Umm, actually … no. I’m 15 and a Sophomore in high school. Just to clarify things. And yeah the machine is coming on soon. The experiment begins on September 10 soon after 9 a.m. (0700 GMT).
The end of the world...IS TOMORROW?!
I think many people don’t understand the PURPOSE of the machine (and if you are reading this post, more than likely we are all still alive, unless you are some razy time demon.)
The purpose of the machine is to create a mini black hole by launching particles art each other at the speed close to light.
The black hole is so tiny, it dissipates within a millisecond.
this more than likely happens around us all the time and we don’t notice it, because obviously we don’t notice when particles collide.
it also happens in the earth’s atmosphere, which we do know. guess what? we’re still here!
So when they say ‘black hole’ they DONT mean mega huge planet-sucking thing. They mean tiny, atom sized black hole that we can record. which is good. we may be able to study material that hasn’t been around since the big bang!
woohoo!
Sorry to dissapoint… but the machine is underneath Cern in Geneva… 
We’ll try to destroy the world some other time then eh?
no it’s not. it’s just to make particles clash at a preposterous velocity to see what happens when you force quarks away from their triplets.
there is a little less than a chance in five hundred that a singularity will show up. it’s likely that it’ll dissipate. however, given the heat and the weird situation in which timespace will be at inside that big collider, it might just be that the odds of the singularity stabilising and becoming a baby black hole. (the odds were calculated at a little less than 1 in 10 000). in that case, there’s a chance a little over 10% (making the whole shebang 1 in 100 000) that the black hole itself will not poof away. in which case we get doomsday before christmas.
yes, but in a normal condition, timespace borrows energy from the future in the form of a particle-antiparticle pair which undergoes anihilation and releases a lot of energy — at which point the baby black hole goes. what we don’t know is whether or not in weird simulated conditions this will hold, as the whole “borrowing energy from the future” thing is about as complicated as quantum goes.
now you’re just skimming through the wikipedia. what arguably happens at the atmosphere is the formation of strange matter, and that’s only provided a massive ammount of energy, like a solar storm. nothing to do with black holes. as for strage matter, it might be more risky in a lab than in the skies because there’s a lot more energy going on in the LHC, and the two mainstream physics standard models of now are particularly contradictory when it comes to strage matter: one says it will dissipate under lots of energy, the other predicts that if you give it matter and heat it will subverting the whole matter around it into strangelets.
at any rate, what you’re dismissing here, Ryan, is that there is a chance a weird thing comes up from this test. the chance is very small — but it’s not a pointing at others and saying “ha, told ya” matter. no matter how small our calculated risk is, we shouldn’t treat “oh, and there’s a risk we’ll anihilate the world in the process” as someone else’s problem! there still is a chance. a small chance is nice that way: it’s not like saying it won’t happen. it just might happen.
also, we work with given figures here, but math in quantum physics is nowhere near trivial. it might just be that we’re playing the figures down compared to what they really are — and vice versa. this machine brings particle colliding to such a new level that we don’t really know what to expect. as particles approach the speed of light, they gain mass (Einstein’s equation) and lose space (Lorentz contraction) approaching ever more state necessary to form a stable singularity. and hey, the LHC is still a human-made machine — the collider itself is subject to math errors and engineering flaws.
helium leaks, that kind of thing: we simply cannot predict what will happen. the tiniest helium leak would set up a self-sustained fusion process, and what you would have is basically the world’s largest fusion reactor. presto: “large hadron collider” becomes “massive H bomb” and you can say goodbye to your european friends.
I’m no scientist, but I am guessing that is why they decided to build it deep into the ground and not on the surface?!
we can’t even tell what exactly would happen if helium leaked, Carnun, whether it would be an explosion, a fireball, a nuclear explosion or plasma erupting. if its done just the right way, it doesn’t matter that the whole shebang is underground, it would wipe a considerable part of Europe from the face of Earth, and most of the human population would (face extinction yadda yadda) be under the risk of having kids with tails. during the construction of the LHC, they already managed to have a helium leak.
(at any rate, i’m not particularly concerned with any of this, but that’s because of what i believe in and stuff — what i don’t get is, given there is indeed a real chance things go really wrong, how come everyone else isn’t worried).
also: this is most instructive (no doomsday predictions, just a somewhat amusing piece of nerd rap).
Errrmm…
And…ummm…
Nvm…
Let’s hope we don’t all die 
So…if i wake up in the morning…WE WILL LIVE!
Meh…just wait and see
Just hope we don’t die…
If Stephen Hawking dismisses the fears of creating black holes and the dangers of it, I’ll believe him.
Stephen Hawking stated that the purpose of the experiment, was to find the hidden “Higgs boson” particle, which supposedly gives mass to other particles. He even bet $100 that they wouldn’t find it.
I’m guessing that since we are still here, he won the bet?
ha! nice try, but it was Msn.com!
Well, yes, in truth we aren’t certain of anything when it comes to particle physics or quantum mechanics (never thought i’d say those words without putting ‘ugh’ before it ). However, considering the fact that no other particle accelerator has run into these problems, plus scientific findings against such problems occurring (this, i will admit, i don’t have actual evidence for. I was reading articles last night and many said ‘yeah, we have scientific evidence against it.’ However, this evidence was not listed, only assured that ‘it’s there’. I’m not going to lie, i have no intention of further pursuing this, in a sort of “i have so much to do why am i posting on a forum?” kind of way. If anyone has the time and is interested and could refute or confirm this, cookie for them 
), i think that many of the fears people have of it are unfounded.
Besides, didn’t we go through similar fears like this the LAST time a new particle accelerator was made? If i recall correctly, this issue has shown up in the past.
oh and one more thing.
I mean sure we’d all die. However, wouldn’t it kinda be a cool way to go out? In the pursuit of science to make our understanding of the universe better, we suck ourselves into a black hole?
way to go out in style. sounds like a classic Vonnegut plot.
google it up — this way, you have more than one source to use, and people can’t track you back to a single article. ;p
sure, but they were completely different in many ways: the energy involved, the velocity involved, the particles to be clashed, the cooling system.
here’s the big controversy that got people postal about black holes: the notion that baby black holes are stable and tend to dissolve, that very notion is so closely related to what was being tested that you can pretty much say today’s collision is when they finally checked whether or not it was true.
fear of black holes and strangelets and what-have-you, yes. well, there’s always a chance, but then again people make nuclear power plants without as much as a second thought, why would they care about the much-smaller chances of uh-oh doomsday situations particle colliding yields?
what i was concerned about was not what could be produced within the experiment, but of possible engineering flaws. see, for a stable black hole to show up and eat the Earth, every thing must happen just the right way. for a massive human-error-caused disaster, on the other hand, something has to go wrong. and the prospect of something going generally wrong tends to scare me way more than the prospect of everything happening just the right way.
well, it’s a risk every time. next time can always be the time where the damned black hole stabilises & eats us all.
four to seven minutes of being sucked by an ever-increasing force of gravity, subject to internal bleeding and excruciating migraines, not to mention the ground trembling and tearing itself open, and houses generally falling on you? (wait, that actually does sound kind of cool).
at any rate, i’m still rather embarrassed about humankind & the whole situation, from a what-will-the-aliens-think perspective.
Actually, it was the Swiss…
Well it is located in Switzerland, but according to wikipedia (could easily be wrong lol) the people working on it and funding it are from all over.
We talked about this in physics today.
My teacher said that basically, they’re doing the exact opposite thing of an atomic bomb. Instead of splitting two atoms, they’re combing two with a large force and see what type of junk it comes up with.
The chance of everybody exploding is very, very minimal and they’re looking for whatever they could find for evidence of the big bang theory. He said they could find anything from dark matter, tiny black holes, and other things. And if black holes are created they would be microscopic and would only last a millisecond before disappearing .
And, the other possibility is that just nothing would happen…
not the opposite of an atomic bomb: they’re doing the opposite of fission (splitting a particle into pieces), which is fusion (throwing particles against each other until they split and their pieces recombine to form different kinds of particles). both reactions can be used in the craft of bombs, the generation of energy, and scientific experimentation.
as i said before, the fact that the tiny black holes disappeared is still disputed. they will naturally decay if the singularity at their core isn’t stable, but we don’t know for sure about a certain “Hawking radiation” which is theoretically behind the anihilation of the ones that are stable — in fact, if we did get swallowed by a black hole, it would be a somewhat funny step forward to science: it would prove that the theory of Hawking radiation (which hasn’t just yet been confirmed or refuted) is, well, wrong.
something is bound to happen, we just don’t know what. we have a few clues as to what we should be looking for — Higgs bosons, supersymmetry, strange matter — and perhaps what we’re looking for is actually none of these: but it still must be somewhere right under our noses. something causes particles to have mass, and that something must show up at some point or another, in some form.
The purpose of the LHC is to create the Higgs boson, NOT to create a black hole. And it’s not going to do anything cosmic rays don’t do already. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LHC.
Come on, were still here, the black hole has eaten us by now, besides, the holes are too weak to eat something. You need something it can eat (metals are too solid too be eaten by small holes). And thats it
Ah well what do you know? I’m not dead…
<
Yay.
stands round being bored
sighs
And now we can 
the whole day, the doomsday is soon however.
I do not know exactly this system, but I do believe that this H bomb possibility is even more negligible than black hole and other fears. Helium is a product of usual fusion processes and amount of the accelerated particles is probable quite small to start some kind of chain reaction.