So here's the thing... The experiments talked about below are some of the largest, most relevant and exciting experiments being undertaken at the moment, and are possibly the most significant of this century. Hundreds of scientists are as excited about these experiments as I was at 8 years old when Return of the Jedi came out in theatres. Believe me, I'm interested in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) results as well; it -could- support or even prove some of the biggest theories in physics. But... the LHC -could- also spell our doom. If something has a 1 in 1,000,000,000 chance of happening, it still has a chance! One scientist said there is more chance that all the oxygen molecules in the room you are sitting in shift to one side of the room suddenly and suffocate you than the LHC producing a global disaster. I say, even if that's true, it's still a chance!
Mark October 21st on your calendar- it could be the first day of Armaggedon!
This summary of the LHC comes from the most reputable source in existence, Wikipedia:"The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of protons with very high kinetic energy. Its main purpose is to explore the validity and limitations of the Standard Model, the current theoretical picture for particle physics. It is theorized that the collider will confirm the existence of the Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and missing links in the Standard Model, and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The LHC was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and lies underneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. It is funded by and built in collaboration with over eight thousand physicists from over eighty-five countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. The LHC is already operational and is presently in the process of being prepared for collisions. The first beams were circulated through the collider on 10 September 2008, and the first high-energy collisions are planned to take place after the LHC is officially unveiled on 21 October.
When in operation, about seven thousand scientists from eighty countries will have access to the LHC. It is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the last unobserved particle among those predicted by the Standard Model. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would shed light on the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking, through which the particles of the Standard Model are thought to acquire their mass. In addition to the Higgs boson, other particles predicted by possible extensions of the Standard Model might be produced at the LHC. More generally, physicists hope that the LHC will enhance their ability to answer the following questions:
Of the possible discoveries the LHC might make, only the discovery of the Higgs particle is relatively uncontroversial, but even this is not considered a certainty. Stephen Hawking said in a BBC interview that "I think it will be much more exciting if we don't find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of one hundred dollars that we won't find the Higgs." In the same interview Hawking mentions the possibility of finding superpartners and adds that "whatever the LHC finds, or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe."[3]
Safety of particle collisions
Although a few individuals, including scientists, have questioned the safety of the Large Hadron Collider in the media and through the courts, the consensus in the scientific community is that there is no conceivable threat from the LHC particle collisions.
Sources:
- ^ "...in the public presentations of the aspiration of particle physics we hear too often that the goal of the LHC or a linear collider is to check off the last missing particle of the Standard Model, this year’s Holy Grail of particle physics, the Higgs boson. The truth is much less boring than that! What we’re trying to accomplish is much more exciting, and asking what the world would have been like without the Higgs mechanism is a way of getting at that excitement." -Chris Quigg, Nature's Greatest Puzzles
- ^ Randall, Lisa. "Extra Dimensions and Warped Geometries. Science. Vol. 296, 24 May 2002]".
- ^ Stephen Hawking interviewed by the BBC on the switch-on of the Large Hadron Collider. news.bbc.co.uk. Retrieved on 10 September 2008."
The following info comes from this article Safety of the Large Hadron Collider.
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The claimed dangers of the LHC particle collisions, which are scheduled to begin on 21 October 2008,[3] include doomsday scenarios involving the production of stable micro black holes or the creation of hypothetical particles called strangelets.[4] The potential risks of these unprecedented experiments were reviewed in 2003 by the LHC Safety Study Group, a group of independent scientists, who concluded that, like current particle experiments such as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the LHC particle collisions pose no conceivable threat.[5] A second review of the evidence commissioned by CERN in 2008 reaffirmed the safety of the LHC collisions in light of further research conducted since the 2003 assessment.
[6][7] The 2008 report was reviewed and endorsed by CERN's governing body and by the Division of Particles & Fields of the American Physical Society and was published in the Journal of Physics G.[8][9][6] It concludes that any doomsday scenarios at the LHC are ruled out because the physical conditions and events that will be created in the LHC experiments occur naturally in the universe without hazardous consequences.[6]In the run up to the commissioning of the LHC, with the first high energy collisions scheduled for 21 October 2008, a group of individuals led by Walter L. Wagner (a former nuclear safety officer and an original opponent of the RHIC) and Otto Rössler, a German biochemist, have expressed concerns over the safety of the LHC, and have attempted to halt the beginning of the experiments through petitions to the US and European Courts.[1][10][11][12] Opponents assert that the LHC experiments have the potential to create low velocity micro black holes that could grow in mass or release dangerous radiation leading to doomsday scenarios, such as the destruction of the Earth.[4] Other claimed potential risks include the creation of theoretical particles called strangelets, magnetic monopoles and vacuum bubbles.[4] The claims made about the safety of the LHC have attracted widespread media attention.[1] This has raised fears among the public that the Earth will be destroyed by the experiments at the LHC, and scientists associated with the project have received many protests. The Large Hadron Collider team revealed they had received death threats and threatening emails and phone calls demanding the experiment be halted.[13][14]
Concern over the LHC has also arisen due to the interpretation of comments made by Martin Rees, an English cosmologist and astrophysicist who is President of the Royal Society and has been the Astronomer Royal since 1995.[10] Rees authored the book Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century? in which he estimates a 50% chance that mankind will destroy itself before the year 2100.[15] Rees calculated that the probability of the Large Hadron Collider to produce a global catastrophe or black hole is 1 in 50 million.[10][16][17] However, Rees has also reported not to be "losing sleep over the collider," and trusts the scientists who have built it.[18] He has stated, "My book has been misquoted in one or two places. I would refer you to the up-to-date safety study."[13]
Specific concerns and safety arguments
Micro black holes
A major concern amongst CERN opponents is that any micro black holes produced by the LHC particle collisions may have a very low velocity and so, unlike any created by natural cosmic ray collisions, they will not escape the Earth's gravitational pull. If the black holes do not immediately decay, they may remain within the Earth and begin accreting (collecting) matter in the planet. Walter L. Wagner has argued that if micro black holes are produced at the LHC, they might not decay as predicted by CERN, since Hawking radiation is not an experimentally-tested or naturally observed phenomenon and might not exist.[34][35]
Although the Standard Model of particle physics predicts that LHC energies are far too low to create black holes, some extensions of the Standard Model posit the existence of extra spatial dimensions, in which it would be possible to create micro black holes at the LHC at a rate on the order of one per second.[36][37][38] According to the standard calculations these are harmless because they would quickly decay by Hawking radiation.[36][37] The LHC Safety Assessment Group (LSAG) indicates that "there is broad consensus among physicists on the reality of Hawking radiation, but so far no experiment has had the sensitivity required to find direct evidence for it."[6] According to the LSAG, even if micro black holes were produced by the LHC and were stable, "they would be unable to accrete matter in a manner dangerous for the Earth. [...] they would also have been produced by cosmic rays and have stopped in the Earth or some other astronomical body, and the stability of these astronomical bodies means that they cannot be dangerous."[6] The LSAG argues that:
| “ | Stable black holes could be either electrically charged or neutral. [...] If stable microscopic black holes had no electric charge, their interactions with the Earth would be very weak. Those produced by cosmic rays would pass harmlessly through the Earth into space, whereas those produced by the LHC could remain on Earth. However, there are much larger and denser astronomical bodies than the Earth in the Universe. Black holes produced in cosmic-ray collisions with bodies such as neutron stars and white dwarf stars would be brought to rest. The continued existence of such dense bodies, as well as the Earth, rules out the possibility of the LHC producing any dangerous black holes.[7] | ” |
Otto Rössler, German chemistry professor at the University of Tübingen, believes that micro black holes created in the LHC could grow exponentially.[39][40][41][42] Hermann Nicolai, Director of the Albert Einstein Institute, in Germany, has examined Otto Rössler's research paper on the safety of the LHC[40] and has issued a statement highlighting logical inconsistencies and physical misunderstandings in Rössler's arguments. Nicolai concludes that "this text would not pass the referee process in a serious journal."[44] Domenico Giulini has also commented with Hermann Nicolai on the validity of Otto Rössler's thesis, concluding that "his argument concerns only the General Theory of Relativity (GRT), and makes no logical connection to LHC physics; the argument is not valid; the argument is not self-consistent." On 1 August 2008, a group of German physicists, the Committee for Elementary Particle Physics (KET),[46] published an open letter dismissing Rössler's concerns and carrying assurances that the LHC is safe.[47][48]
Strangelets
Strangelets are a hypothetical form of strange matter that contains roughly equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks and are more stable than ordinary nuclei.[citation needed] If strangelets can actually exist, and if they were produced at LHC, they could conceivably initiate a runaway fusion process in which all the nuclei in the planet were converted to strange matter, similar to a strange star.[citation needed]
| “ | Perhaps cosmic-ray collisions really are creating tiny black holes or strangelets, but those little bits of doomsday zip by too fast to cause any trouble. In the LHC, they say, the bad stuff could hang around long enough to be captured by Earth’s gravity and set off a catastrophe.[34] | ” |
The probability of the creation of strangelets decreases at higher energies. As the LHC operates at higher energies than the RHIC or the heavy ion programs of the 1980s and 1990s, LHC is less likely to produce strangelets than its predecessors.[6] Furthermore, models indicate that strangelets are only stable or long-lived at low temperatures. Strangelets are bound at low energies (in the range of 1-10 MeV), whilst the collisions in the LHC release energies in the range of 14 TeV. The second law of thermodynamics precludes the formation of a cold condensate that is an order of magnitude cooler than the surrounding medium. This can be illustrated by the example of trying to form an ice cube in boiling water.[6]
Sources: see this link
