« MoveOn.org Whines About AP's Conservative Bias | Main | Panic Spreads Among the Nutroots »

Well if it only blows up France, no big loss. But if destroys the whole Earth - that would be a major bummer. I guess when they turn this thing on this coming Wednesday we will find out. Supposedly September 10th is the day when they flip the switch. If the worst happens I hope its over quickly.

Oh you don't actually believe that crap about it destroying the world, do you? It's all a load of-

wait a moment, they recently announced that there was no danger whatsoever. Oh dear. I'm worried now...

I wonder if they'll be jamming some Soundgarden when they flip the switch. "Black-hole son, won't you come, won't you come?"

Well, the French have always been a bit suicidal in gaining victories. Think of Napoleon. He twice went out and kicked ass and both times the French army wound up decimated at the end and the country in ruins. Then there was WWI. They had to import men after that one was over. Besides, other than superb individuals who happend to be French, tell me of the great French discoveries. I mean Montgolfier filled a baloon with hot air. The French Parliament has dozens of gas bags available at any given moment, so what?

Speaking of massive black holes, has anyone heard anything from Cynthia McKinney lately?

I'm actually not too happy at seeing my favorite blog Moonbattery run an anti-science story. We're supposed to be the party with brains.

Needless to say, as the black hole begins consuming our planet, destroying everything we've created in a final act of hubris, the left will be screaming "See!! Global warming ruined us."

Where's the outrage?
This thing is going to suck the whole planet and then the Solar System and probably the friggin galaxy before its done! Where's Al Gore? Where's Hollywood? Where's Michael Moore? Where's Obama? Where's NBC? Where's the government to save us?

We're all going to die, I tell you, we're all going to die.

Air2, is it really anti-science to want to maybe hold off on running an experiment that could end the entire world in seven seconds? Or, is it cool because some French scientists say not to worry, no big deal?

Reading some IPCC reports might help pull into focus whether we should blindly be accepting scientists' conclusions these days.

One can be a secular, pro-science, rational, forward-thinking person and at the same time really question whether turning on a black hole machine is a good idea.

They should play this classic REM tune before they flip the switch - just in case!

R.E.M. - Its The End Of The World As We Know It

That's great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane,
Lenny Bruce is not afraid
Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn - world
Serves its own needs, dont misserve your own needs. Feed
It off an aux speak, grunt, no, strength,turn, ladder
Start to clatter with fear fight down height. Wire
In a fire, representing seven games, in a government
For hire and a combat site. Left of west and coming in
A hurry with the furies breathing down your neck. Team
By team reporters baffled, trumped, tethered cropped
Look at that low playing! Fine, then. Uh oh,
Overflow, population, common food, but it'll do. Save
Yourself, serve yourself. World serves its own needs,
Listen to your heart bleed dummy with the rapture and
The revered and the right, right. You vitriolic,
Patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty
Psyched

It's the end of the world as we know it
It's the end of the world as we know it
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine

Six o'clock - TV hour. Don't get caught in foreign
Towers. Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself
Churn. Locking in, uniforming,and book burning, blood
Letting. Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate
Light a candle, light a motive. Step down, step down
Watch your heel crush, crushed, uh-oh, this means no
Fear cavalier. Renegade steer clear! A tournament,
a Tournament, a tournament of lies. Offer me solutions,
Offer me alternatives and I decline

(chorus)
It's the end of the world as we know it (it's time I had some time alone)
It's the end of the world as we know it (it's time I had some time alone)
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine (it's time I had some
time alone)

I feel fine

(repeat chorus)

The other night I dreamt of knives, continental
Drift divide. Mountains sit in a line, Leonard
Bernstein. Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester
Bangs. Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom! You
Symbiotic, patriotic, slam book neck, right? Right

(repeat chorus)

It's the end of the world as we know it
It's the end of the world as we know it
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine (it's time I had some
time alone)

(repeat chorus 2x)

Fine
It's the end of the world as we know it (it's time I had some time alone)

Cool! Black Holes, here we come!!

Save us, Superman!

Haven't we been through it before? Aren't "B*lk Holes" rayciss? Jes' aks John Wiley Price, Cummeshoner from TX.

Not to threadjack but that giant bastion of liberal asshattery, Daily Kos is reporting McCain up by 10 pts. They even have a link to the latest USA Today?Gallup poll results. Suck it libtards!!!!

Not to threadjack but that giant bastion of liberal asshattery, Daily Kos is reporting McCain up by 10 pts. They even have a link to the latest USA Today/Gallup poll results. Suck it libtards!!!!

I don't think it is anti-science to raise concerns over something so exotic and that might carry a huge (though short-term) risk.

If we are wrong, nothing happens. If they are wrong, how long does it take for you to sing the aforementioned REM song?

So all of the folks that worry over 380 ppm (0.038%) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are not concerned about this? I don't get it.

But seriously, what are the actual chance of this thing destroying the earth.

Doesnt this thing use up alot of power? Isnt it wasteful? Is it solar and wind powered? If not then its politically incorrect and Al Gore/Earth First will be blowing it up.

The way things are going, with barking moonbats running around and all, a black hole might be exactly what we need.

Yall do realize that the guy running the Misunderstood Universe is a crack pot, right? I posted a bit about the scare mongering over the LHC at my blog, though not on this particular guy. I didn't delve into the science, but the primary purpose of the LHC is NOT to make blackholes (which would be cool, but highly unlikely). Antimatter is made all the time, and is even used in PET scans. However, making a full gram of the stuff, storing it long enough to make a bomb (or even to collect that much), and even producing enough to destroy France is totally wishful thinking.

With regard to stable blackholes: if these tiny blackholes that could possibly be produced were stable, then we would have them all over the place gobbling up stuff as they would've been made at the beginning of the universe.

I'm not a particle physicist (but I know several, including some working on LHC detectors), but I have enough physics training to recognize crack pots and scare mongers. I'm a PhD candidate in physics (meaning, I'm almost done with my PhD) at Vanderbilt. Trust me guys, this thing will no more destroy the world than the last 50 years of particle accelerator research has - despite the critics saying so for each one ever made.

Is the outcome worth the risk? This isn't a cure for cancer or some way to save starving children...it's an obscure experiment that will produce results that AT BEST will be non conclusive regarding the "Big Bang" or anything else. Is it worth it?

Here is the statement by Otto Rossler:

German chemist Otto Rossler has filed a complaint with the European Court Of Human Rights — although he thinks the test will take a little longer to kill us.

He claimed: “Nothing will happen for at least four years. Then someone will spot a light-ray coming out of the Indian Ocean.

“A few weeks later we will see a stream of particles coming out of the soil on the other side of the planet. Then we will know there is a little quasar inside the planet.

“The weather will change completely, wiping out life. There will be a Biblical Armageddon.”

Yeah. didn't people believe that the "Iron Horse" traveling at 30mph was supposed to vaporize human bodies?

This story ought to be taken down. The scare is groundless and there is a lot of snickering going on by lefty scientists about right-wing concerns that a black hole will eat them.
The liklihood of generating a stable black hole has been evaluted and the probability is near zero.

Some people said nuclear weapons would never work and it was all mumbo jumbo. Boy were they suprised when they did.

How does anyone really know what the odds of creating a stable black hole are since nobody has done it? - yet.

Hopefully if something goes wrong it only blows up France - that place is a real waste of real estate.

Van, this is nutballism. Antimatter is already currently made, in very very tiny quantities. It is incredibly difficult to store. You can't put it in a bag and walk out with it. The chances of terrorists using it are precisely zero.

Neither is the LHC intended to make black holes, nor has it the energy to make black holes. Among other things, there's something called Hawking radiation. The smaller a black hole is, the faster it radiates. A tiny black hole would thus instantly disappear again, in a flash of radiation equal to the energy that went into it. You can't, by the laws of physics, make a stable tiny black hole.

The LHC isn't going to destroy the world, and neither is it going to create anything of use to terrorists. Like I said, this is pure moonbattery.

First of all, if it generatres a black hole, it'll be a micro black hole. Those are common in the universe around us and very unstable. They'll last at most a microsecond or two. Most will evaporate in less than a nanosecond. They are incapable of ingesting enough matter to become self supporting (i.e., "stable").

Here we have another case for why taxpayers need to get a refund on the money we spent on public "education".

Any black hole that could be created by Man would be how big? The size of an atom, perhaps? Now, I don't have a physics degree; but I do think that would be inherently unstable and likely to immediately...evaporate?

Sorry, but I'm with Ian. People who believe this are shit-flinging retards. As has been stated already, we've been making anti-protons for some 50 years now and the Earth hasn't gone KABOOM yet. Furthermore, its not going to create a black hole, which haven't even been proven to exist yet, only theorized. Get a grip.

OK fine, but if the thing is so unstable as to not have any chance of success in its blackholeness, then why are we funding this project? And if we're funding it because we think it might pump out a decent black hole one of these days, then wouldn't that be the end of everything? So.....we should keep funding it while expecting it to fail. Sounds like every other government program, actually.

Mega, the issue of whether the state should fund big science is one thing. But whether this is a reasonable experiment, if you are in favour of big science funding, is another.

Working at the subatomic scale you need higher and higher energies in particle accelerators. It's just the way it is. To put it crudely, you need to smash the particles together harder to make them interact. You need higher energies for finer scales.

The purpose of the experiment isn't to make black holes, so not doing so isn't a FAIL. The purpose of it is to probe higher energies. One major hope is the detection of the Higgs Boson- or lack of detection, which at these energies where it is expected will help confirm or falsify theories that rely on its existence. The Higgs Boson is theorised to be the particle which causes other particles to have mass, so it's pretty crucial to our understanding.

What is the point? We don't know what applications will come. The first particle accelerators led to nuclear energy (and weapons). Earlier, the proof of existence of electrons was considered entirely theoretical and useless; indeed Thompson and his co-discoverers for a while had an annual dinner celebrating "the most useless discovery in physics". But now our entire lives have been revolutionised by electronics.

It may be that discovering how mass comes into existence may lead us one day to being able to control mass itself. But nobody knows. That's the fun of it, in a sense.

Right on mega.

What gets me is the BEST they hope to achieve is seeing some possible particles that MIGHT fit the models of sub-atomic physics, and by extrapolation, fill in some gaping holes in said theories.

Also, everyone who is so sure that there is zero risk from this seems to gloss over one big point: nothing this powerful has every been done before...by several orders of magnitude.

Sounds to me like "Hey...we have our new toy! It might destroy life as we know it, but DAMN IT, we want to use it anyhow, SO THERE!"

Oh, and Brooklyn, aside from finding your "retards" comment offensive (I happen to know someone who's retarded, and trust me...it's neither a choice or a "badge of stupidity"), I love the way you say "black holes haven't even been proven yet". It's funny how science types will scoff if you question their theories, yet use that same "theory" to say "see, it's only a theory" when it benefits them. JEEZ, I am tired of "nuance".

This is a safe project.

The energies being used are significantly smaller than a variety of exotic high-energy particles found in the Earth's upper atmosphere. The reason we are building the Hadron Collider is to have a controlled environment to measure these interactions.

There's nothing too crazy going on here, and the concerns in the article are actually pure moonbattery. This is an important scientific project which will help establish a grand unified field theorem, essentially completing a significant portion of modern physics.

A follow up comment.

Some people are wondering how big the micro black hole (MBH) will be.

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times smaller than an atom.

Again, this sort of interaction happens in our upper atmosphere regularly. It also most likely occurred during the various large fusion bomb tests performed by the U.S. and the Soviet Union before the CTBT.

And by the way, although the LHC is being built in France, much of the know-how and equipment is from Fermilab and the Tevatron experiments, and much of the funding is from the US DOE.

This is a safe project. The article is pure BS. These interactions happen *all the time* in the atmosphere already, and all over the universe regularly.

The central premise of the article is that Hawking radiation might not exist. This may or may not be true, however, the universe is not awash in black holes, and as such there must be some mechanism by which MBHs formed in high-energy star-based interactions dissolve.

The risk is tiny. The idea that we can put out energy even close to that put out by the sun is ludicrous. Calm down, people :)

I thought the HC was to hold bad Terminators with its magnetic field.

Samrian:
Thanks, I knew those guys that started this were full of it!

Alright, I'm on board. But I'm still hoping it sucks in a few million French people when they fire it up.

Seven minutes to destruction? Great! Just enough time to ask "Just when did this seem like a GOOD idea?"

chuck in st paul
In defence of French inventors we can thank them for radium, the minnie ball and the "French 75" (Both the gun and the drink). If you want to be amased at French stupidity, look up the hell America went through in WWI just to be able to build the "75"!
"I guess the French would rather lose the war than the secret of the 75!"

Don't worry, mega, there's no need for a black hole. France, like the rest of Europe, is slated for extinction. That's what the EU is for, remember.

Excuse moi but I thought France was a black hole itself. Will it now implode in on itself? Marci Beaucoup.

whether it kills us all or not, we wont know anything.

The concerns are based on junk science. The fact that very small black holes cannot be stable was determined years ago by Professor Stephen Hawking. All black holes give off Hawking radiation which reduces their mass. Large ones draw in more mass than they give off, so growing. Small ones give it off more quickly and draw in mass more slowly so evaporate gradually, and really small ones disappear before they could affect anything.

The otehr concerns (relating to achieving more stable states of zero-point energy) would have happened millions of years ago in some of the more exotic, energetic astronomic bodies if it was possible.

Oh, and Brooklyn, aside from finding your "retards" comment offensive

Give me a break.

I love the way you say "black holes haven't even been proven yet".

They are a non-observed phenomena. That means they are theoretical and will remain so until observed. And, as has been repeatedly stated, this whole hulabaloo is crap cooked up by Luddite fucktards, many of whom are the anti-nuclear power crowd.