(Untitled)

[lilymaiden]

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but the chances of the LHC producing an non-dissipating black hole are about the same as my chances of walking through the wall, correct? Possible ... but not in any real sense of the word.

Right? I can shove it in the face of the rampant conspiracy theorists on my ignorant campus? Right?

Comments

[zanduar]

Correct. Even if they created a black hole, it would collapse due to not having enough energy to maintain its mass. We apparently walk through mini black holes everyday. Black holes also need massive amounts of mass for them to be created.

I'm gonna trust Stephen Hawking on this one.

[lilymaiden]

Yeah, I saw that about the like 100 mini black holes a day. Very cool and creeper.

[seekingferret]

It is correct that there is almost no likelihood of this happening. Still, take a little care before shoving it in the face of the rampant conspiracy theorists. Just because something is unlikely doesn't mean it should be dismissed out of hand. When doing new things in particle physics, the whole point is to observe phenomena in detail we've never been able to see before. Who knows what could happen? We might find the Higgs Boson! We might bend light into pretzels! We might destroy Earth!

Don't you find it all kind of exciting?

[lilymaiden]

I guess I'd like to think the possibility of us destroying Earth is very, very, very, very infinitesimally marginal, because as a rule of thumb I'm against things that destroy Earth, and yes, I'd be anti LHC if there was a non-insignificant chance (like, more than the chance of me walking through the wall) of it doing so.

And I don't like being anti-science. But humanism comes first.

[seekingferret]

Ha! I'm anti-science all the time, without feeling bad. And yet something like this comes along, with the opportunity to really teach us new things about the way the universe works through science, and I get way excited.
With great risk comes great reward.

I keep retelling this story from the Manhattan Project, which involved, on the day before Trinity, Bethe saying to Teller, "Hey, this is going to explode with more heat in a smaller area than we've ever seen before. Could it ignite the atmosphere on fire?" And then Teller crunched the numbers and showed that there was no chance of this happening (There's a fantastic, now declassified, report that discusses the calculation). But... the day before the test and nobody had asked that question!!! Great science always carries the risks of the unknown. That's what makes it important.

[seekingferret]

I'm curious what you think of... hold on, I'll find his name... Barry Marshall? There is a valid and fascinating debate on scientific method embedded in his story.

[jaiwithani]

There's nothing to worry about. Just watch the webcams, it's just another metal tube doing another science experiment.

[lilymaiden]

I LOVE IT, lol.