Posted on 09/09/2008 7:03:36 PM PDT by buccaneer81
MIT physicist gets death threats over collider
September 9, 2008 01:19 PM
By Carolyn Y. Johnson
Frank Wilczek, an MIT physicist and Nobel laureate, has received death threats from what he called "one disturbed individual," as the world's largest physics experiment is poised to come online tomorrow in Europe.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
The Berkley trees are so yesterday...
I was thinking that maybe the collider was leaking the much lesser known “idiot particle” all over the place.
The media, however, has promulgated some rather bizarre and frightening scenerios.
that’s amazing!
i wonder when the “progressives” became reactionaries?
during lenin’s time technology was considered positively.
mao i remember reading long ago wanted all technology, so that humans were relieved of physical work.
but sometime before ayn rand wrote “the new left, the anti-industrial revolution” (essays of the early 1960’s),
the left became reactionaries.
Fear, like sex, sells.
Nuclear technology, be it weapons or power plants really seems to have driven the left over the edge.
good point.
jane fonda lost it!
I hadn’t seen or heard the term “Luddite” for 40 years since a lecture concerning the Industrial Revolution in
grad school. Thanks, I had to look it up!
Arrogant Euro-weenies, not content with having started two world wars, now seek to create a black hole.
Brilliant.
Being concerned about this irresponsible bit of idiocy, is hardly the concern of luddites.
These morons could end life on earth. Earth itself even.
Any of you scoffing at the critics, pro-life?...
6 billion of them, hang on whether these maroons have done their math right. And a theory, that a black hole, once created, will somehow “evaporate”.
If light itself cannot escape the gravity of a black hole,
how exactly can one “evaporate”?
Must admit, it’s freaking me out a bit too...
http://www.glennbeck.com/downloads/08/090908fusion.pdf
As usual, scientists are more interested in whether or not they CAN do something, rather than whether or not they SHOULD.
Why threaten death? If the wackos are right, we’ll all be dead tomorrow anyway.
We're still here. And we'll still be here tomorrow night if this test goes off.
If humanity is ever going to leave this solar system, we're going to need to learn a whole bunch of things. This is one of them. I approve of this endeavour wholeheartedly.
Their colliders have been getting progressively more powerful for more than 50 years. Why is it only now that people are suddenly getting worried about it?
People are afraid of the unknown..
Today I saw a van which burned to a crisp on the freeway.
Undoubtedly, yesterday the driver did not crash...
When the first railroads were being built in Britain in the 1830's and 1840's, it was postulated that man could not travel faster than 30 mph, lest he suffocate from the acceleration.
Our descendants will laugh at us in 200 years for fearing this experiment.
(or they won’t)...
Every day is unknown though. What’s different here is that we’re engaged in group-think. One guy claims that this could be the end of the world, and suddenly everyone is agreeing with him.
Well, tomorrow is the day.
It was nice knowing you all.
Bye
Jim was right all along.......
(as if I needed it - /s)
Bet you $10.00 ;-)
How can it (possibly) be a good idea to create something which only ever eats everything it comes into contact with ... even photons of LIGHT?
I can just picture it.
CERN: One month from now. Wilhelm and Claus have just created a black hole. They look at each other for a moment.
Claus asks “did it work”.
Wilhelm says “Ja, let me look”, and turns on his flashlight...
I did think it was funny today when Glenn Beck suggested we at least leave a note on the moon for future species in case it goes bad.....
The earth gets hit with rays more powerful than even CERN can create.
There are “super high energy cosmic rays” from space which are fairly rare, but which have been detected hitting the atmosphere. Unfortunately there are so few of them and they’re obviously scattered all over the earth, that you can’t really use them to study particle physics.
Point is, if CERN will destroy the Earth, the impact of one of these rays, millions upon millions of which have hit the Earth, would have destroyed the Earth first.
I have a feeling that the Moon would follow us into oblivion ;-)
How many of those particles you refer to, collide precisely right into each other in opposite directions, both at light speed — exactly on the surface of our planet?...
I have no idea what this Large Hadron Collider is but if MIT is doing it, it has to be cool. What is more......those dirt bag countries that hate us....THEY ARE NOT DOING IT so that makes it even better!
Well...we're not exactly doing it. The Europeans are ( although Americans are a part of the team.)
I will bet anyone on this thread, or any other, $1,000,000 that the world will not end from this experiment. If any of you are so sure that it will cause the end of the world come and bet. After all, I can’t lose. If the world ends, I won’t have to pay, if it doesn’t end someone will owe me a million. So, any takers?
Let's run that by the DNC! LOL!
I am finishin up all of my weed just in case this is true...
I am finishin up all of my weed just in case this is true...
Fittinng name.
I'm staying in bed tomorrow. They always say it's best to die in bed.
Alright, as long as I’m gonna get beat up on this thread.
I’ll run with it.
Scientists know how to clone human babies, to harvest stem cells.
Does that make it a good idea?
“Wilczek said doomsday fears about the collider are unfounded.”
Let’s find out — push the button, dammit!
Doesn't feel any different, does it?
I’ve heard it before. :)
Bring it.
Life is just a dream...
I learn further that 20 European nations have contributed...... but wouldn't you know- oh yes, "The United States and Japan are major contributors". They have observer status. The cost?
$10 Billion US dollars.
I guess I will have to join Ned Ludd at work tomorrow. (joke) That money could have fed a lot of starving third world people.
this story reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Ice 9”
Wilczek says fears unfounded...
What the hell else is he gonna say?
Anyway - the History Channel just said the world won’t end till 2012 - no worries.
I quit my diet just in case. Want some brownies?
Bummer, Dude.
Quantum mechanics and "virtual particles", which in the vicinity of a small black hole turn out not to be so virtual.
Basically a particle and it's anti particle spontaneously appear. Absent the black hole they would annihilate each other with not net loss or gain of mass-energy. However, if one get sucked in to the black hole, it can't annihilate it's partner. The energy of the partner, including both it's mass and kinetic energy, has to come from somewhere, and "somewhere" turns out to be the mass of the black hole itself.
It's a gravity gradient effect, not even noticiable around a star or galaxy mass black hole, but it causes little black holes, the type the collider *might* make, to go "poof" faster than they can suck in new matter.
Doesn't matter, it's the total energy of the collision that matters. Many cosmic rays have far more energy than two protons colliding in the LHC. Besides, given relativity. The two situations, one faster particle hitting a slow or "stationary" one, and two particles hitting each other at some very high fraction of the speed of light, are equivalent ways of describing the same thing.
I’m going to wait a few days before I mow the lawn.
Yea, but it was supposed to be done earlier than now, and in Texas. But the Congress took away the funding as soon as the Texas site was selected, or almost as soon anyway. (The alternative which would have been more LHC like than the Texas based Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) would have been.
I believe they grow mushrooms in part of the incomplete tunnel under the Waxahachie Texas area.
IIRC, the SSC would ultimately have been able to reach higher energies than the LHC, although initially it would have been comparable to the limit reachable by the LHc.
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