Physics GRE Discussion Forums

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/scien ... ?th&emc=th

I first heard about this doomsday story last year on some website..but apparently it has finally hit the popular media with ny times coverage....so what do you guys think about this issue...Are these doomsday sayers crackpots or not???

If it can do what they think it can do, it'd be a crying shame to not turn it on.

"But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act."

*** hilarious. thanks

We're all dewmed, dewmed I tell ya!

As silly as the article sounds, I think the whole debate is fascinating. It's like a philosophy argument. Basically, this collider is going to make "things" that have never before existed on Earth and possibly do not exist naturally in the universe today. The possibility of Earth being swallowed up still sounds silly, but I don't think it's too unreasonable to claim that something bad could happen when you're dealing with such extreme, unfamiliar things.

I mean for instance, if you took a paper clip and squeezed it down small enough it would become a black hole, right? Then the Earth's gravity will pull it in and the black hole would start sucking matter in constantly, as it oscillates back and forth through the center of the Earth until all of Earth was sucked in, right?

Is there any flaw in what I said above? I don't know but it's still cool to think about. When you create weird things, you never know what can happen.

Exercise: determine the radius of the event horizon of a 14 TeV black hole. Supposing it oscillates through the Earth due to the force of gravity, that length scales shorter than the Planck length are meaningful, that anything that goes beyond its event horizon is trapped in and that it does not lose mass due to Hawking radiation, calculate the time it would take to consume the Earth.

Hint: the answer is at least 30 orders of magnitude longer than the life time of the universe.

...creation of a black hole is "effectively ruled out by the persistence of the Moon."

http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/

There are cosmic ray events in the upper atmosphere and on the surface of the moon that are orders of magnitude higher energy than the collisions at the LHC. We're safe.

The LHC doomsday people are crackpots. There was the same hoopla when they turned on the RHIC at Brookhaven.

ok kewl, that's good enough evidence for me.

Yeah that's just criminal that the LHC and BNL even has to defend against such frivolous lawsuits... reminds me of when we learned about Galileo and the Catholic church...

What I can't understand is why this guy in Hawaii isn't concerned about all the Bose-Einstein condensates being made. You and I may know a BEC may contain a billionth the matter of a minimum black hole, but if believes LHC could make a black hole why isn't he concerned about terrorists killing us all with laser cooling?

lol, too many drinks in a coconut perhaps? if you take a look at the cosmic ray spectrum there are more than 10^12 particles/km2 arriving at the top of the atmosphere with kinetic energies higher than 1 TeV every year. We should be gone by now! lmao

Here's a comic on LHC
http://xkcd.com/401/