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When is the CERN Supercollider Going to Destroy the Universe?

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by Stealthy

Didn't they start it up in May or something? Seriously, this is like an episode of Dragonball Z right now. Get on with it! It is the dream of every free man to be sucked into a singularity during his lifetime.

Stealthy | 22 Jul '08, 10:12 | Send note | Report this | Reply

Unless "to be sucked into a singularity" is a euphamism...

I'm afraid it's not my dream.

They're still in the warm-up stage, which actually involves cooling the whole thing down to a shade above absolute zero. I think there's another month left before the first experiment begins.


It is being cooled down this moment to

COLDER THAN SPACE

Then it takes two months to spin the particles around so I think October time, not sure. BUt there is an injunction in the courts trying to get it to stop so the world doesn't blow up... so I don't know when.


minor correction

Getting the particle clusters to collision speed is actual pretty quick, quoth wikipeda, "It will take less than 90 microseconds for a proton to travel once around the main ring".

They're mostly just getting it cold and testing things


Probably never.

To quote the Guardian supplement, there are also chances of it producing fire breathing dragons but no one is worked up by that.


I am.

Got my Lance ready.


I love the CERN Supercollider

it's a giant death ray!


...

I know! I bet after they've finished using it to figure out the universe, they'll just convert it to a big gun. Located in Switz...er... land...

Oh... my GOD!!


hi

I was all ready to get my scientific smite on, but there no retarded responses this time.

The LHC is probably the thing i'm most excited about this year, if not decade. It's completely fucking awesome.

There's an ace Ted Talk by Brian Cox (http://tinyurl.com/5wkx2y) that everyone should watch it's really accessible and does a great job of getting across the awesome of the LHC and Science! in general.


OOh, ta.

I'll have a listen to that later..


yeh we ALL know blair's gonna use it

to invade Iraq AGAIN

Your just blinkerd


Retarded response #1:

OHMIGODWE'REALLGOINGTODIE

kthxbi


Thanks for the link!

That site is awesome, looks like I won;t be bored at work for the next wee while :D


SCENE:

High above the American Midwest, 2 scientists DAVE and DAVID are locked in deadly battle with the evil CERN SUPERCOLLIDER

CERN SUPERCOLLIDER: HHHHHHNNNNGGGGG

DAVE: HHHNNNNGGG

CERN SUPERCOLLIDER: PREPARE TO SEE MY FINAL FORM

DAVID: NO! DAVE I WILL DISTRACT HIM, WHILE YOU CHARGE YOUR SCIENCE INFINITY BOMB THRUST MANOUVER

DAVE: NO IT IS TOO DANGEROUS ITS POWER LEVEL IS TOO HIGH HHHHHNNNNNGGGGG

DAVE, DAVID AND CERN SUPERCOLLIDER: HHHHHNNNNNGGGGGGG


pls live with me


bt?

fuck bt. there MUST be options. fuck bt in it's bloated assbutt


There are a couple of companies

that do sliiightly cheaper line rental (by, like, a pound) and calls but they all sound a bit.. rickety. I'll check it out.


Mordge!

.


I asked them if they

wanted anyone to sit in the machine whilst they put it on...i never recieved a reply...so on the day they fire it up i m going to fly over there, cover myself in tin foil and run up to their gates shouting..."DONT DO IT!!!, DONT DO IT, YOU WILL BRING BACK JESUS, I M FROM THE FUTURE!!!", then i will deficate myself in their building and start crying, no one like a crying man.


i forgot all about this

yeah, this is exciting and worrying, i hope it does destroy the world in a split second, that would be funny in retrospect.


It would be a good way to go!

I'd like to imagine all the other galaxies laughing at us!


it's just life

we mean nothing, we can die in an instant, the chanecs of most of us being remembered by more than 20 people on this plannet in 100 years are pretty tiny, at least this way we proved that humans are utter twits


...

Cyberdemons response is the most obviously logical way of rationalising death outside darwinism and religion. There is no point in giving mortality a reason because it doesnt matter. Arguably we are only mortal because we have developed the ability to realise the history and potential of our own deaths. The greeks called us mortal to distinguish humanity from the rest of the living world purely because of our ability to rationalise, trivialise or even respond to death or potential death.

Sure, instinct amongst all living animals exists to prevent death - this however goes only as far as natural selection will take it, death is a matter of settling the debt of life, either by random probable generation (science), or from a God (religion)

nuff said


im excited about this CERN business

hurry up and make that god particle!


I can never read about these things in a sober balanced way

because in my head I'm always going "WHOOOOOOOSSSSSH NYYYAAAAAAAAAAAM"

kindathing


sweeeet

" The first particle beams are due for injection in August 2008, with the first collisions planned to take place about two months later."


Can't wait for this to go down

I'll be sat on a deckchair in Switzerland they day they press 'On' with a pretzel and cold one, waiting for the world to get destroyed in an instant.


I'm going to get my deckchair out

on top of my roof too. Put the aviators on, face southeast, plug in stereo, play Death Goes To The Winner by Harvey Milk and wait for impending doom, stark naked except for a pair of striped boxers.


It'll be our "riding the bomb" moment

Dr Strangelove is hilarious. I'd like to think this manner of dying will be equally funny


I'm sending myself an email now

*buy stetson*.

I think I'll wear that and a pair of boots.


this is really really quite interesting

and if successful could answer some very important questions.

It also makes you think about the massive forces that are at work around us. Compare the amount of energy, say, generated in a car crash with the supercollider and then compare that with the forces involved in the creation or death of a star.

In reality the supercollider is only scratching the surface of our knowledge of the forces at work, but with so little evidence of these larger forces available on Earth, it is a pretty big deal.


as an aside

over the safety of it, in terms of the energy contained within the magnets being used as well as the gasses, there is certainly a risk of an accident occuring.

But despite the obviously huge amounts of energy that will be at work when the experiments are started, in reality the forces are probably the tiniest fraction of what would be required to create something like a black hole, or dark matter. it's all relative innit?


...

Okay doctor, how about if we stacked 10 on top of each other? Would it theoretically then be possible to at least to construct some sort of alien mothership-destroying particle cannon?

You know... just in case.


...

I thought the point of a black hole is that it was infinitely tiny. Or infinitely massive. Or, uh... both...


black holes for everyone! :D

the new garbage disposal from black holes inc.

tired of your girl friends best friend why not send her a black hole for her birthday and remove that annoying itch.


You can get wee black holes

they boil away pretty quick as they are unstable.


more serious reply

:)

Nano-Blackholes: According to Stephen Hawking, little bitty black holes occur and “evaporate” in nature when certain cosmic rays smack into stuff. LHC’s experiments are very much about simulating and reproducing cosmic rays smacking into stuff and so may develop such nano-blackholes but without the speed and trajectory of the naturally occurring ones. As with the monopole magnets, the danger is that these should-be-hauling-ass objects would instead poke around the earth’s gravity field and accumulate, not evaporate. A resulting combined greater-than-nano-scale black hole appearing 100m under the Swiss countryside would make fast work of the country’s cheese, chocolate, watchmakers and cukoo clocks, sucking them all in, followed by you and me and everything on earth some fraction of a second later. Even Dr. Hawking, if he were present, would barely have time to press the key on his vocalizer for “oh shit.”


just done a little more research

it seems you are correct, theoretically it may be possible to produce 'mini' black holes using a partical accelerator which would evaporate into gamma rays. I have no idea what the effect would be if this were to happen in the LHC.


LOL this bit rocks :D

Creaton of Strangelets: My personal favorite: the LHC may produce a physical manifestation of the theoretical phenomenon of a strangelet. Not the name of a garage band band on a Pebbles compilation, strangelets are constructions made of the stuff that makes up protons and neutrons, known as quarks. An aim of LHC experiments is to unify the theories behind the behavior of three of the four basic forces on physics (gravity is omitted) : electromagnetic, strong nuclear force (the force that holds nuclei together) and weak nuclear force (the force that keeps electrons from flying out of the nuclear orbit in the atom.) In exploring the commonalities between these forces, strangelets were conceived. A strangelet is a chunk of strange matter (they name this stuff well, don’t they?) which is a more stable version of an atom due to a slightly different quark recipe in its composition. Once again, terrestrial as opposed to celestial speed is the issue. The general worry is that the strangelets might, when created “at rest” (meaning not near the speed of light) get into a slow collision with an unsuspecting nucleus of an atom of copper or whatever. The property of the stragelet’s construction is such that it catalyzes the copper atom into strange matter, which releases energy, and another strangelet, and so on in a chain reaction until the planet is converted into a hot lump of uninhabitable strange matter.


wouldn't it be cool

if starnge matter turned out to be oil or an oil substitute. or candy!


i was hoping for

flubber :D


I dont really think that

therories of 3 of the basic forces can be unified without including gravity though.

Its like trying to consider/explain magnetism seperately from electricity, they are seperated manifestations of a bigger whole


update

The start of collider has been delayed (again), and collisions are not expected for several months. And even if the worst predictions come to pass, Dr. Rossler’s calculations indicate that a micro black hole would require several years or decades to grow large enough to destroy the planet. So no immediate danger, in a sense…

LHCFacts.org


phew thats lucky

if it stayed stable for a while then that would totally sort all our problems with garbage disposal. Juts chuck it in the black hole!


racist


i read a book once

where an alien plague eventually turned the earth into a black hole and everyone moved to the moon.

so don't worry.


...

But knowing you've read a book with that plot is very worrying.


true facts:

the end of the world begins in Scotland.


I was just talking with Comrade_Penguin last night.

Apparently it's not even actually capable of that, or something. Or you know this and are just talking shit. I'm tired and drunkish, I can't understand anything--has this been helpful?





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