If these guys aren't scared then all I can say is they do NOT watch/read enough Sci-fi.
Large Hadron Collider gives young ALICE a black-hole ray gun
CERN's Large Hadron Collider is ready to provide more scientific breakthroughs to the world after almost two years of slumber and months of recommissioning. Particle-physics boffins tell us the new LHC experiments are "ready to take data at the unprecedented energy of 13 TeV (trillion electron volts), almost double the …
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Wednesday 3rd June 2015 14:39 GMT AbelSoul
Alice, Alice?
Who the f*ck is ALICE?
A Large Ion Collider Experiment, you say?
What's that now?
ALICE is a larger lardy too?
Larger *and* lardy?
Oh, well. I'm glad that's finally settled.
Chubby Brown will be pleased.
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Wednesday 3rd June 2015 14:48 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: "The LHC is absolutely safe," said Hawking
Cue ominous music: "Probably not a problem"
"Collisions releasing greater energy occur millions of times a day in the earth's atmosphere and nothing terrible happens."
One can apparently have fun with Smartphones used as cosmic ray detectors: crayfis.io
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Wednesday 3rd June 2015 14:53 GMT GSG
Tin foil hat alert
I'd disregard anything the Professor Hawkins says...
Whilst it looks to the untrained eye that he's making brilliant physics contributions to the world, in reality, the WiFi was compromised years ago and everything he says and does is controlled by eight legged silver skinned aliens from beyond the moons of Saturn.
And I, for one, welcome our space arachnoid overlords.
(in other news, can't wait to see what science comes out of LHC 2.0...)
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This post has been deleted by its author
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Wednesday 3rd June 2015 16:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Not actually new, you know
"At 10,000tons we are pretty sure of its momentum"
Ah, you're making the classical mistake of treating the Earth as being a fixed frame of reference. But relativity implies that there is no such fixed frame, so the momentum of ALICE depends on the observer. If the observer is on one of the hadrons going round the ring, the momentum of ALICE is pretty fricking huge, and so when the hadron collides with another hadron, it's pretty certain where ALICE is at the time.
If I'm walking at 1M/s relative to ALICE, and regard myself as being in a reference frame, then the de Broglie wavelength I perceive for ALICE is about 6.6 * 10-27M. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out how big its wavelength appears to be if I'm standing still but we have to allow for saccadic eye movements.
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Wednesday 3rd June 2015 22:54 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: Not actually new, you know
If I'm standing next to ALICE thinking - "bloody hell thats a lot of detector", then I'm sure that neither of us is moving very much - so I'm mostly uncertain about where it is.
Although I only became an astrophysicist because i'm too short to be a high-energy physicist.
It's well known that the only purpose of HEP researchers is to stand in front of detectors in pictures to give them scale. As a result all HEP students are selected to be exactly 2.0m tall
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Wednesday 3rd June 2015 15:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
Quark-gluon plasma
In effect, the entire universe at this point was a single hadron. We are fortunate that it wasn't part of an experiment in a much, much bigger LHC.
Or perhaps it was, and the entire observable universe is simply the decomposition fragments. We are just in a much bigger version of ALICE. Not turtles all the way down, LHCs and ALICES all the way up.
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Wednesday 3rd June 2015 16:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Was it safe to set sail into unknown oceans? Safe to inject yourself with the first polio vaccine? Was it safe to use a screwdriver to keep two half spheres of beryllium from enclosing a close to critical sphere of plutonium?
Pushing into the unknown will always be dangerous, after all we do not know what is there, but it is equally dangerous, if not more so to not push into the unknown.
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Wednesday 3rd June 2015 17:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Was it safe to use a screwdriver to keep two half spheres of beryllium from enclosing a close to critical sphere of plutonium?"
Not only is the answer "No", but with the resources available to the Manhattan Project it was criminal negligence. Physicists are not an easily renewable resource; can anyone seriously suggest that a technician couldn't have been found to build a safe test rig?
I bet when Columbus set off to cross the ocean, if someone had said "that's a nasty looking crack in the mainmast" he wouldn't have said "oh forget it, I doubt there are any big storms out there."
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Thursday 4th June 2015 03:52 GMT JCitizen
Hawking is right but..
The type of chaos introduced by the Large Hadron Collider may be different from that of nature.
"The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and is about to come up out of the abyss, and to go into perdition. And they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, they whose name hath not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast, how that he was, and is not, and shall come." - Revelation 17:8
Could we be initiating a time traveling chaos to the earth? Just wondering! God, who is the King of chaos, is not worried, he warned us of it after all!
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Thursday 4th June 2015 11:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Hawking is right but..
God, who is the King of chaos, is not worried, he warned us of it after all!
OK, I was raised Christian, but even if you take it on faith that Jesus was the son of god, sent to earth to forgive us our sins, and even if you accept that the gospels written by his disciples are an accurate chronicle of his life and sayings, why on earth should we pay any credence to what some nut job in Anatolia wrote at least 50 years later, claiming to be divine revelations that he received in visions?
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
