[Blacklight]

They're fireing up the LHC tomorrow. A friend emailed me an article about it (And an opposing viewpoint article as well)
I personally can't wait to see what this machine discovers.

LHC First Beam Tomorrow 10 September 2008
http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/Welcome.html

World's Biggest Physics Experiment Moves Closer to Completion
By Art Chimes
Washington, DC
08 September 2008

..
Technician on work platform inspects the massive CMS detector, which tracks particle collisions at CERN's Large Hadron Collider

The biggest science experiment on Earth is expected to take a big step forward on Wednesday. As we hear from VOA's Art Chimes, an international team of scientists is getting ready to fire up the Large Hadron Collider, even as skeptics fear it could have disastrous consequences.


Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known by its French acronym, CERN, are planning to send a beam of particles racing around the 27-kilometer ring of the Large Hadron Collider for the first time.


The LHC, as it's known, is the world's most powerful particle accelerator. CERN physicist Tejinder Virdee says it's designed to explore some of the most fundamental questions in physics.


"At the end of this, it is possible that our view of nature, of how the nature works at the fundamental level, would be altered in the same way, for example, that Einstein had altered our view of space and time about 100 years ago," he said. "So the scientific results could be extremely important.
"

The Large Hadron Collider is housed in a circular tunnel, buried under the French-Swiss border just outside Geneva.


Beams of subatomic protons and other particles will zip around the ring, accelerated up to nearly the speed of light by some 1,800 superconducting magnet systems.


Protons will reach an energy level of 7 trillion electron volts, seven times more powerful than in any existing accelerator. The project has cost an estimated $5.8 billion.


When the LHC goes into full operation, scientists will aim beams of particles directly at each other. When particles collide — up to 600 million times a second — special sensors will detect and record the collisions, and a network of computers will analyze the vast amount of data generated.


It's designed in part to mimic conditions present at the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang, almost 15 billion years ago.


Researchers will also be looking for a subatomic particle known as the Higgs Boson. The Standard Model of particle physics predicts that it exists… but it has never been seen. CERN physicist Mike Seymour says the elusive Higgs Boson has a nickname that conveys its importance.


"People call it 'God's particle' because it really has a very important central role in our whole theory of what everything is made of, of matter," Seymour explained. "Because without the Higgs particle we wouldn't be able to understand why any of the elementary particles have masses. The more we discover about the Higgs mechanism, the more we will understand about the dynamics of the early universe.
"

As scientists and technicians prepare to send a particle beam all the way around the LHC, some critics have wondered whether attempts to reproduce conditions at the beginning of the universe may create a black hole that could destroy the Earth.


A CERN team that studied the matter concluded there was no danger of that happening, and lawsuits filed by opponents have not succeeded in stopping work on the LHC.


CERN physicist John Ellis says simply, the skeptics are wrong. "LHC is only going to reproduce what nature does every second, it has been doing for billions of years, and all of these astronomical bodies including the earth and the sun, they are still here. So there really is no problem.
"

Well, let's hope not. The first beam of particles is set to make that 27-kilometer trip around the Large Hadron Collider on Wednesday.


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Assessing Black Hole Risk
By Anthony O'Donnell
Sep 8, 2008 at 12:39 PM ET

Technology is great for modeling risk if one starts with the right assumptions. But sometimes those assumptions are hard to come by. Take the admittedly extreme example from this CNN story. Some people think what a certain small group of scientists is about to do could destroy the world.


The fear is that the world’s largest particle accelerator, about to be activated several hundred feet below the French/Swiss border, could cause a black hole that could swallow up the earth. The accelerator will attempt to replicate the conditions of less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, according to the article, and some people have evidently taken legal action to have the experiment stopped.


Physicists acknowledge that the accelerator could, in theory, create black holes, but one John Huth, quoted in the article, says assertions about the possibility of earth-swallowing black holes are “baloney.
”

The article reports that Huth said in a recent interview that even if the accelerator created small black holes, and even if one such black hole were stable, “it could just pass through the earth without being detected or without interacting at all.
” Said Huth:

“The gravitational force is so weak that you’d have to wait many, many, many, many, many lifetimes of the universe before one of these things could [get] big enough to even get close to being a problem.
”
That sounds more reassuring than the reporter’s conditional “could” in the paragraph above, but it points to the need of underwriters to rely on specialists in order to adequately assess risks.


For my part, I’m willing to adopt Huth’s insouciance and bet any sum of money that the world won’t in fact disappear into a void when the accelerator is turned on.
Any takers?

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No danger from creating a black hole? What do they take us for?
Sep 9 2008 By Richard McComb

Be afraid. Be very afraid. When anyone, particularly a scientist, tells you there is nothing to worry about, you know damn well there is only one thing to do: worry.


We are now only hours from the big switch-on of the Large Hadron Collider.
Sounds harmless, doesn’t it, the Large Hadron Collider, like something you might find inside your Dyson or under the bonnet of your car, next to the “big end”?

It is also strangely evocative of flared-denim, bearded 70’s rock groups, like Van der Graaf Generator and Bachman Turner Overdrive: “And here they are, the band of the moment, smashing their way – quite literally – to the top of the charts.
Give a big Top of the Pops welcome to Large Hadron Collider … ”

The Large Hadron Collider (not to be confused with the Large Hardon Collider) has been called the Large Hadron Collider for good reason, namely not to scare the living bejesus out of us.


Because if it was given its real name – Professor Doom’s Big Scary Machine That’s Going To Re-create Black Holes And We’re All Going To Disappear Into Them And Die, Arrrgggghhhh – no one would sanction £3.5 billion of taxpayers’ money on it.


But this is exactly what we have done. Somewhere, straddling Switzerland and France, deep underground, buried under mountains and lots of cows, the eggiest egg-heads in the world have built a 17-mile tunnel in which they plan to experiment with their very dark materials.


The Large Hadron Collider is so big even the Abu Dhabi royal family would have to check with their bank manager before buying it. Astonishingly, the technology amassed within its subterranean corridors boasts faster computing power than the brains of Prof Stephen Hawking and Dame Carol Vorderman put together.


Inside its deep, and we can only hope, jolly well reinforced vaults, scientists hope to unlock some of the secrets of the universe in what is being called the world’s biggest physics experiment. The boffinry going on in here, from tomorrow, is baffling. And to someone banned from taking O-level physics (by the basketball teacher – go figure!) this stuff is baffling to the power of E = mc2, cross-reference McComb’s Law of Dimitivity {S+ Akc3/4hG, Birmimgham 2008}.


The Large Hadron Collider – let’s call it Colin, for short – will re-create the conditions just after the Big Bang, when the universe went pear-shaped. To do this, Colin will fire tiny stuff, smaller than dinner-party cheese footballs, around magnetic tunnels and will study what happens when they smack into each other. You or I, of course, could provide the answer to this taxing question for nothing. (Answer: there will be a lot of squishy cheese on the walls, figuratively speaking.
)

However, the crazy guys at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) appear to be aiming for a slightly higher level of analytical sophistication and will be looking into the very nature of the cheesy goo, otherwise known to Dr Strangelove and chums as quark-gluon plasma.


CERN wants to know why some of this super-hot Big Bang fondue, so to speak, was destined to become inter-galactic cheese strings, while other bits became extra-terrestrial ready-prepared sandwich-size gouda slices and earth-bound Dairylea Lunchables.


This isn’t too alarming, until one considers the collisions in Colin will spark temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the centre of the Sun. Haven’t these people heard of global warming? This news will not go down well among the flooded residents of Frankly, Bournbrook and Morpeth, I can tell you.


What’s more, there will be 600 million of these collisions EVERY SECOND. Sure, there will be computer back-up but if Karl-Heinz blinks he will miss it. And keep missing it, gazillions of times.


Then there is the small, or rather whopping, matter of re-creating black holes. Now, I’ve read Prof Hawking’s A Briefer History of Time, so I know a look-see at a black hole only comes with a one-way ticket, no refunds.


The CERN boffins say they are only going to make lickle-ickle black holes, about the size of a midget’s bucket, so there will be no harm done.


The mad fools.Watch them disappear into the vortex, just like Oddjob in Goldfinger when he gets sucked out of the plane.


That’s what happens when you go near a black hole.


Boom! The clue’s in the name, stupid: they’re black, and they’re holes.


There is also a host of other evidential material that points to the dangers of messing with nature, matter and anti-matter, like Honey! I Shrunk The Kids and Dr Watt’s Frankenstein monster in Carry on Screaming.


Mark my words, if they start messing with black holes, I have a warning for the scientists from the prescient Bachman Turner Overdrive: “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
”