How weird! I was working out in the gym and had the TV set to The History Channel and the show I was watching discussed CERN! Woooo woooo woooooo spooky
thanks for ruining my day, Charles. Fuck it, i'm getting drunk and running around naked for the next 3 months. Does this tie into the Obama (black male) as president = apocalypse post you had months back? Maybe I'll start supporting hillary now.
It's pretty irresponsible to quote that chunk of the article without the later sections, pointing out that these guys have a history of suing big science projects with similar apocalyptic accusations (projects which went on not to destroy any universes at all). Or that one of them has a doctorate in law from "what is now known as the University of Northern California in Sacramento", and that the other "describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory". Or that the vast majority of working scientists think these guys are fucking crackpots.
Your IHT version also edits more ruthlessly than the NYT version, which includes Stephen Hawking's opinion that any man-made black holes "would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat". Cool picture, though.
Maybe we'll finally be able to invent the ansible with that thing. That would be wicked.
Come on, it's not like we'll feel it or anything if a giant black hole suddenly eats the world. Climate change is much scarier in that it is much more certain and entails much more suffering (by being slow).
More people should read the philosopher John Leslie's book The End of the World, on the Doomsday argument. It's fun, if you're not too attached to the continued existence of humans.
Umm... How can they take them to court under the US National Environmental Policy Act when the research is based in Switzerland?
Do they realise that Switzerland is a different country?
And we could also get swallowed up by a wandering black hole, or even kicked out of our orbit of the sun...
As long as the black hole gets you first, Chuckles, I'll be happy. And BTW, if you hadn't done such a shitty job on this post, Sean would have known that US courts have no jurisdiction over CERN, but do have jurisdiction over their American sources of funding.
I'm hoping they do create a black hole. And Charles will get sucked into it.
Ooooooh! Scary evil Scientists want to KILL US ALL!
Before the first h-bomb test, there were some scientists who were worried that the manmade fission explosion might create a runaway chain reaction throughout the planet's entire atmosphere. The worriers couldn't stop Progress, though -- they went right on ahead and exploded the thing anyway.
With luck, the Hero (and his love interest) will be able to stop this travesty of science just as the clock reaches 3 seconds; preferably by throwing rival mad scientist into the gaping maw of the accelerator.
As long as they don't try to run any grapes through it, we should be just fine.
My goal in life is to die owing a shitpile of money to the IRS. If I die right now, I will have succeeded quite spectacularly, so fire that sucker up!
nat, one day he will be right.
Well, hopefully we'll disapparate into a quantum singularity before having to endure too much of his smugness, then.
Can't they just fire some electrons at it to create matter or something to stop such a reaction if it does get out of control? For every action there is an equal, opposite reaction, and all.
Gomez, your grasp of quantum physics is truly dizzying.
If somehow they do create a black hole, I'm sure they can stop it up with some sort of a rubber plug.
Or maybe France.
It's a good thing I've decided not to renew my condo lease in July.
One of the litigants, Luis Sancho, is demonstrably insane, as seen from his website:
http://www.unificationtheory.com/astrophysics/starandgalaxy.htm
The other litigant, Walter Wagner, filed a similar suit against another collider that was found to be baseless.
Any quantum black holes that form should be evaporated almost instantly by Hawking radiation. Even in the unlikely event that a theoretically-possible quantum strangelet forms, it's extremely unlikely that it would lead to all nearby matter being converted to strangelets.
Thanks for the link, Pete. After a cursory review of his website, it's official: this guy is a certifiable, grade A nut job.
Thanks for the link, Pete. After a cursory review of his website, it's official: this guy is a certifiable, grade A nut job.
The Earth is constantly bombarded by high energy particles similar to the ones produced by the LHC. The universe is full of natural particle accelerators. This one just has dectectors around it.
I don't understand what they're doing at anything other than a very shallow level, but it scares me shitless nonetheless. Manmade blackholes, wormholes, nanotech grey or green goo...
I'm not one to try to slap the beaker out of anyone's hand, especially when their IQ is twice mine, but am I really supposed to trust these scientists? I mean, I KNOW there has never been any situation where the discoveries of a group of highly educated scientists have led to the deaths of large numbers of people, but it's possible, right?
More paranoid crap.
I would be more worried about how scientists get their hands on 8 billion dollars to build particle accelerators. 8 billion could solve some serious poverty problems on this particle called Earth.
Eight billion? That's chicken shit. The Brits spent $8.2 billion on the third terminal at Heathrow, and it doesn't even fucking work.
$8 bill is cheap in light of the benefits CERN p[rovides -- many thriller novels' finales are set in its mad physicist-dense, underAlpen lair....
Point of clarification, @12:
The concerns you cite were made before the explosion of the first plutonium fission bomb in 1945; which is a very different beast from an H (for Hydrogen) fusion-bomb.
By the time we got around to testing those much more powerful weapons, nobody was in the least concerned about what they might do to the atmosphere.
Don't take out that massive loan yet people. Ultra high energy cosmic rays have been observed with energies up to 51 JOULES, about ten million times greater than LHC energies. If it could happen it would have long ago.
@27,
$8 billion is chicken feed. 1 billion people live on less than $1 a day. Distribute that evenly and they get less than $2.
A few moments in Switzerland on the way thru to Disney's Black Hole would not suck.
At U of O there is one guy who is paranoid about us making nanobots. It takes my buddy about 3 years of his life to make a sample of "monodispersed nanoparticles" ie ... very small spherical things that are uniform in size. We care because they absorb light, and conduct electricity funny.
Yet he thinks we are making nanobots! It's enough to give the people work here stitches in laughter, it's a persistant nuisance to our advisors.
It reminds of the scene in the Simpsons, where they are in itchy and scratchy land and one of the robots removes his face plate to expose his circuitry, to which Marge resonds, "You see all that stuff inside Homwer? That's why your robot never worked."
COMTE @ 30, you are of course, correct. I should have gone back and researched my half-remembered apocryphal anecdote. I hereby issue a correction to my erroneous comment.
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