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 ...
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.
So you're walking everywhere now?
Probably not, it would just continue to orbit with the little black hole that had once been the earth. If there was anything alive there, the "event" might have done it in though. A black hole eating a planet is bound to be an energetic event. With the energy being mostly hard gamma and X-rays. :)
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