plane to the time of the Ancient Romans would probably make them think we're their Gods.
And we could try out the Grandfather Paradox. You know, the one that says you can't travel back in time because then you can kill your ancestors, preventing you from being born.
I wouldn't mind going through a Black Hole if it meant I could go back to the past, as long as I had people and weapons with me - I don't want to face Sabre Toothed Tigers all by myself. Going to the future scares me. Maybe because of all those stories about how mankind is going to get so powerful it's going to overwhelm and destroy itself. And my comparatively useless machine guns and F-34s and nuclear bombs probably aren't going to do much to protect me.

I don't really think it is any more dangerous than what J. Robert Oppenheimer¹ did with the Trinity test² back in 1945. Back then there was talk about it being the end of the world too! People thought that Oppenheimer would start a fission reaction that would just go on forever, igniting the atmosphere and destroying the Earth³. I have to agree with shadowx on this. Conspiracy theories will abound wherever there is a lack of knowledge. But the Large Hadron Collider experiments⁴ are all about pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge, just like the experiment known as the Manhattan project⁵ was. They pushed the boundaries of science then too. But Enrico Fermi⁶ was quick to realize that a supercritical fission reaction (an uncontrolled explosion) would be more use in the world that he lived in at that time, rather than a critical fission reaction (controlled chain reaction). So too, I fear, that the scientists of the LHC Experiments may also take the results of their work and turn it into a bigger, badder bomb than the ones released on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The problem, to my mind, is that science for purely scientific advancement of knowledge is not possible because it is not self-funding. The scientific community have to get their funds from somewhere in order to make all this whiz-bang technology available to the scientists so that they can run their experiments. Funding of that nature normally comes from the Government, and the Government therefore feels that they have the right to benefit first from any advancements made by the scientists, as the Government becomes a key investor and stakeholder in the experiment at hand. Therefore, if there is any opportunity for the Government to gain pecuniary advantage from the results of said experiment, then they will pounce on it. This, I believe, is why we saw the first commercial nuclear power plant built in 1956⁷, some 11 years after the same technology was used to obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'd hate to see what the Government will make out of the findings of the LHC Experiments! And, yeah, I'm not saying whose Government or where. There are enough conspiracy theories around already!

---

References
¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Oppenheimer
² http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_test
³ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_test#Test_predictions
⁴ http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/LHC-en.html
⁵ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_project
⁶ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Ferm
⁶ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Early_years



This post has been edited by travstatesmen: Sep 6 2008, 11:40 PM

Loved the joke about Gordon Freeman xD

Anyway, you can't create a "stable" black hole unless you grab something as massive as 1.2x (or 1.4x) the mass of our Sun... The "black holes" created by the LHC will be so transitory that many of them will be created and evaporate in just one second.

People often talk without knowing a damn thing about what they are talking about... Mis-information is bad :(

well i know of this one and there are activist and debates going aroung the world. well in my opinion, this is like experimenting with a human but way worse. one false move can destroy the earth and even the planet.

stephen hawking the one in the wheel chair or the smartest in the world. tells us that microblackholes will not harm us. but how if his wrong and something happened. then were all dead.


well they say that we will not die instantly but we will be sucked to the center of the black hole.

whatever happens is for the worse i say.

Nothing bad will happen!

The absolute worst that can actually happen is that the LHC powers down, or some idiot walks in with a metal thing in his pocket and it gets thrown about by the magnets.

There is no possible way that it will create a blackhole of any kind big enough to do any damage. I dont even think it can create a black hole. A black hole is simply a very very denser ball of matter. Imagine the earth squeezed down the size of a marble. That is what a black hole is (but bigger and with more mass) Its just a very dense ball of material. The gravity is very concentrated because it has (in my example) the same gravity as the whole earth but in the size of a marble, so there is the same amount of gravity but in a smaller area so it feels stronger, it is more intense. This gravity is so intense that nothing can escape it. The most powerful rocket in the universe could not "take off" from within a blackhole. The gravity is too strong. The reason it is black is because light is sucked into it. Gravity bends and distorts light, and in a black hole the gravity is so strong it pulls light in to, making it appear black and like a hole.

The LHC is not capable of doing that. Stephen hawking himself showed us that black holes "evaporate" that is, without sucking in new material a blackhole will vanish into nothing. So even if the LHC did create a black hole (which it cant -- read on) it would evaporate in a micro second. So even if this blackhole was the most powerful on ever seen in the universe (which it wouldnt be) it would only be there for a microsecond because its so small so it wouldnt be able to do any damage.

Do you know what the LHC does? It simply crashes one particle (of which there are millions, perhaps billions in this one full stop : . ) into another particle. It will also do this with small groups of particles (eg tens, or hundreds, still so small they wouldnt be visible to the human eye or any optical microscope). When these particles collide they produce large amounts of energy, when i say large i mean relative to their mass. So this isnt dangerous. If the worst happens then perhaps it springs a leak. Big deal. If the absolute worst happens a few scientists die. Not the end of the world (though still not good!). all that happens is the biggest magnets in the world pull the particles around in a circle. So power down one of the magnets and it shuts down.

This hype about "oh we are all going to die" is absolute rubbish and its really annoying. Scientists arent retards, they know the world isnt going to end. These experiments have being going on for decades. True this is the most powerful one so far but none of the others have even came CLOSE to endangering the world and neither will this one. Its all rubbish.



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

This post has been edited by shadowx: Sep 7 2008, 05:38 PM

Wah, I just heard that people is going to make a black hole. How is it anyway?
I personally don't know much about black hole, but black hole is believed created from a collapsed star. If the Lhc experiment is success then maybe the black hole can eat the city, hehe jokes, I think that they are professional, and they must have done all their home work so that anything bad will not happen. And I believe such an experiment is important since we don't know much about this black hole thing until we have our own one.