A Black Hole Nearly Swallowed the Earth at 3am EDT Today

[FreekiN]

A Black Hole Nearly Swallowed the Earth at 3am EDT Today

The Large Hadron Collider Doomsday Machine was ready to shock the world today with a huge explosion that normal people cannot understand. But it failed. The Guardian's live blogger was disappointed. Update: It worked! But we're still alive.

Updated from The Guardian:
12.07pm: Fabiola Gianotti, head of the Atlas team:
"We got something like 40 events per second, which is the expected rate.
"It's the beginning of a new era of physica exploration."

12.05pm: Gooooaaalllll!
We have collisions. The detectors are not yet fully on and taking data, but particles are colliding.

11.59am: Beams aligned and ready for collision. Nearly.

Two minutes after scientists at Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research) announced the second failure due to a power glitch, the Guardian reminded readers that, "Britain pays £80m a year in Cern subscriptions, the bulk of which goes on the LHC."

But they're still trying! A live feed from Cern can be seen here.

There's no use trying to explain this thing. But just know that the scientists at Cern do things like "inject protons" into something so they can juice the machine up to 3.5TeV. Then laser beams shoot around and then a black hole or an extra spatial dimension opens up and we all die, maybe. Or nothing at all happens. It's science, people. Don't ask questions, just believe.

The LHC is housed in a 17-mile long tunnel under Switzerland and France, keeping the machine that can destroy everything at least half neutral and off limits for nefarious purposes.

[Image via NASA]

http://gawker.com/5505160/a-black-hole-nearly-swallowed-the-earth-at-3am-edt-today

________________

ARE THEY TRYING TO GET US ALL KILLED OR SOMETHING?

WHAT HAS SCIENCE DONE?

 

[FreekiN]

Ask a Nuclear Physicist: What Exactly Did the L.H.C. Do Today?

Today brought the exciting news that Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider “mashed beams of protons together at energies that are 3.5 times higher than previously achieved.” This was joyous news, for some reason! According to the B.B.C., many scientists are describing the event as the onset of “a new era in science” that will allow researchers to understand “why matter has mass.” But what exactly does smashing protons together even prove, and why does it matter? Was that pun intended? And were we really in danger of enveloping the entire planet in a black hole?

To find out, we spoke with VF.com’s go-to scientist, Professor John Parsons of Columbia University, who actually has a hand in L.H.C. goings-on, for another edition of Ask a Nuclear Physicist.

VF Daily: What’s the significance of all of this, in layman’s terms?

Professor Parsons: This is the beginning of the operations phase of the L.H.C., which has started producing proton-proton collisions at a new world record energy, 7 TeV (~3.5X higher than at Fermilab near Chicago, the accelerator which has been the highest until recently). The experiments, which we have been building for close to 20 years, are now starting to record and analyze these collisions, which recreate on a microscopic scale the conditions less than one-billionth of a second after the Big Bang. If there are new types of particles which exist (such as those proposed in supersymmetry),we should be able to create them in the lab and study their properties, hopefully answering some of the mysteries about how the universe began and how it got to be the way we see it today. For example, we know ~25% of the universe is some exotic form of matter that we call “dark matter,” but we don’t know what it is made of. Supersymmetric particles are a leading candidate, but there are also other ideas around.

We hope the L.H.C. will allow us to answer this, and other questions, such as whether there are additional spacetime dimensions in the universe. Since it will take some time to accumulate and study enough data, and to understand our detectors, one should not expect such a discovery next week, but today marks the beginning of a new era in the exploration of the fundamental constituents of the universe, and the role they played in shaping our universe.

VF Daily: Was there really a chance—as some have prophesied—that the experiment would cause a black hole that would instantaneously destroy the planet?

Professor Parsons: Concerning black holes, there are some exotic theories which predict we could create microscopic black holes at the L.H.C. However, if true, these black holes would decay very rapidly and would not pose any danger at all. We know this with certainty because nature produces particles of much higher energies than the L.H.C. (for example, the Earth is continuously bombarded by so-called “cosmic rays” from space which are many powers of ten higher in energy than the protons in the L.H.C.). Therefore, any particles which we can create at the L.H.C. would be created in much larger numbers throughout the universe. It has been estimated that the universe as a whole performs the equivalent of 10 million L.H.C. experiments per second! So, any worries about the creation of potentially dangerous black holes is entirely unfounded.

Ask a Nuclear Physicist: What Exactly Did the L.H.C. Do Today? | VF Daily | Vanity Fair

 

[ajpirzada]

much smaller black hole hmmmm i see...

so its just the LHC which will disappear. lolzzz

in another article some god particle was mentioned. i hope this god particle doesnt get angry and take this world with it.