Thread: Im so scared about the LHC experiment tomorrow?

Hi there just registerd this forum to get a good answer from you clever people.
My mind seems to reject everyones views on this matter, but i'm so scared that tomorrow the world be sucked in to a black hole, im hopeless at science, ive read the facts and understand them but even still videos on youtube scare the hell out of me. So please could you tell me more about what there doing and how we wont if we wont be sucked in to a black hole. and if this experiment goes well will the others?
Much appreciated

Even ignoring all the technical arguments about why it shouldn't destroy the earth in theory, there's the fact that particles with much more energy than the LHC creates hit the earth all the time and apparently don't cause any unusual problems.

Here is some temporary relief. The LHC is switched on tomorrow, but it will take them a couple of months to get everything working correctly before they make the two beams of protons actually collide.

you think thats a releif for me (thanks for trying) but 2 months even still i hoped to live a good 75 years!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just note that 99.9% of the videos in youtube regarding this matter are total bulldshit.
Youtube is just a big rumor spreading evil mechanism imo...

Physicists are crazy, but they are not suicidal.


Cheers

This is my advice. Stop reading The Sun or News of the World! Or whatever junk tabloid it is you're taking these groundless ideas from. Then you won't be panicking for no reason.

I`m a little bit scared,because i know that anyone is not like God...

the humany makes a big mistake when do that !

I would love to jump in here.

So, there is the chance of Micro Black Holes. 1 and 50,000,000. Thats like, Hitting the lottery once a week, 3 weeks in a row.

That being said, why does CERN have the right to play god? What if we hit that 1 and 50,000,000 and we all get sucked in? What gives CERN the right to decide to play russian roulette with my life.

It's not right. Anytime where the exsisitance of the human race is at stake, they should never even think of turning it on.

I would love to beat living f*ck out of every single one of those geeky phycists.

My 2 cents. Im just angry and being a dumb bloke.

Originally Posted by worriedaboutLHC

Hi there just registerd this forum to get a good answer from you clever people.
My mind seems to reject everyones views on this matter, but i'm so scared that tomorrow the world be sucked in to a black hole, im hopeless at science, ive read the facts and understand them but even still videos on youtube scare the hell out of me. So please could you tell me more about what there doing and how we wont if we wont be sucked in to a black hole. and if this experiment goes well will the others?
Much appreciated

The short answer is that there is nothing to worry about. The concern comes from a bunch of crazies who don't know what they are talking about.

Here is a well-reasoned discussion of the subject by a physicist who actually knows something about the subject. http://physics.aps.org/articles/v1/14

I personally dont think there will be any problems but there seems to be some propaganda there.

on the one hand they say these things are happening in our outer atmosphere and in our sun so no need to worry.

on the other hand they say we will be making conditions of the big bang to discover how matter can be created out of nothing.

Originally Posted by konzine

I would love to beat living f*ck out of every single one of those geeky phycists.

And I'd love to beat the living tar out of people like you. Good thing neither of us will get what we want.

BTW, the chance of winning the lottery jackpot once is more like 1 in 150,000,000, meaning the chance of winning three times in a row is 1 in 3,375,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. If you played three times a second, you'd expect to win with all three tickets (assuming three different drawings) at least once in about 106,947,296,372,347,707 years. BTW, the universe is less than about 15,000,000,000 years old. I hope that puts some things in perspective.

i am having a bad morning anyway

maybe its the damn colider

Originally Posted by konzine

So, there is the chance of Micro Black Holes. 1 and 50,000,000. Thats like, Hitting the lottery once a week, 3 weeks in a row.

Did you just pulled that number out of your ass? Because most serious physicists agree that the chance is zero.

That being said, why does CERN have the right to play god? What if we hit that 1 and 50,000,000 and we all get sucked in? What gives CERN the right to decide to play russian roulette with my life.

There is no good reason to believe that it's risky. You are getting worked up over nothing.

It's not right. Anytime where the exsisitance of the human race is at stake, they should never even think of turning it on.

The existence of the human race is not any more at stake here than it is any time anyone does an experiment that has never been tried before.

My 2 cents. Im just angry and being a dumb bloke.

Yes and yes.

It's apparently worth repeating:

The LHC isn't going to do anything that doesn't happen naturally anyway. Collisions with much greater energies occur with cosmic rays etc. all the time on earth, and so far as I can tell none of them have resulted in the earth being destroyed. The only difference here is that now we're causing them to happen when and where we want, so we can study them properly.

the problem is, is that the average person, say me, or anyone for that matter knows nothing about these physics and find the whole thing to be quite intimidating.

when it comes to this LHC we have to rely on information that is spoon fed to us and hope for the best. at the moment its a 50/50 chance we have one half saying "don't worry" and the other half panicking. so who do we trust? what are we to think.

History has shown in the past that things can go wrong and nothing is perfect, the A bomb is brought to mind.

What I find so terrifying is the fact that reading the article it could take 2-4 years to actually recreate the big bang; Hmm big bang that in itself is scary, but what a coincidence that it could happen in 2012, didn't the Mayans predict the end of the word as we know it?

to me its no black holes or wormholes that worry, maybe they were mentioned just to make the whole negative subject seem like a joke, the big bang as far as I know (being of a less intellectual that I am) is a HUGE EXPLOSION!? isnt that what the universe is? just one great big explosion, and we are to think its OK to recreate this?

put all that aside what benifits would this have to people like myself, the general public? will it feed me? cure my bad back? or make me live a little longer? I know we are a curious bunch but to what cost? why not put this amount of effort into stopping world hunger or wars? or even the guy who lives at the end of my street who has terminal cancer at the age of 20.

my point is why spend so much money, time and effort when we have more immediate problems.

New here also suprise suprise.

I have only two questions in regard to this project that hopefully someone can answer/explain to me who understands more about all this:

1: I have noticed Scientists are partly explaining away the possibility of anything going wrong on the basis that cosmic rays the speed of light are often hitting the earth and clearly nothing dangerous comes of that...so why would it come from this...

But when cosmic rays hit the earth, the earth is not traveling at the same speed towards them. How do we know for certain that sending two things of equal force at eachother like this would not create a different outcome ? Has this exact scenario been observed anywhere in any detail ? Two things moving at light speed towards each other ? How would we study this ?

2: I have read Brian Cox state "Even if Hawking is wrong, and therefore much of our understanding of modern physics is also wrong, the little black holes would be so tiny that they would rarely come close enough to a particle of matter in the Earth to eat it and grow. "

How could we possibly know this ?? He says there is little evidence of small black holes in the universe eating anything. Again based on what ?? Simply because we havent observed this happening ? How do we not know little black holes arent developing into much bigger ones by very gradually eating everything around them all the time ?? We cant be studying millions of black holes every day, i get the impression they're hard enough to find as it is.

Just worried that we are believing we have more knowledge over something than we really do. Thankyou for any replies.....

Originally Posted by da_spook_uk

the problem is, is that the average person, say me, or anyone for that matter knows nothing about these physics and find the whole thing to be quite intimidating.

when it comes to this LHC we have to rely on information that is spoon fed to us and hope for the best. at the moment its a 50/50 chance we have one half saying "don't worry" and the other half panicking. so who do we trust? what are we to think.

History has shown in the past that things can go wrong and nothing is perfect, the A bomb is brought to mind.

What I find so terrifying is the fact that reading the article it could take 2-4 years to actually recreate the big bang; Hmm big bang that in itself is scary, but what a coincidence that it could happen in 2012, didn't the Mayans predict the end of the word as we know it?

to me its no black holes or wormholes that worry, maybe they were mentioned just to make the whole negative subject seem like a joke, the big bang as far as I know (being of a less intellectual that I am) is a HUGE EXPLOSION!? isnt that what the universe is? just one great big explosion, and we are to think its OK to recreate this?

put all that aside what benifits would this have to people like myself, the general public? will it feed me? cure my bad back? or make me live a little longer? I know we are a curious bunch but to what cost? why not put this amount of effort into stopping world hunger or wars? or even the guy who lives at the end of my street who has terminal cancer at the age of 20.

my point is why spend so much money, time and effort when we have more immediate problems.

The Big Bang is most definitely not just a huge explosion. In fact it was not an explosion at all.

An explosion is a rapid generation and expansion of gas from an isolated location in space into pre-existing space. The Big Bang was a rapid expansion of space ant time itself. No one really understands the mechanism of the Big Bang earlier than about and there is no thought that the experiments at the LHC could trigger another Big Bang. We don't even know what that would mean. What is being attempted is to produce some interactions between particles that might have taken place soon after the Big Bang, and that might shed some light on the physics of elementary particles at such energy levels.

These experiments ought to be cause to celebrate the intellectual accomplishments of the human mind in understanding the laws that govern the universe. The element of fear has been introduced by hysterical people who have no understanding of the science that is involved. If you do not have the necessary expertise yourself, you should rely on the opinions of responsible scientists, not lawyers and not wackos. Here again is an opinion from such a responsible and knowledgeable physicist. http://physics.aps.org/articles/v1/14

The LHC went live this morning. So far as I know France ad Switzerland are still there. I expect them to be there for a long time to come.

Quantum mechanics implies so called Hawkins radiation, which makes that black holes evaporate in time proportional to M^3 - so microscopic black holes would just instantly evaporate, changing own energy into some particles.

Look at annihilation process - electron attracts positron, maybe they are creating microscopic black hole and two photons we see is just Hawking radiation?

Originally Posted by DrRocket

So far as I know France and Switzerland are still there. .

I suppose there is a downside to everything.

Originally Posted by da_spook_uk

when it comes to this LHC we have to rely on information that is spoon fed to us and hope for the best. at the moment its a 50/50 chance we have one half saying "don't worry" and the other half panicking. so who do we trust? what are we to think.

No, you have virtually every particle physicist on the planet agreeing that it's safe and a tiny group of very vocal nuts with no relevant training claiming it will be dangerous. It should be really obvious who to trust.

What I find so terrifying is the fact that reading the article it could take 2-4 years to actually recreate the big bang; Hmm big bang that in itself is scary, but what a coincidence that it could happen in 2012, didn't the Mayans predict the end of the word as we know it?

Are you SERIOUSLY worried about an ancient Mayan prediction? Are you kidding me? This is so stupid that it isn't even worth seriously responding to. As long as we're worrying about magical threats, maybe we should avoid digging holes that are too deep. After all, we might break through into hell. And we should definitely avoid going into the woods, because we might get eaten by trolls.

Seriously, you should be embarrassed as hell for even mentioning this.

Originally Posted by Razien

New here also suprise suprise.

I have only two questions in regard to this project that hopefully someone can answer/explain to me who understands more about all this:

Welcome Razien.

Originally Posted by Razien

1: I have noticed Scientists are partly explaining away the possibility of anything going wrong on the basis that cosmic rays the speed of light are often hitting the earth and clearly nothing dangerous comes of that...so why would it come from this...

But when cosmic rays hit the earth, the earth is not traveling at the same speed towards them. How do we know for certain that sending two things of equal force at eachother like this would not create a different outcome ? Has this exact scenario been observed anywhere in any detail ? Two things moving at light speed towards each other ? How would we study this ?

Thanks to special relativity, we know that even the relative speed (two objects moving towards each other ) is limited to the speed of light. What the scientists are talking about, therefore, is not the 'speed' pf the particles, but their energy - and getting them to higher and higher speeds is a way of, through relativity, adding energy to them.

Even with all the energy we can add at the LHC, however, as scientists point out, we cannot exceed (and barely reach) the energy levels of some of the interactions with cosmic rays.

So yes, the scientists are right to point this out - it isn't about speed, it is about the energy involved in the interaction.

Originally Posted by Razien

2: I have read Brian Cox state "Even if Hawking is wrong, and therefore much of our understanding of modern physics is also wrong, the little black holes would be so tiny that they would rarely come close enough to a particle of matter in the Earth to eat it and grow. "

How could we possibly know this ?? He says there is little evidence of small black holes in the universe eating anything. Again based on what ?? Simply because we havent observed this happening ? How do we not know little black holes arent developing into much bigger ones by very gradually eating everything around them all the time ?? We cant be studying millions of black holes every day, i get the impression they're hard enough to find as it is.

Just worried that we are believing we have more knowledge over something than we really do. Thankyou for any replies.....

Knowledge is a tricky word. In most modern physics we have a number of concepts (frequently relied upon) which are more like informed estimates than the sort of 'knowledge' contained in a religious text.

An informed guess about a black hold would say, for instance, that even a single proton could be made into a black hole. But yes it would be micrscopic in size - smaller than an electron, and with only the mass of a proton. The gravitational forces generated by a proton (whether or not collapsed into a black hole) are truly minuscule - you can do the calculation yourself, and its interactivty would, therefore be very small. To that extent Brian Cox is right - the chances of such a small Black Hole interacting with any matter is tiny, and will continue to be so even if it should, through one interaction a century say, swallow the odd sub-atomic particle.

I don't know if this has helepd clarify the science in any way, or hel;ped allay some of your concerns, but stick around - we have far more physics knowledgeable peope here than me, and far more lucid ones too.

:P

cheer

shanks

Are you SERIOUSLY worried about an ancient Mayan prediction? Are you kidding me? This is so stupid that it isn't even worth seriously responding to. As long as we're worrying about magical threats, maybe we should avoid digging holes that are too deep. After all, we might break through into hell. And we should definitely avoid going into the woods, because we might get eaten by trolls.

Taking what I had said just shows how some people including scientists can misinterperate things.

What I find so terrifying is the fact that reading the article it could take 2-4 years to actually recreate the big bang

as I had said I am just your average JOE SHMOE who knows nothing about science, so when I hear big bang, thats just exactly what I expect a "Big BANG" as for the 2012 prediction I merely stated it was a coincidence I thought worth thinking about.

I do however notice no one has made any comment about time and effort better spent else where.

To be honest I think we were better off in caves playing with our bones, where everyone was named UG!

history has shown that mankind (huh man kind a bit arrogant isn't it man is definately NOT kind) is hell bent on destroying itself, in fact it is the only thing we seem to be good at. it is inevetable that we will destroy ourselves and everything around us.

So yeah I think its quite normal for us lesser beings to be a little afraid.

You know what's BULLSHIT?!.. this.

Man... there is soo much bullshit here that it's almost impossible to tell
where's the bull and where's the shit!

If you want to bury your head in the sand like little Dolly would be my guest;
its because sissy-cowards such as yourself we still don't have hovercars flying
about in the streets. People always like to ask "what if", but those who don't
even try to venture further are only left with the benefit of the doubt.

Again, you have better chance that some cat will fart on a nuke tomorrow; causing
an explosion which will lead to a chain reaction which eventually would blow the Earth to pieces
than the LHC miraceously creating a black hole anytime soon(or later).