Posted on 09/10/2008 8:56:27 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
The work of the Large Hadron Collider is crucial for the survival of humanity, according to Professor Stephen Hawking.
Prof Hawking said the £4.4bn machine, in which scientists are about to recreate conditions just after the Big Bang, is "vital if the human race is not to stultify and eventually die out."
And he sought to ease fears that the machine could have apocalyptic effects. "The world will not come to an end when the LHC turns on," Prof Hawking said, adding: "The LHC is absolutely safe."
Scientists at the CERN research centre in Switzerland are aiming to use the machine to gain a better understanding of the birth and structure of the universe, and to fill gaps in our knowledge of physics.
They hope that by recreating the moments after the Big Bang - the massive explosion thought to have created the universe - the experiment will make clearer what the universe is made of, what makes it expand and also to predict its future.
Prof Hawking, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, said: "The LHC will increase the energy at which we can study particle interactions by a factor of four."
However, he doubts that the machine will have the power to unravel some of the universe's more elusive secrets such as the putative Higgs boson particle - thought to have given mass to all other particles.
Prof Hawking said he has placed a bet of $100 that the scientists won't find the Higgs boson - the so-called "God particle."
"Another discovery that we might make is superpartners, partners for all the particles we know ... they could make up the mysterious dark matter that holds galaxies together," he told BBC Radio 4.
"Whatever the LHC finds or fails to find, the results
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
i've posted this before, but it's pretty decent.
“vital for the survival of humanity”?
I seriously doubt that Stephen.
I’m not worried. I figure that whoever can invent such a machine is smart enough to know it’s capabilities.
How does Hawking communicate? I understood that some time ago he had declined to the point of being unable to speak?
Democrats are totally stultified, so I guess we are pretty far along that path already.
I seriously doubt that Stephen."
Yikes. If he's wrong about that, what about this:
"The world will not come to an end when the LHC turns on," Prof Hawking said.
Remember, today was just a flip the switch test. They won't do the God thing for a couple of months.
yitbos
I think Prof. Hawking has confused humanity with the theoretical physics community.
I’m fairly certain it’ll have no effect whatsoever on our survival. Someone needs to tell Stephen his horoscope. FYI, Stephen, you’re gonna die.
Matter of fact, courtesy of Chris Rock, here’s a horoscope for everyone:
Aquarius: You’re gonna die
Capricorn: You’re gonna die
Gemini: You’re gonna die TWICE
Leo: You’re gonna die
Scorpio: You’re gonna die f***in
But is it going to stop global warming so we don’t all drown or starve in ten years?
“The world will not come to an end when the LHC turns on,” Prof Hawking said.
If they understood enough about physics to be certain of that, they wouldn’t need to do these experiments. They’re trying to recreate particles that they believe haven’t existed anywhere in the universe in about 14 billion years, and they’re telling us they’re not sure what’s going to happen, but they’re certain it won’t be that bad. They don’t have a clue. But hey, mankind has been doing silly things for thousands of years without wiping ourselves out, odds are we’ll make it through this one. If they do wipe us all out, we probably won’t have time to notice, so who cares?
President Reagan wanted to build it in USA but other social programs where more important...
Prof Hawking said he has placed a bet of $100 that the scientists won’t find the Higgs boson - the so-called “God particle.”
I knew it! He’s just in it for the money!
It’s vital for the survival of his paycheck.
It is a miracle that we managed to survive this long without it.
“There is no Godparticle”
Started it yesterday, 4 earthquakes today....hmmm
What could these tests contribute to the theoretical physics community?
Best Case: The Large Hadron Colliders' ALICE experiment successfully creates quark-gluon plasma, a substance theorized to have existed just milliseconds after the Big Bang. By generating temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the sun, scientists hope to watch as this particle goo cools and expands into the particles that we know. That could help scientists answer why protons and neutrons weigh 100 times more than the quarks they're made of.
Worst Case: Scientists inadvertently make a micro black hole, and the earth is quickly erased from existence.
The Standard Model of Particle Physics
Best Case: With the standard model so well elucidated, perhaps a curveball is in order. Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance notes, "There is almost a guarantee that the Higgs exists, or at least some sort of Higgs-like particle," so perhaps the best scenario would be finding the Higgs-like particle rather than the Higgs itself. That wouldn't be such a radical break from the model such that all previous work is too highly devalued, and at the same time it could open new physics frontiers.
Worst Case: The Higgs boson -- the long-postulated [God] particle that is supposed to give mass to particles -- is finally confirmed. Sure, discovering the Higgs at the LHC would be neat, but it would basically just confirm a lot of what physicists already know, without really pushing the science: Boring. Some scientists have even said that their worst case scenario for the entire collider project would be finding the Higgs and just the Higgs.
yitbos
It's not going to destroy the universe or create a black hole, and there's actually a certain amount of evidence that the energies the large hadron collider can achieve are achieved throughout our own galaxy every day and seen in very high energy cosmic rays.
It's not true that we don't have the slightest idea of what's going to happen. Oy vey. 1 trillionth of a second after The Singularity is still 30 orders of magnitude from the Planck time. That's the collider to be scared of. Not slated for production any time soon.
Not in the least.
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