Alright, I know it’s been awhile since I’ve updated my blog, but hey – I’ve got a life, too! Anyways, as most of you have noticed, the Olympics have been over for quite some time now, which is good! For those of you who haven’t noticed, well – where the hell have you been living?! The bad thing about the ending of the Olympics, now the Olympic Athletes feel like they’re frigging celebrities, pssh – as if!
Now to the real reason I’m writing this. As some of you have noticed, and an astonishing number of you haven’t, the LHC at CERN is finally up and running! If you don’t know what the LHC is, it is the machine that many predict will bring the end of the world as we know it! The main thing that they’re planning to do is get a handful or protons and a handful of neutrons, shoot them into two separate tubes that will use magnets to repel and/or attract these atoms and get them traveling inside these tubes at nearly the speed of light! After much spining in circles and gaining speed and mass, these atoms are then going to literally be smashed against one another at these high speeds to get an outcome close to that of the outcome moments after the Big Bang.
The views about this thing is very split, re-split and splitted once more. In other words, there are those who say that nothing is going to happen, then there are those who say something can happen. Then those two sides get split once more, half of the people in the side that say that nothing is going to happen say that it’s still a good thing to do because it could improve our transportation methods and whatnot, whilst another group say it’s a waste of time. Then the group of people who say something will happen are split as well, half say a black hole will be formed, and the other half say that it will cause grave unbalance. Once again, those are also split, the people who believe there is going to be a black hole are actually split four ways this time! A quarter say, if a black hole is formed, it’s not going to do anything, it’s going to be small and collapse in itself. Another quarter say that if the black hole is formed it will start off small and get bigger, and bigger, eventually devouring us all! There’s another portion that say that if a black hole is formed, it will take the ozone first and go from there, and blah-blah-blah.
Honestly, too much information, too many views! What’s your take, is the world truly on it’s way to the end?
September 16, 2008 at 3:35 am |
Actually the scientific views on the outcome of the LHC experiments are not as divided as you describe them above. Those that speak of the end of the world are not scientists at all.
The scientific safety reports can be found in CERN’s website and in http://www.arxiv.org
I must add that microscopic black holes are quantum objects that need quantum gravity to be described. As qe don’t know how to do quantum gravity, we cannot calculate their formation probability, decay probability and so on exactly. Classically, general relativity predicts that it is negligibly possible for such a black hole to be formed (the estimated required energy is according to GR many orders of magnitude larger). Theories (braneworld scenario, RS models, string theory) that predict that such BH could form at lower energies are mathematical models that go beyond the standard (tested) physical theories and have not yet been proven.
And even if a micro BH formed in LHC it would not devour anything. Actually its gravitational field would be so weak that it could not exert any macroscopically measurable force on a person, let alone on the whole earth.