Large Hadron Collider

[Guffe]

It's not "Hadron collider", It's a HARDON COLLIDER (for scientists at least...)

OT: it's a pretty cool machine, a few friends of mine have seen it in reality and they actually work a lot aorund it every day. But the thing they are working with is also pretty intense/difficult physics so answers wont be flying around everyday.

 

[wooty]

Dear science, stop wasting money and develop something usefull for once

sorry, but this kind of thinking irks me, whether or not people can see it the work being done by the LHC is useful, once we understand what gives things mass we can start to be able to manipulate it, or know never to try depending, also the energy given off by matter annihilation is insane, when we know what causes everything we can try to harness it and then be able to create energy without fossil fuels ect... sometimes it might seem like science is just being stupid, but look ahead, even the most insignificant little thing can have a huge impact, cancer can start with the alteration of a single nucleic acid....

I aint got a problem with science taking a while, because it does. Research, testing, enhancing, altering, adjusting, field testing, overcoming the christain lobby all takes time. Its just that the common man generally doesnt see all that going on. If you ask the man on the street about technology breakthroughs in the last 10 years or so, then most will probably just say "iPhone/pad" or "facebook, innit bruv", which is sad.

Maybe science in the west needs to be out there more in the mainstream like its shown in the far east (Japan, Singapore, China ect). Showing an experiment, saying what it does, how it works and what it could possibly lead to in the future, rather than it being portrayed in mass media as scary, destructive, "world ending", against Gods law, not working or blowing up in mid-showcase.

 

[thylasos]

There's still fairly regular updates on BBC News... it was out of comission for a while, mind.

 

[alias2]

The method disproves theories, not proves them.

Last I checked, experimental results can be positive or negative regarding to the theory. But sure, I'd love a link to more material if I am wrong there.

Still ... The point of it all was that myths have nothing to do with it, guess we agree on that bit?

If you want material, as I understand it Karl Popper wrote extensively on the subject, but it's easy enough to demonstrate.

Take a tennis ball and let go of it. It drops to the ground. This leads you to the hypothesis that tennis ball's will always fall to the ground when let go of. At this point you have only run one test, so you pick the ball up and let go again. It drops to the ground. Now you have more evidence. It would seem that your theory has become more likely. How many times do you need to drop the ball to prove your theory? To prove that your theory is true, you would have to test indefinitely, because you could never be sure that the ball would drop the next time and as such you could never prove your theory.

Now consider attempting to disprove the theory. How many times would the test have to fail to disprove the theory? The answer is once. Thus you have that we can disprove a theory, but we cannot prove a theory. (That is of course, if you accept that the axiomatic assumptions of science are 'true' which is a whole other discussion)

 

[cathou]

Ah but how do you know the black hole wasn't already created and we are just trapped by it's gravitational time dilation field, maybe we are doomed already

it's ok, just check that site daily to be reassured

http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/

 

[Whateveralot]

I assume they are still testing shit out. Or the results are just darn slow. I didnt see what all the paranoia was about. It was a very very slim chance that it could ever spawn a black hole and if it did we all would die in seconds.

But the chance is so small its likely that would never happen.

It's not a chance thing, it's impossible to happen. That's what the results are too (so far I've heard of). Of course, most of the results so far are pretty illusive, and they have been testing / breaking / replacing parts constantly. A while back I heard they were running at 90% of the energy levels they know they can achieve with the LHC. I was unsure of the reason why it couldn't possibly spawn a black hole, but I believe that it was because the mass of the particles being too low, which sounds reasonable. Black holes are not based on energy but on mass.

They do have a facility which produced antimatter for multiple miliseconds by the way. Not sure what the name of that project was, but it wasn't in the LHC.

 

[Pat8u]

i imagine if they do make the black hole some scientist's gonna goe "well someone owes me 50 pounds looking at you hawking"

 

[HardkorSB]

But a renewable source of power would be much more useful to humanity than finding out how to alter matter by throwing Gigawatts into it.

If we would learn how to alter matter then couldn't that lead to learning how to turn stuff into a source of power?

 

[Doitpow]

Dear science, stop wasting money and develop something usefull for once

sorry, but this kind of thinking irks me, whether or not people can see it the work being done by the LHC is useful, once we understand what gives things mass we can start to be able to manipulate it, or know never to try depending, also the energy given off by matter annihilation is insane, when we know what causes everything we can try to harness it and then be able to create energy without fossil fuels ect... sometimes it might seem like science is just being stupid, but look ahead, even the most insignificant little thing can have a huge impact, cancer can start with the alteration of a single nucleic acid....

*applauds Kyle frantically.

Damn right. People thought radioactivity was useless once, now it provides a fifth of the country's power, runs smoke detectors, kills cancer (also causes it, slightly ironic), ends wars with a kaboom (slight moral debate about whether this is a good thing, but undeniably a relevant thing), sterilises food, is used in carbon dating, and ten thousand other things.

You can never predict the uses of technology like this.

SHAME ON YOU!!

 

[Valagetti]

I guess no ones actually knows the most common way of creating black holes? I'll give you a hint, something to do with mass...

 

[RJ Dalton]

There's actually been quite a bit since the collider went online, but little of it is as sensational as the media was hoping, so they've largely been ignoring it.

 

[Spudgun Man]

I believe the whole Higgs boson thing is a ruse anyway, it was actually built to contain Brian Cox's ego

 

[Kyle Eyre]

But a renewable source of power would be much more useful to humanity than finding out how to alter matter by throwing Gigawatts into it.

If we would learn how to alter matter then couldn't that lead to learning how to turn stuff into a source of power?

yes it would, if we can manipulate matter (or more importantly anti-matter) we can use matter annihilation to generate incomprehensible amounts of energy one gram of material (including weight of dark matter, so half a gram of normal matter) would give out 9x10^13 Joules of energy or 90Trillion Joules (enough to boil 280,352,870 liters of water.... about 140 million kettles worth)

 

[Kyle Eyre]

I guess no ones actually knows the most common way of creating black holes? I'll give you a hint, something to do with mass...

it's when the mass of an object becomes so massive (in comparison to its size) that the effect of gravity caused by it is so great even light cannot escape its effect.

 

[Bloedhoest]

I guess no ones actually knows the most common way of creating black holes? I'll give you a hint, something to do with mass...

it's when the mass of an object becomes so massive (in comparison to its size) that the effect of gravity caused by it is so great even light cannot escape its effect.

Yeah. This happens when a star dies. Should be one visible right now. One star in Orion's belt is also a red dwarf, you can see the faint red glow.

 

[Balgus]

they used it for a bit and said they needed a linier collider....

 

[Kyle Eyre]

I guess no ones actually knows the most common way of creating black holes? I'll give you a hint, something to do with mass...

it's when the mass of an object becomes so massive (in comparison to its size) that the effect of gravity caused by it is so great even light cannot escape its effect.

Yeah. This happens when a star dies. Should be one visible right now. One star in Orion's belt is also a red dwarf, you can see the faint red glow.

yupp, chances are it won't become a black whole though, its not big enough

 

[crudus]

I assume they are still testing shit out. Or the results are just darn slow. I didnt see what all the paranoia was about. It was a very very slim chance that it could ever spawn a black hole and if it did we all would die in seconds.

But the chance is so small its likely that would never happen.

If it did spawn a black hole it would have burned itself out. It wouldn't have been anywhere near massive enough to cause damage to the machine, much less the world. Black holes aren't this magic thing that movies make them out to be.

Haven't heard a single fucking word about it since. Did it get abandoned or are the results really slow?

Last I heard they ran out of liquid helium which was at least a year ago. You really won't be hearing anything about it on the news because this isn't the type of stuff news stations report on. You have to either be/work at a physics lab/building or know where to look to get reports on anything about the LHC.

 

[AngryMongoose]

The barrel melted, I believe. Things tend to go wrong with these.

Also, it didn't disappear, science just doesn't happen that fast. As pointed out by Brian Cox (Who works there): "If you see a paper that says 'Higgs Boson Discovered', it's likely to be bollocks." Basically, the news gave up when they got bored and stopped understanding, which was very quickly, because journalists are some of the stupidest (possibly the stupidest) clever people around.

Also, it's not going to create a black hole. Really. And if it did, it'd just drop to the centre of the earth and we probably wouldn't know for one hundred thousand years at least, so you personally have nothing to worry about.

Anyway, the official page is here if you wanna read up on it: http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/
http://www.lhc.ac.uk/

Also, it's not the Hedron Collider, it's the Hadron Collider, or Hamster Collider: