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The Large Hadron Collider - The Earth is Still Here! |
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 Sep 9 2008, 04:09 PM
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Official Giggle Loop Coordinator
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Scientists near Geneva at the Large Hadron Collider are experimenting with smashing particles together the speed of light to see if they can re-create the conditions of the beginning of the universe.
Some scientists fear the results of these experiments could cause tiny black holes that would eventually gobble up the earth. Other scientists say the experiments are perfectly safe.
Have you been following the research CERN is doing? What do you think about it?
This post has been edited by Pleione: Sep 12 2008, 05:45 PM
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Sep 10 2008, 11:53 AM
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Leaky's Seriously Senior Mad Scientist
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The CERN people did a lot of good things aside the collider. Timothy Berners Lee "invented" the basis of the Internet there. He gave us (however distantly) the opportunity to be here in Leaky.  Yay to Sir Timothy!
As for the idea of re-creating the "Big Bang" - though being a scientist, I always felt there should be something left undecided, unknown.
CERN presumably has the highest density of geniuses per squaremeter anywhere in the world, so I'm pretty sure they will get close to the Big Bang, they will learn a lot, and they will end up having devised even more mindbogglingly complicated formulae explaining all this. (This, of course, means, we will still be here, after they smashed minute particles into one another at the speed of light...)
Yet, and I'm equally sure here, there will be something left that is not entirely explainable. I like that idea.
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Sep 10 2008, 07:34 PM
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Knight MacMod The Great Protecting The Memory Of Sense
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QUOTE(innkeeper_tom @ Sep 10 2008, 08:53 AM)  The CERN people did a lot of good things aside the collider. Timothy Berners Lee "invented" the basis of the Internet there. He gave us (however distantly) the opportunity to be here in Leaky. Yay to Sir Timothy! As for the idea of re-creating the "Big Bang" - though being a scientist, I always felt there should be something left undecided, unknown. CERN presumably has the highest density of geniuses per squaremeter anywhere in the world, so I'm pretty sure they will get close to the Big Bang, they will learn a lot, and they will end up having devised even more mindbogglingly complicated formulae explaining all this. (This, of course, means, we will still be here, after they smashed minute particles into one another at the speed of light...) Yet, and I'm equally sure here, there will be something left that is not entirely explainable. I like that idea.
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"And, if there is need to speak in brief summary of this power, we shall find that none of the things which are done with intelligence take place without the help of speech, but that in all our actions as well as in all our thoughts speech is our guide, . . ." Isocrates, Antidosis |
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Sep 12 2008, 09:43 PM
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Leaky's Youngest Elf
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It's funny- because if I hadn't read Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, I wouldn't know what CERN or a particle collider was. Although it's fiction, they discuss the collider and a thing called anti-matter.
But what's cool now is to see the news about CERN actually doing tests and possibly being that much closer to replicating the Big Bang. Thus, we are being offered a different explanation of where we came from, rather than the common religious explanations we have accepted mostly for 1,000s of years.
This post has been edited by JeffHpFan: Sep 12 2008, 09:45 PM
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Sep 12 2008, 11:04 PM
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Eeylops Owl Cage Cleaner
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QUOTE(Pleione @ Sep 10 2008, 07:09 AM) Scientists near Geneva at the Large Hadron Collider are experimenting with smashing particles together the speed of light to see if they can re-create the conditions of the beginning of the universe. Some scientists fear the results of these experiments could cause tiny black holes that would eventually gobble up the earth. Other scientists say the experiments are perfectly safe. Have you been following the research CERN is doing? What do you think about it?
There is no way these mini black holes could possibly gobble up the earth. If they are created, still a fairly big if, they are smaller than the nucleus of an atom and such black holes evaporate within such a tiny amount of time that they would be harmless. Secondly, though they would create temperatures close to that of a trillionth of a second after the big bang, these temperatures are contained within such a small space - microscopically small, as I understand it on at subatomic scales, that there isn't the least danger. I think it is all very exciting. Paul Davies was talking about it on "Lateline" a highly reputable current affairs program on the ABC in Australia - not the populist garbage that inflicts so much of our airwaves (no doubt the sort of programs responsible for the scaremongering) -and he was very reassuring and convincing about any possible menace. One of the things they hope to find is the Higgs boson - a theoretical particle that should exist according to the standard model that creates a field that gives all other particles their mass, without which nothing could exist. According to Davies and others I've read about, the discoveries could open up a whole new area of particle physics as questions regarding supersymmetry and other dimensions necessary for string theory may be seen to have some empirical evidence - or not. There is also the question that only 5% of the stuff the universe is made from is known. The other currently postulated stuff is dark matter and dark energy and some hope to find dark matter particles. You don't have to be a scientist, and I'm not, to be intrigued about the deepest questions about the origins of everything and if this can help lead us closer to the truth then I'm all for it. Of course, it remains to be seen if there are enough scientists out there who are able to convey this information to the general public in terms we can understand. But on track record the likes of Davies, Hawking and Green have done a pretty good job thus far, albeit in pictorial rather than highly mathematical terms. However, even a glimpse into this wonderland of knowledge, only fully accessible to the initiated, is thrilling enough.
As for this totally 'unweaving the rainbow' as Keats would have it - not a chance - yet, if ever. Whatever they might find is bound to open up as many questions as it answers. For that, they would have to get to energies large enough to explore the things on the Planck scale - theoretically the smallest possible and the scale, which on my very rudimentary understanding, is the scale at which all four forces of nature are unified and where the answer to the definitive explanation of how it all began is most likely to be found. This is a strange realm in which it is thought by some theories that time and space itself is not continuous but discrete - pixellated in a sense, with the delightfully named chronons as the particles of time. And according to Davies, this would require a particle accelator not 27 kms long but going right round our solar system! That ain't going to happen anytime soon, I imagine.
As to why the universe began - maybe there just isn't an answer - it just is. At least, an answer to why in the teleolopgical sense - for what purpose? For that already presupposes one of two things, either the universe as whole is capable of intention attributable normally only to conscious beings or there is a designer of some kind. However, it would seem theoretically possible that the answer to why in the sense of following cause and effect back to time zero, which is in essence the same as the question how, may be discovered. The other 'why' will remain always a metaphysical not a scientific question to be pondered as long as beings like us exist in the universe to ask. So just maybe we can still have our rainbow and unweave it too!
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