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- Llyod0
it's not pretty when hardons collide
- recycling L000000
- New Prince song:
"This is what it sounds like when Hadrons Collide"locustsloth - yes, everytime I read about this I read "hardon collider"Point5
- vespa0
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- vespa0
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Particle Physics in a Nut Shell for Sea_Sea
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Hello Sea_Sea, i'm no particle physicist but here is my meagre understanding of the significance of the Large Hadron Collider experiment:--------------------------------...
Everything is made up of atoms.Atoms are incredibly tiny (500000 would fit behind a human hair) and incredibly durable (apparently an atom can last 10 years to the power of 35, that's 10000000000000000000000000000000... years). They are also incredibly abundant (in a cubic centimetre of air, that's about the size of a sugar cube, there are 45 billion billion molecules)
Their durability and abundance means they would be very useful to know about, but their tininess makes them very difficult to study.
The basic structure of an atom is protons, neutrons and electrons, but there's loads of other subatomic particles that have only recently been discovered (bosons, gluons, muons, mesons, there's loads of them) and that we don't know much about.
This is because finding subatomic particles to study is difficult.
For one thing, they can come into existence and pop out of existence again in as little as 0.000000000000000000000001 of a second.
Secondly, they are hard to capture. The Earth is bombarded by ten thousand trillion trillion neutrinos every second, but they are notoriously difficult to track. Scientists need tanks of up to 57,000 cubic metres of water (in underground chambers so that no radiation can interfere with them) to capture just a few neutrinos in order to study them.
- vespa0
As a result, scientists' knowledge of particles is largely theoretical. The mountain of theory that is particle physics has been formulated on a molehill of evidence.
For example, of the 6 bosons thought to make up a particle, 1 of them, the "Higgs Boson", has never been found – it was made up to give atoms the necessary mass for particle theory equations to make sense.
The best way to study particles is to fire one really, really fast along a track, bang it into another particle and see what flies off. This is extremely costly, and requires vast amounts of energy.
- vespa0
The hadron collider uses 27 km of track and enough energy to dim the lights of neighbouring towns when fired up.
- vespa0
A proton will be able to complete a circuit of the track in less than 90 microseconds (i.e. it will travel the circuit 12000 times in a single second).
- vespa0
The cost is estimated at $10 bn.
- vespa0
In a nutshell, if this experiment doesn't find evidence of the Higgs boson, it's likely that a whole branch of particle physics theory, the "Standard Model", will be abandoned.
Fears have also been raised about the possibility of inadvertently creating a black hole or "strange quarks" which could react with other subatomic particles and propagate uncontrollably, probably meaning the end of existence for you and I.
- drgs0
anal bleaching... discuss
- ian0
- sea_sea0
This is scary no matter what anyone says.. who is to know what it's gonna mess with. Ok I understand "their" reasoning, but I can't help but ask myself why why why?!
ps.. thanks vespa :)
- detritus0
It's not scary at all.
In the incredibly highly unlikely chance something 'deeply bad' were to happen, the kind of bad thing it could invoke would likely end us all in mere seconds, if that. So there'd be no warning, no reason to panic or fear.
If you want to get a grasp on what the whole thing's about, spend some time watching these two videos - they'll better and more succinctly explain it better, I imagine, than anyone here can.
- detritus0
Oops.. the second of those videos was the wrong one, I meant this one.. (and, ignore the stupid Star Wars music and theme, it's otherwise quite a good explanation)
- Oh sod. The vid works - it just doesn't play here. I don't understand why some YouTubes do that in teh QBN.detritus
- now it works :)omgitsacamera
- nvm.omgitsacamera
- boobs0
OK. If they turn the Earth into a Black Hole, none of us will even be aware of it, so who cares?
- locustsloth0
My prediction:
No strangelets (too bad, they sound so cute), no black holes, but the circular path blows up, sinking that portion of Geneva down to the realm of the Mole People, setting off a global war.PS Dick Cheney will say the Geneva Convention rules no longer apply since Geneva is no longer intact
- ian0
Same worries when scientists first split the atom right? They didn't know if it would cause a chain reaction that would eventually just burn up the earths atmosphere. Or was that when they tested the first nuclear bomb?
anyway, if popular science fiction has taught me anything its that the earth will be destroyed when our robot slaves revolt, so this puppy should be ok, unless its in control of the robots.