Go Go LHC!

[lorrior]

Just felt I had to state for the record that I, for one, am excited and hopeful about the firing-up of the Large Hadron Collider today. Three cheers for magnets, bitches

Comments

[epim]

"Oh noez teh black holez will form!"

Bah. This is gonna be awesome. Science: It works, bitches.

[lorrior]

Excellently put. I was actually kind of wondering to myself why I felt so compelled to add 'bitches' (read with the appropriate high-pitched emphatic pronunciation) to the end of that hurrah for magnets. Now it is clear to me. Inert black-body radiation curve here

Vital update site

[lokmer]

Anyone who is (childishly) worried about the LHC destroying the world should regularly check http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com If there is a problem, this will be the first site to report it. Bonus: It's in very accessible language for the scientifically illiterate.

Re: Vital update site

[lorrior]

Tee Hee. Yeah, a friend forwarded me that link yesterday and I got a kick out of it.

Re: Vital update site

[lorrior]

Correction: he sent me this slightly different link yesterday. Now I feel doubly reassured with two corroborating information sources. Phew!

[dalisair]

LOL I have to poke fun, and it's inspired a short story, so it's all good.

[lorrior]

Huh? Short story? ...Ah... just hopped over and caught up on your posts. Heh - didn't mean to call you out or anything. Is the story your computer ate about LHC doom?

[dalisair]

yes. will be good.

[kalendargirl]

Do you personally promise that it will not go crazy-style and make a huge-fuck-off black hole that will swallow us like something out of Stargate?

My boss was telling me that he hoped it killed us all, but was sad that he didn't think it could do the job.

However, if YOU tell me it is safe, I will not worry. Because, after all, you are awesomely smart. : )

[lorrior]

I personally promise (as do the over 8,000 physicists who have worked on the project and are much much smarter than me). Firstly, assuming they are able to produce the hoped-for subatomic black holes, they would be so minute (smaller than electrons) and so short-lived (mere billionths of seconds from creation to decay) that they wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of attracting additional matter, even if the reaction chamber wasn't an enormous vacuum. Secondly, The collisions that would take place in the LHC already occur naturally in the upper atmosphere when cosmic rays collide. If they were a danger to the world, the world probably wouldn't still be here. So rest assured (otherwise I'll be forced to make you read a full mathematical workup of the issue ;-)