Proof?

"Since such vacuum bubbles have not been produced anywhere in the visible Universe, ......."

How do they know that ?!? (Also note the use of the weasel word 'visible')

LHC?

doesn't that stand for "Likely Harbinger of Cthulhu"? Or was that "Lawks! Hello, Cthulhu"; I forget which.

Why does it matter anyway?

Surely if the collider opens up a black hole, then we will all be dead in micro-seconds so we won't have anything to worry about. I also have no idea how CERN can be completely sure that they won't create a black hole. a lot of theories regarding the universe are just 'learned' speculation, anyway.....

I say start spending your life-savings on beer and women.... or men.... etc. Were all doomed...

Paris isn't losing too much sleep about this either....

More Stable

"Moving swiftly on to vaccum bubbles - described as the universe in "a more stable state...in which we could not exist"

More stable, as in one where brown and blair hadn't ruined our economy?

PH because she is the personification of stable.

LHC Safety Assessment Group?

Please! No "Safety of the LHC Assessment Group?

Much more apt, as it's what we'll reduce the earth to.

Misleading device name?

Are people worried because they will be colliding "large" hadrons? Do they think these are the size of volkswagens or summat? Everyone knows that blackholes smaller than three solar masses evaporate to nothing due to hawking radiation, and even if one is made in the collider, it will last in the order of picoseconds, so why all the fuss? i think people just want to moan. Bleedin' swiss!

Also, now is FAR too late....they've built the bugger!

Fermi

I guess we will know soon how the Fermi Paradox is solved ;)

Paris because she has more attraction than a Black Hole.

Base Rules ..... with Pyjamahadeen.

Strangelets Rule in NEUKlearer HyperRadioProActivity then. Just Perfect.

...in the test chamber...

Just get Gordon Freeman in to start the tests. What could go wrong?

I'm not concerned...

...that a black hole will eat up our earth. "[...]would have no time to start accreting matter and to cause macroscopic effects[...]" And if so, who am I to care since 'the whole world's gone crazy' anyway. But remember the film Event Horizon? Anyone?

EAfH, awaiting to go back to hell...

Ballmer, for obvious reason.

And 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Engage.

There, perfectly s........

@ Why does it matter anyway?

Is that title a pun?

Greedy guts

So the whole thing is kept as close as possible to Absolute Zero temperature?? Exactly how much energy must that thing gobble every second of every minute of every hour, before you even start colliding 'stuff'?!!

Is that Greenpeace I (don't) see camped outside the gates...?

Back spin

"...the key concerns surrounding the doomsday particle accelerator..."

You think they'd rename it...

Alien, 'cos you just know they're all sitting in deckchairs, giggling at the silly earthlings and waiting for the fireworks to start!

See and learn, my young Grundfshlorps...

... in that year, the earthlings devised a method of fucking up on a... more universal scale. And they did.

hold on..

Black holes we're familiar with are caused by stars collapsing under their own weight to unimaginably small concentrations. Even if a handful of matter can generate enough energy to somehow form a black hole, would it even be possible to detect such a thing?

It wouldn't be the first time....

........... that stuff has disappeared into Black Holes in Switzerland.

And I would just like to take this opportunity to re-iterate that I welcome our Trans-Dimensional overlords and their minions from the nth Pit of Hell.

My coat was next to that Giraffe in the corner..........

.........You sure there isn't a leak of Strange matter?

Blackmesa?

Does anyone else worry?

Is it time to break out the HEV suits?

but...

surely the point of the LHC is to probe energy scales never probed (on an earth based experiment). As a theoretical physicist myself I'm sure not every theory to date can cover every possible scenario (much as some of them really are just crackpot), so saying we don't expect them doesn't mean they won't be there - Rutherford didn't expect to see his alpha particles fly back at him, but they did!

And RHIC hasn't produced any to date... right - so that doesn't say RHIC will never produce them, so it's therefore statistically possible that the first thing LHC could produce when running in Pb-Pb mode are the frankly terrifying strangelets.

Mind you - if LHC weakens string theory's stance further I'm happy to run the risk of annihilation!

Theories

I could have sworn we still referred to Einstein's *theory of* relativity.

I can't work out what an "acceptable" risk would be. We can't prove it won't implode and shatter the earth without firing it up, because we don't know the physics yet (else why are we building it).

OTOH we can't expect to do only things which are absolutely safe, or we would never go outside.

The potential danger here (supposedly destruction of the solar system) is quite high, but at what point is that risk worth taking in order to advance our understanding of the universe. is 20% OK, but 21% not?

I'm surprised no one has suggested a lunar build though (*I* know it wouldn't make a difference, but they don't seem to be thinking straight either)

AC & Frank

You may as well say "how do I know that making a cheese sandwitch wont bring Gozila in to existance". Please stop using the stupid arguments of paranoids and bible bashers.

Flash in the pan

The most convincing argument to me that this is safe is that we have cosmic rays bombarding us from space which have been observed to have energies of one hundred million times the energy of the particles in the LHC. If anything was going to happen, it already would have. Anyone seriously think the conditions inside the LHC are anything whatsoever on the natural fireworks elsewhere in the universe that kick shrapnel our way all the time?

Black helicopter because I'm obviously part of the conspiracy.

Black Mesa

I hope Gordan Freeman works there or we're all headlice.

Coat because I still play the games.........

Walter L Wagner

He can be ignored. If the LHC is safe, then he has no case. If it isn't, he (nor anyone else) will exist, so he can't pursue his writ.

(and how come a European - CERN - project in France/Switzerland concerns a Hawaiian's "tax dollars"?)

Gordon Freeman......

thinks this is a bad idea.

Sayeth the caveman...

Ogg, stop that!!!

Don't you know that by rubbing those sticks together, you'll cause the whole world to catch fire, destroying us all?!?!?

Yes, I've heard your arguments that the fires started by lightning don't burn down the whole world. But how can you know, really, really know, that the fire you're trying to start won't somehow be "different"?

And even if it doesn't cause a conflagration, need I remind you that you fools and your "progress" are wasting time that should be spent hunting?

I for one

welcome our proton-eating magnetic monopolar overlords

Of course if the LSAG is wrong we will probably never know as everything will just s

The Universe...

We have always wondered where the matter that created the Big Bang came from (unless you are American, in which case there was no big bang) but science has never really found an answer, until now!

This monster of a machine will create a black hole that will grow really big (scientific term there) and start to suck in the Earth followed by the entire Universe. As black holes can (apparently, according to the telly at least) exist in two different times, its quite possible that we open one end of a black hole here, and another black hole way back in the past.

Now all the matter that gets sucked in on this time of the universe, finds its way back to the other side of the black hole which then fills up, like petrol in a tank, only cheaper, then once it is full enough, it will explode in a Big Bang!!

I call it first, we're about to create the Universe!

Where are they?

The universe seems full of planets (more discovered every day), yet intelligent, technological life seems rare. If it was common, the SETI project would have detected their radio traffic.

One possible explanation is that technological civilizations evolve and start broadcasting radio, but disappear within a short period of time - possibly in a cataclysm triggered by taking one chance too many with a high energy physics experiment.

I'd feel a lot better if the darn thing was built on the moon, or in a space station.

Who's been reading...

... David Brin's 'Earth'?

It's safe

It's very simple to say why it's safe. The universe has been bombarding the earth with particles as energetic (and far more energetic) than anything they can make at CERN since the planet was formed(*). The bombarding particles are called cosmic rays. The earth is still here. So is the moon. So is the sun (a MUCH bigger target). So are eight other planets in the Solar system. What we don't see is any former planets or moons collapsed into black holes or strange matter.

If highly energetic particles could collapse matter into black holes or cause destructive phase changes with any non-vanishing probability(**), it would have happened by now and we wouldn't be here. Or more likely, would have happened to the sun by now because it's so much bigger, and we also wouldn't be here.

Black helicopter, because some people won't believe anything except a conspiracy theory that says mad scientists are trying to blow up the world.

(*) this can be proved. Cosmic rays leave scars in crystals called zircons. Zircon is the first mineral to crystallize out of hot molten rock, and has such a high melting point, and is so hard, that once having formed, zircons are almost indestructible by geological processes in the Earth's crust. One can date them by radioactive decay of Uranium traces that they contain. The oldest are around four billion years old. Before then the planet had not formed, or was all molten.

(**) In a quantum universe, everything has a probability, it's just that it's zero to a gazillion decimal places for most things. There's nothing except probability to stop your arm falling off because all the molecules in it happen to move away from your body at the same time ... trust me, that won't happen either, but feel free to worry about it if you need to.

Ia Cthlhu Fhtagn Gordon Freeman!

I'm not sure what will happen.

Thankfully I shall be eaten first.

Mine's the Hazard Suit with the Elder sign painted on.

@Colin Morris

Because, by the rules of science, you can't be a theory without significant corroborating evidence. Otherwise, you're still just a hypothesis.

re: Why does it matter anyway?

I think the argument is that if it did produce black holes, they'd be atom sized. If you're worried about the gravitational attraction of atoms, you're probably in the wrong place and want the next Universe along.

@AC and @Frank

"vacuum bubbles have not been produced anywhere in the visible Universe" probably means that highly energetic cosmic rays haven't produced them, so why would our pea-shooter of a particle accelerator create one?

According to thickypedia:

"Particle accelerations have reached energies of only approximately four thousand billion electron volts (4 ×10^3 GeV). Cosmic ray collisions have been observed at and beyond energies of 10^11 GeV, the so-called Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit. John Leslie has argued[10] that if present trends continue, particle accelerators will exceed the energy given off in cosmic ray collisions by the year 2150."

So our current technology is about 250 million times too puny; anyone around in a hundred and fifty years might do good business with tinfoil hats though...

Mine's the lead lined one

@AC, Mark

@AC: Sense of humour, spelling skills - get some.

@Mark: Thank you for that.

Just a heads up for the fear mongers

But we've been making black holes in the lab for awhile now.

No Kidding!

Synthetic: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/33256 (Made by pulsing two different colors through fiber optics, it only generates event horizons.)

And Whoops! real: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4357613.stm (Made out of solid gold, lasts just 10 million, billion, billionths of a second. You can't make up stuff as weird as this!)

And guess what, we're still here!

PS: if you're worried about strangelets, better check under the bed. There's a higher probability that the boogey man exists!

A bit of excitement

So what if it creates a black hole that swallows the earth. The chances are equally as good we'll just come out the other side, but with messy hair and a lot of sweeping up to do as a voice fades into the distance 'goddamn that was cool! let's do it again...."

If we can't put our faith in some of the best scientific minds of the 20th and 21st century, we're pretty much buggered anyway.

I'll get my coat, its cold in them there black holes :)

Un-bloody-believable

It never ceases to amaze me how people can get their panties in a bunch over some highly improbable (tending to impossible) event or circumstance while ignoring very real dangers such as crossing the road, eating under-cooked meat, etc.

Homo Sapiens? What's the latin for "species that likes to scare itself with bogeymen"?