Posted on 06/22/2008 11:44:33 AM PDT by neverdem
That black hole that was going to eat the Earth? Forget about it, and keep making the mortgage payments — those of you who still have them.
A new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider scheduled to go into operation this fall outside Geneva, is no threat to the Earth or the universe, according to a new safety review approved Friday by the governing council of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or Cern, which is building the collider.
“There is no basis for any concerns about the consequences of new particles or forms of matter that could possibly be produced by the LHC,” five physicists who comprised the safety assessment group wrote in their report. Whatever the collider will do, they said, Nature has already done many times over.
The report is available at http://lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/LSAG-Report.pdf.
The physicists, who labored anonymously for the last year and a half, are John Ellis, Michelangelo Mangano, Gian Giudice and Urs Wiedemann, of Cern, and Igor Tkachev, of the Institute for Nuclear Research in Moscow. In a press release, Cern’s director general Robert Aymar said, “With this report, the Laboratory has fulfilled every safety and environmental evaluation necessary to ensure safe operation of this exciting new research facility.”
It is full speed ahead, they say, on the new machine, which is designed to accelerate protons, the building blocks of ordinary matter, to energies of 7 trillion electron volts and then bang them together to produce tiny primordial fireballs, miniature versions of the Big Bang. Physicists will comb the detritus from those fireballs in search of forces and particles and even new laws of nature that might have prevailed during the first trillionth of a second of time.
Some critics have argued, however, that Cern has ignored or downplayed the risk that the collider could...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Oh sure it’ll survive the LHC, but won’t it be destroyed by global warming?
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Whew. I can finally get on with my life.
If they are wrong, we will never know.
In other words, “Don’t worry... The guy we paid $300,000 last year to do a study that revealed that there are such things as micro black holes was wrong. And our newest $300,000 study shows that they can’t really exist.”
From your lips, to Gods ears.
Yes, we will. The black hole will initially be so tiny that it will take 600 years to swallow the whole planet.
OK. Then I won’t be canceling my Netflix account.
That's the post of the week.
Well, back on my worry list it goes.
Of course, this report only deals with the ‘known unknowns’, and doesn’t address any ‘unknown unknowns’, as our poetic and philosophically perceptive one-time Sec. Def. would have put it.
Work at the LHC is research isn’t it? As Einstein pointed out “If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t call it research.”
A black hole the weight of a car (~ 10-24 m) would only take a nanosecond to evaporate, during which time it would briefly have a luminosity more than 200 times that of the sun. Lighter black holes are expected to evaporate even faster, for example a black hole of mass 1 TeV/c2 would take less than 10^-88 seconds to evaporate completely.
I doubt a black hole the size of a TeV particle would last long enough to have any matter accretion
Chromosome rearrangements not as random as believed
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
Sure...that's what they WANT us to think.
Well, if they do accidentally create a mini black hole, we won’t know about it for months, perhaps even years.
The particle would head off in whichever direction its initial momentum sends it - through whatever is in its path. For the most part, zipping right through walls, SUV’s or whatever and heading into space. As gravity acts slowly to slow it down, and eventually it will loop back around...
For the most part - it will be so small it will even zip through molecules and atoms - right through the space between the electron cloud and the neutrons/protons in the center. Every once in a while, it will run into something, swallowing it up. Becoming slightly larger.
That process will continue. The tiny, undetectible black hole zooming around in some sort of earth orbit. Slowly growing.
Eventually, it will grow to the point where it will begin to slow, and more quickly gobble up other matter.
When it reaches a certain size, we’ll notice it. It will begin to have detectible effects on satellites. We’ll realize then — the assurances from the EU scientists were not correct.
But there will be nothing at that point, which can be done.
The black hole will slowly approach earth. Once it slows and reaches the surface, it will sink to the center of the planet, and begin to grow.
Probably at that point, earth will last a few more hours.
The EU is being profoundly irresponsible, IMHO.
I think this is all about one-upping America - and they couldn’t care less about the risk.
It’s just about ego.
Nothing more.
Work at the LHC is research isn’t it? As Einstein pointed out “If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t call it research.”
Exactly! That's worth repeating. We don't know what we don't know, but if the worst happens, a black hole is created, who and what would remain to suffer any consequences?
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