I'm not even joking... I might be more excited about this than the start of the football season... LHC Wikipedia Info LHC Official CERN Page Countdown to Activation
:lol: An atom once called a physicist a geek and they've all been trying to smash it into something smaller since. :yes:
Well it's tough to anticipate how the discoveries this thing will assist us with might help people, because we really can really only speculate what it's going to show us. But in the big pictures it's going to make major strides as far as telling us what modern theories are accurate and which are not. The energy levels and particle interactions that are going to take place inside this machine have literally not existed (at least in a time or place in which we can witness and measure it) in the universe since the first moments after the big bang. There are a lot of different competing theories out there that attempt to describe huge chunks of the way the universe works from Einstein's Standard Model, to Quantum Physics, to String Theory and beyond. All these different models offer slightly different predictions for what we can expect from the experiments this machine will perform. Hopefully the actual results will confirm one of these theories as being the most accurate and in tune with the way the universe actually functions. And that will be a major step forward for physics because it will basically tell us which path we need to follow from here to continue advancing the science. I know it's all pretty abstract, but I think I share a sentiment with the people that have created all this stuff; that the more we know about the universe and how it functions, how it started and where's it's going, the more we might actually learn about ourselves and our role therein.
Funny, I just got into a conversation about this with my aunt recently. She believes that is going to create a micro black hole and suck the earth into it. Umm... I disagreed.
I can't find the link, but I recently read on a physics blog some guy requesting some other guy to stop spamming internet boards and university e-mail boxes with demands to hault the project. Like the guy was calling the physics department at MIT like 15 times a day and harassing professors, leaving threatening messages and ****. The request to the spammer was very humorous and condescending, and I must admit... I laughed my balls off. I'll post the link if I ever find it. I think CERN researches estimate the odds of a catastrophe to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 in 40 million.
This is like asking which came first .... the chicken or the egg? Then they'll find out it was neither.
Learning that everyone is wrong would be just as valuable as learning that one person is right. :yes:
The funny thing is, the experiment, like any other, has variables yet to be discovered, such as the jump I made on my bicycle when I was 8. Looked cool until the landing. Wonder if the scientists consider the consequences of this test yet? 1 in 40 million? I think that was my calculation too. :icon_rofl:
I'm actually really excited to see what they/ we all learn from the LHC. The scare about mini black holes is just an ignorant belief, but it is pretty funny!
how exactly is it damaged? mayb for the best? theories were flyin around that it could swiss cheese the earth. i also kinda funny they phrased it like that. especially being on the French-SWISS border
I think when they told the public that "mini-black holes" could happen, it was a misnomer. The only reason why real black holes seem to devour all matter is because their masses are GINORMOUS. The masses we're dealing with in the LHC are just parts of atoms. I mean, we're talking atomic units here, not even grams. With black holes, we're talking like 10 million solar masses. Huge difference! :yes:
