They're already here.
Posted on 07/01/2008 9:35:45 AM PDT by glymers
If all goes according to plan, a massive underground facility in Switzerland will begin smashing particles together later this summer in an effort to provide a clearer understanding of the physical universe than has ever before been possible. Known as the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, the project is composed of a 17-mile circular tunnel beneath Geneva, containing thousands of magnets meant to send beams of subatomic particles hurtling toward each other. The resulting collisions are expected to release matter similar to that present at the "Big Bang" that created the universe.
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
Sounds like a global warmingdoom and gloom scenario that gives way to much credit to humans to me.
We’ve already seen worse than this thing could create.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-energy_cosmic_ray
Will watch this thread to learn more. I may be wrong, but I seem to recall that there are numerous other collidors smashing atoms (probably the same atoms). But the size of this one is to allow us to “see” the smallest particles or something. (Although I imagine in 20 years we will need a bigger one, because after all our study we will have discovered that there must be something even smaller!)
I had no clue about this super magnet. Found the article interesting and a bit scarey, since they don’t know what will happen when they turn this thing on in August.
Uberhype. The scientists are mainly concerned that their hugh and expensive magnets do not self-destruct.
Yay! The world’s going to end! Now I can tell National City where they can stick their mortgage payments!
Black holes?
Sit down Bill Clinton, it ain’t what you’re thinking.
“Smashing atoms together with this much energy may just cause a bigger bang than they or we are ready for.”
Not to worry — all they’ll hear is a snap, crackle and pop.
That's what everybody thought until they tried it and the hadrons kept getting bigger
To paraphrase Neil Peart, “All the brightest boys, Play with the biggest toys, More than they bargained for...”
And Buddy Rich said,”I can’t sit down long enough to absorb any kind of learning. “
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See Link for Math calculations...etc...
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The University of Utah operates a cosmic ray detector called the Fly's Eye II, situated at the Dugway Proving Ground about an hour's drive from Salt Lake City. The Fly's Eye consists of an array of telescopes which stare into the night sky and record the blue flashes which result when very high energy cosmic rays slam into the atmosphere. From the height and intensity of the flash, one can calculate the nature of the particle and its energy.
On the night of October 15, 1991, the Fly's Eye detected a proton with an energy of 3.2±0.9×1020 electron volts.[1,2] By comparison, the recently-canceled Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) would have accelerated protons to an energy of 20 TeV, or 2×1013 electron volts—ten million times less. The energy of the Oh My God particle seen by the Fly's Eye is equivalent to 51 joules—enough to light a 40 watt light bulb for more than a second—equivalent, in the words of Utah physicist Pierre Sokolsky, to “a brick falling on your toe.” The particle's energy is equivalent to an American baseball travelling fifty-five miles an hour.
All evidence points to these extremely high energy particles being protons—the nuclei of hydrogen atoms. Recalling that the rest mass of the proton is 938.28 MeV—roughly 1 GeV, 1×109 eV, all of the rest of the particle's energy results from the kinetic energy resulting from its motion, which we can calculate according to basic formulæ of special relativity. So let's crunch a few numbers.
First of all, noting that mass and energy are equivalent, we can calculate the rest mass equivalent of a 3×1020 eV particle to be about 5×10−13 grams. That doesn't sound like much until you recall that this is about 3×1011 daltons (chemists measure molecular mass in daltons, where 1 dalton is the mass of a hydrogen atom), just about the same as a single cell of the intestinal bacterium E. coli (5×1011 daltons). Thus this single subatomic particle had a mass-energy equivalent to a bacterium.
*************snip**************Formula at the link....*************************
After traveling one light year, the particle would be only 0.15 femtoseconds—46 nanometres—behind a photon that left at the same time.
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These calculations involve some elementary but easy to mess up algebra and some very demanding numerical calculations for which regular IEEE double precision is insufficient. If you'd like to double-check these results, be sure to use a multiple precision calculator with at least 30 significant digits of accuracy. I generally use Mathematica for symbolic work and Mark Hopkins' package C-BC for number crunching. It's entirely possible I've made one or more mistakes of order-of-magnitude or greater significance. But even so, (and please correct me!), this is, particle physics wise, a genuine Oh Wow event.
See post #13 ....I don’t think the energy of any particles to be generated approaches what has been observed in the WILD!
‘The resulting collisions are expected to release matter similar to that present at the “Big Bang” that created the universe.’
Bad assumption. They don’t know if there was an event like the “big bang” or what matter was like at the supposed event.
Tech giants use controversial project as test bed ( Hadron Collider threatens the earth says Suit)
Well, can you tell me if this sort of collision (at this energy level of the LHC but with greater magnetic confinements) is occurring in nature, perhaps inside stars, which would seem to indicate something, if such stars do not implode due to the collisions. And then there’s the question of ‘at what confinement can the collisions be kept from “growing”’ a black hole?’
They're already here.
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