has the LHC destroyed the earth?
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/ (http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/)
Simple, Sweet and to the point.
I had my GF's daughter in floods of tears all last night because some daft history teacher had mentioned this idiocy. Still I guess she now knows quite a bit more about particle physics that most 13 year olds ...
Richard
Ummm. It hasn't done anything yet. It takes a couple of months before the thing's even warmed up and at full speed I believe.
don't worry everyone we can all hide in Tom Cruise's personal bunker!
At 1025 (local time) scientists sent a single beam of protons in a clockwise direction around the full 27 kilometres of the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.
The journey began at 0930 when LHC project leader Lyn Evans and his team launched protons into the ring. Progress was made in short steps of a few kilometres, so that physicists could learn how to steer the beam, which is travelling at 99.9998% the speed of light.
from:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14699-working-lhc-produces-first-images.html (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14699-working-lhc-produces-first-images.html)
"However, it will be several weeks before physicists accelerate two proton beams travelling in opposite directions to their full energy of 7 teraelectronvolts, and smash them head on."
Hoo, boy!! This will be the date we care about.
Thanks inky.
Ha that's plenty of time to finish my render.
@Will - HA!!!
How appropriate. ;D I hope the best for you. Are you secure in your bomb shelter? Plenty of rations? Lots of cooling for your PC?
Nice to see someone's got their priorities sorted for the end :D Indeed they haven't actually done anything yet. They did make the protons collide but at a snails pace compared to the first actual test on the 14th of october which will take a few weeks to prepare. As JimB said it'll take a while to get the protons up to speed for this first time, but even when this test comes there's still as much chance of the LHC creating a full black hole as there is for God to come down to Earth and fart in the faces of the physicists.
To understand why you have to know of the 4 fundamental forces in the universe. Electromagnetic, Strong Nuclear, Weak Nuclear and Gravity. The latter is by far the weakest of the 4 and because of this the gravitational pull of any momentary flux in the space time continuum would be squished by the other 3 forces. There is also Hawkings Radiation theory but this is only theory and doesn't necessarily logically follow.
Well you see I bought me a pass into vault 301, which as plenty of food and a nice water-cooled workstation. However I would like to point those who wish to prepare to http://www.bomb-shelter.net/ (http://www.bomb-shelter.net/) where you can find an option to accommodate your needs.
Erm wait a second...
a "collision" hasn't even been done yet, so wait patiently.
But just by the way, what is destroying our Earth right now is our Sun, and I mean shortterm. ;)
Any way the point is that the earth will be fine (As all those in the peanut gallery will soon discover) in any case there are as you know only 26 dimensions in relative space-time or at least 26 dimensions that could be accessed by people with any certainty. Uncertainty, at least form the relativistic point of view means that probabilistically (I could be wrong here) to open access to any of these other dimensions that the LHC would need to output a field strength of 900 to 16th power or some thing quite astronomical like that, as for a black hole large enough to endanger the earth then you would need many order of magnitude more power.
Looking forward to the data, without the bunkum.
Regards to you.
Cyber-Angel ;D
Actually the majority of physicists believe there to be only 11 dimensions however there are a lot of projects coming up that will use the LHC to test for more. The only thing I'm surprised about is that none of the universities have yet thought of creating dimensions, theorietically it's possible as many physicists believe our universe started in another dimension which solves the problem of what was here before the universe but unfortunately doesn't solve the problem of what came before all of that and the infinite regress that follows.
Incidentely if you want to use your computer to help understand the materials in our universe then you can use the BOINC application to donate your idle computer time to this. Don't worry you don't have to have worked at Black Mesa........or Aperture Science. (if you know the Half life series) Just follow these steps:
1. Download BOINC from Berkley University (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php)
2. Install the program.
3. Open BOINC and click Add Project
4. Click next and select LHC@home from the list on the next page and click next again
5. Enter your email and a password and click next/finish
6. A web page will open up with some textboxes. You can put your postcode/zip code in so they can assign the points you earn to your area but I never do.
7. It'll ask you to join a team, I've got my own team PGCS, you can join me or if someone wants to make a planetside or terragen team that's cool too.
Then all you have to do is wait till October 21st, fire up BOINC and let it do the rest. There are a bunch of other really cool projects you can get involved in from researching gravitional waves from pulsar stars with Einstein@home to predicting the weather with Climateprediction to simulating a human brain with the Artificial Intellegence Simulator. These are all ones I'm involved in.
How it'll work once the experiments start is:
All of the academic centres around the world that are linked to the LHC grid (similar to the LHC@home but for adademic computer centres) will be coming up with their own research that they can do with the LHC, so they'll create projects for you all to run on BOINC that can plan the experiment (orbit path, speed, etc.)
Then they run the experiment with this data.
Once they have the results they will be analysed in one or more of two ways. Performing the analysis on the Grid will be done if there is a lot of data but not too much processing power required. Finding out how the universe expands would be done this way.
The other way is if there is a lot of processing required, this would be done through BOINC and usually this would be all the really cool stuff like finding gravitational waves caused by the collision. This is what Einstein@home does for pulsar stars, it looks for entities in the universe that are likely to generate gravitational waves and studies how the star or bi-star system works to see how the gravitational wave is generated, etc.
EDIT: Here's a screenshot of BOINC at work plotting a reaction from a collision in the LHC. It only takes 16 minutes to do which is the quickest project I've ever run with BOINC. Usually they're between 1 and 3000 hours depending on the project
(http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b374/pauliesgrandson/LHC_002542.jpg)