Good-bye cruel world! The man behind the world’s biggest scientific experiment, which critics claim could cause the end of the world, is a Welsh miner’s son who has admitted blowing things up as a child.
The aim of the £4.4billion experiment is to recreate the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang – the birth of the universe – and provide vital clues to the building blocks of life.
But a handful of scientists believe that the experiment could create a shower of unstable black holes that could ‘eat’ the planet from within, and they are launching last-ditch efforts to halt it in the courts.
Who's kidding? I know my post kind of looked like I might be, it's an affliction I have.
I saw a quick blurb, so I did a quick search. "Evan the Atom" was my search. If this is really as dangerous as some want us to think, why not more of a protest? Are scientists not taken seriously?
GL- I'm well aware of the collider at Brookhaven, bear in mind I lived nearly atop Stanford's Particle Accelerator in the 90s. I'm not as much worried about any strong odds of an unstoppable chain reaction as I am in the rush into this project without more thoughtful determination of potential snafus. The interesting part is, that, if those who speak against it are correct, they'll never receive credit for it, as their supporters and detractors, alike, will be gone, giving those whom support the experiment the upper hand in credibility. weird, right?
Personally, I side w/TS Elliot re: a whimper, as opposed to a bang.
The interesting part is, that, if those who speak against it are correct, they'll never receive credit for it, as their supporters and detractors, alike, will be gone, giving those whom support the experiment the upper hand in credibility. weird, right?
It's an interesting risk problem: probability versus consequences. OK, the probability may be one in a gazillion, but the consequences are pretty much infinitely bad.
Yesterday, at dog park I met an 80 year old man who owns the world record for the highest g-force SUSTAINED by a human being--16G for 3 minutes in the human cyclotron!
From Wikipedia:
"Human tolerances depend on the magnitude of the g-force, the length of time it is applied, the direction it acts, the location of application, and the posture of the body. The human body is flexible and deformable, particularly the softer tissues. A hard slap on the face may impose hundreds of g locally but not produce any real damage; a constant 16 g for a minute, however, may be deadly."
He worked on the Mercury missions, and told me that they were having problems with the sternum collapsing into the chest cavity at high sustained g-force. So he and his crew developed a steel hammock that naturally pushed on the sides of the chest--when at high Gs--to stop the deformation.
Anyway, I'm not worried about CERN. The experiment will happen. We will survive. We will learn. We will have more questions than answers in particle physics soon.
It will probably take a year or two until they get up to near-relativistic speed.
The sad part is that Europe has surpassed US as far as this type of science is concerned. What happened to America?
Spiderman-that is profound, I never thought of that, and it may even be true
It is true, they have verified the time relative theroy with clocks on the space shuttle.
The time would be instantanious for the travler but for us it would seem like years maybe decades.
Not to mention the rate at which you would have to increase and decrease said speed, if a ship jumped into lightspeed without any Star Trek-esq buffering you would instantly be turned to mush...
that's why it is an investment you won;t know the gains till after. Look at the space race and all the billions NASA has spent. We got some pretty cool knowledge and junk from that...