Posted on 04/14/2008 5:29:17 PM PDT by Flavius
GENEVA -- Michelangelo L. Mangano, a respected particle physicist who helped discover the top quark in 1995, now spends most days trying to convince people that his new machine won't destroy the world.
"If it were just crackpots, we could wave them away," the physicist said in an interview at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, CERN. "But some are real physicists."
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
This news is simply smashing. :)
Whomever wrote this article obviously read too many Spiderman comics when he was a kid.
If all goes as planned, scientists say, the new collider is likely to become one of the greatest engines of discovery in history, far outstripping the Apollo moon missions and even Charles Darwin’s monumental voyage aboard the Beagle.
bump
I’m no particle physicist, but I seriously doubt they’re going to open a black hole.
Well, if we all get destroyed we won’t have to worry about the election. There’s a silver lining in every situation.
There goes the neighb
“greatest engines of discovery”
A very apt description for the SC.
I like it.
“’m no particle physicist, but I seriously doubt they’re going to open a black hole.”
Well... maybe. But... It will be really, really small.
So small, maybe only a Quark could get through.
The evaporation rate of a black hole goes up steeply as they get smaller. Even if they make one, it won’t have much mass at all (the collider works with individual ions in a vacuum, so collisions are between things with an atom-scaled mass).
It would evaporate very quickly, if Hawking et al are to be believed.
The “make a black hole” fear is common- PBFA I at Sandia was supposed to make one, then PBFA II, then when PBFA II converted over to Z, that was going to make a black hole.
The big laser for fusion research, RHIC at Brookhaven, there are probably fifty more black hole threatmakers.
That’s why I don’t go public with the project I’m doing in the spare bedroom, I don’t want angry villagers with torches outside.
That's not very reassuring.
Having no science degree himself, whatsoever, AlBore should credit his environmental detractors the same way. "But some are REAL scientists!"
You can't create a tidal wave in a bathtub.
If thet made a “Black Hole”
it would evaporate in microseconds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation
WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!
Maybe the black hole will just swallow up Washington.
“If it were just crackpots, we could wave them away,” the physicist said in an interview at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, CERN. “But some are real physicists.”
Doesn’t stop them with global warming.
Well if they DO open a black hole, all I can say is that it’s a one-time event. That supercollider will be gone along with a bunch of scientists.
I would characterize that as a true miracle.
“Maybe the black hole will just swallow up Washington.”
Some of the greatest of things begin with the simplest of dreams. ;>)
stupid Luddite anti-science brought to you by the same folks who are happy to sell Global Warming as we freeze to death.
How about the earth. The moon would be stay in orbit around a miniblack hole and the rest of the solar system would not even miss us.
Maybe this ain't such a good idea.
.
“The collider will consume as much energy as all the households in Geneva, running up an annual electric bill of $30 million.”
That’s one hell of a carbon footprint.
Oh, please... we completely debunked that idea in my physics class last week. For anyone who’s interested, the Schwarzchild radius of a black hole is 2GM/(c^2), where G is Newton’s constant for gravity, M is the total mass of the two particles in question, and c is the speed of light (I’m currently too tired to look up the specifics of the particles being smashed together, but if anyone’s interested that’s the math). Heck, if the Schwarzchild radius is smaller than the radius of the particles, I don’t think a black hole would form at all.
Thats what I’ve been trying to tell everybody.
I’m not a particle physicist. I just play one on TV.
If you’re talking to someone about this in person, just doing the math for them is usually wonderfully convincing, because the average person assumes that any math related to astrophysics is way beyond their grasp and any person who can memorize such math is insanely intelligent... and they just say something like ‘Oh, OK... I guess you’re right then, I have no clue about this kind of stuff’ and be completely in awe of you.
*Note to self: This does not work as a pick-up technique, and I should not attempt to use it as such again...
Except - electrons are black holes that have finished evaporating - and - nobody can explain why protons don’t split into smaller particles. So actually, the universe is *more* stable than theory would imply.
Doing the math *does* work as a pickup line, just not as often as hoped. Say about the frequency of proton decay.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and proactice. In practice, there is.
Hmmm. Didn't they say this about the atom bomb? That was what, over 65 years ago?
So are we really still here, or in another dimension?
That made me LOL!
IF the jamoke has to blow the planet up, let it be after our 70* Wednesday.
OK?
After that.
...blow away. ;^)
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