back to article 'Something may come through' dimensional 'doors' at LHC

A top boffin at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) says that the titanic machine may possibly create or discover previously unimagined scientific phenomena, or "unknown unknowns" - for instance "an extra dimension". "Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it," said Sergio Bertolucci, who is …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    You earthbound beings amuse me

    Why is it that you always wish to define the unknown in terms of your greatest fears?

    What has happened to the adventurer in you?

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  3. Robert Hill
    Terminator

    @Flugal

    MANY THANKS for your Tejinder Virdee discussion...it makes sense. However, I have also heard a counter arguement that while these collisions and microblack holes occur in the normal course of events here on Earth, they are usually formed MOVING at very high rates of speed when they are formed, whereas they will be confined in the LHC and at much lower velocities.

    I have heard that the statistical probability is that a micro-blackhole will evaporate before it can accrue enough mass to be dangerous (thank you Hawkins radiation!). Umm, however, that is, um, er, statistically speaking, of course...and there is a minute, very minute chance...that it might not...

    Perhaps LHC-type devices are an evolutionary test for advanced intelligence - you either are smart enough to do it outside the gravity field of your home planet, or you are not...

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Heart

    Hawking radiation

    Thanks for getting into it Lewis. We have no conception of Plank time/space, alternative realities, etc. We hope that when reality changes you will be on the forefront and the register will be the first to know.

  5. Stephen Huyssoon
    WTF?

    Once Upon Time In A Galaxy In A Galaxy

    You know, you guys...

    Seriously, there is something here to take notice of.

    1. An interdimensional event showing, following sufficient analysis of observation, existence and characteristics of previously unknown dimensionality is not really something worthy of only jokes.

    2. Use of the term "dimension" is very loose. Of interest in this case is an undiscovered aspect of matter or energy or simply existence of a nature not seen in other aspects of matter or energy or existence. Something new.

    3. Thinking that our universe will end during such an event is presupposing an incredible instability. Do you think perhaps were our universe that unstable that we would have come thus far? Ok, so this view is subjective. Nevertheless, this is incredibly pessimistic. Do any of your really think our universe was formed as an accident?

    4. That you can think of and discuss this subject as a joke displays a shallowness of thought and a closed state of mind. I get so tired of this. Shoot yourself.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    many worlds

    "Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it. "

    What an amazing world we live in when some one can say that and it's no big deal.

  7. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Alien

    Invasion of the Hermitian Hilbert Space Operators!

    Yes!! Imminent Transdimensional Invasion threatens. Upgrade to plan CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN and implement shoot-to-kill police state immediately. Then strike a NuLabour/NuOverlords deal. Win/Win situation.

    As for the rest of us, anyone who judges himself able to understand modern QFT and assorted mathematical tooling enough to be able to even judge the likelihood of an LHC event killing the planet or whatnot can probably understand http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.3381 And thus the case rests.

    > Considering that black holes are known to have a magnetic force

    > The unknowns and improbables are possible but no one know the odds.

    > Hey, our maths says there's an infinite number of universes out there, and they all really exist!

    > Perhaps LHC-type devices are an evolutionary test for advanced intelligence

    > Since Everything is made of Photons, this pinpoint sized object thus contained, well, Everything.

    LOL NO!! This is like listening to a badly tuned radio.

    Ok, enough of this, I'm going home.

  8. bexley

    the first sensible thing i've read all week

    he problem I have #

    By Valerion Posted Friday 6th November 2009 14:22 GMT

    Is the whole "recreating the conditions just after the big bang" thing.

    The last time that happened, as I recall, the entire Universe sort of came into being and proceeded to grow continually outward at, presumably, the speed of light.

    Seems to me that starting off another one of those in Switzerland could be considered A Bad Thing.

  9. Astarte

    Progress

    Keep banging the rocks together chaps - look what happened when that was tried a long long time ago. We'll end up with either income tax and rice pudding or expose a portal through which unstoppable hoards of Auditors come marching through. However I'm sure Gordon and (Her Ladyship) Alyx can deal with it - until the next time.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    RE: Well @Lee Dowling

    "If we could, we'd be witnessing Big Bangs and self-created black hole all over the cosmos and they would be our primary indicator of "intelligent life""

    .....

    Maybe your exactly correct. Science is only just beginning to be able to detect these 'black holes' (black spheres in my book)... what IF these ARE exactly what you describe - life that was a little more advanced than us that pissed about with this exact same experiment?

    Now I bet you wish you had not thought that up!

  11. Rattus Rattus
    Thumb Up

    Fascinating, Captain

    Yes, yes, Gordon Freeman, I for one welcome etc etc but honestly, this stuff is fascinating and really important. Basic research without an eye to the commercial implications, poking the fabric of space just to see what happens. I am really looking forward to the flipping of the Big Red Switch, and can't wait to see what kind of results start to appear once they start gethering data and analysing it.

    I think the most disappointing result possible would be if nothing at all unusual is seen or even hinted at. After all, the most exciting phrase in science isn't "Eureka!" but rather "That's funny..."

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Horns

    Stephen King would be proud

    Just fill in your own scary thoughts at this moment. Personally in circumstances like these I prefer to have my back close against several thousand meters of granite. I know they could come in from that direction but I also keep a sheet of aluminium foil handy just in case.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    @Stephen Huyssoon

    "Do any of your really think our universe was formed as an accident?"

    Ehmm.. are you saying that you believe that our universe was formed according to some plan made by a great space monkey?

    For all you fools that wanna hide your head in the sand till time stops or what ever.The only way to find out if your idiotic fears are correct is to go ahead on turn the damn thing on.

    If the world come to an end. So what.

    If we open a gateway to another dimension? Cool but so what they will be as tired of us as we are of them. Besides its a tiny tiny tiny speck for a fraction of a second. I doubt anyone in this other dimension would notice it.

    CERN! Rock on.

  14. fajensen
    Grenade

    More advanced civilisations

    Maybe the gamma ray burst we see are just the firings of whatever passes for alien naval guns!

  15. Wilko
    Thumb Up

    I know it's been done, but..

    They're waiting for you Gordon...in the test chamber.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    I was under the impression

    That a dimension was just an infinite line stretching out from whatever point you care to move, with pairs of perpendicular dimensions forming a plane and three perpendicular dimensions forming a space and four perpendicular dimensions forming space-time. Something like Back to the Future or Star Trek or... well, the general concept of what could happen with time travel requires more of a time-plane rather than a time-dimension as you can have parallel streams of time.

    So openning a gateway to another dimension wouldn't really do anything. The matter's already there and pretty much anything non-intelligent that can move into human-intelligible spacetime already has in the same way that a cube of water will flow out into any direction along which it's not constrained.

    An odd sensation, I guess, would be shifting yourself along the time axis at a rate greater or slower than 1second per second. I mean imagine the huge problems you'd have with, say, heat buildup. Your body's pumping out all this heat and it can only drain away to the outside universe at, say, half the speed it normally does. Yes there's less flowing in but you've still got a load of stored energy inside you being released through muscle action.

    Anyway, pan-dimensional thinking is incredibly difficult and tedious and provides no significant benefit unless you can jump sideways along an unknown dimension into a voided parallel-to-ours universe or space between universes, move unimpeded along axes parallel to "our" 3 and then jump back to our own. Still doesn't let you beat the speed of light, but it might just make spacetravel a whole lot safer if we didn't have to worry about radiation or asteroids!

    Anyway, this beer's working nicely so I'm off to bed.

  17. Dr.

    Don't use gold nuclei in the LHC!

    I liked the comments by Lee Dowling (6. XI, 13:18 GMT), saying that "There might be a big bang at the LHC in the conventional sense... but we aren't going to destroy the world accidentally," and by Peter McAuley (6. XI, 14:09 GMT), pointing out that we would need "18 orders of magnitude more energy..." And even then, with the Planck energy of E* = 1.956 x 10 exp. 16 erg or 2.177 x 10 exp. -5 grams or about 10 exp. 20 TeV in each particle, one would only create a few John Archibald Wheeler's "undressed electrons" or vacuum density fluctuations which are being formed everywhere spontaneously and vanish in Planck's unit of time T* = 1.616 x 10 exp. -33 second (cf. Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, "Gravitation," Freeman, .San Francisco, 1973, pp. 1190-1194). Even if the cosmon was such a vacuum density fluctuation, one would need 10 exp. 61 of them for the present mass of our universe, about 2 x 10 exp. 56 grams. Without inflation, the LHC, with an energy of up to 7 TeV, may at best produce a Higgs boson, not the higgsino or the particle for the unification of three basic forces of nature at 10 exp. 16 TeV (Alan H. Guth, "The Inflationary Universe," Perseus, Reading, MA, 1997, pp. 254-269). However, he also states that "a patch of false vacuum 10 exp. -26 cm across is all the recipe demands" for the creation of a "pocket universe" which, disconnecting from our universe "in roughly 10 exp. -37 seconds," would leave behind a black hole which would evaporate (by the Hawking process of pair creation) "in roughly 10 exp. -23 seconds, releasing the energy of a 500 kiloton nuclear explosion," about 17 times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb in 1945. If the LHC could produce such a patch of false vacuum (and if the inflationary theory is right, as to increasing the initial energy many times by the inflation), then the prediction by Lee Dowling as to merely a local explosion would come true. Something like that also appears to be predicted by Michael Nostradamus ("Les Propheties...", Rosne, Lyon, 1557, verse IX-44) in Geneva, when a transmutation of elements is done there ("Saturn will transmute gold to iron") by that opposite to a positive ray (RAYON POSITIF, abbreviated to RAY POZ), followed by "extermination of all", in Old French: IX-44: "Migrez, migrez de Geneue trestous, Saturne d'or en fer se changera, Le contre RAYPOZ exterminera tous, Avant l'advent le Ciel signes fera." Mentioning Saturn connects this prediction to his verse IV-67 which specifies that this will happen in "the air very parched, by a long trajectory", when Saturn and Mars will be equally fiery", at the time when they are in a conjunction; "by secret fires, a great place will be scorched.". The next time when the closest conjunction of Saturn and Mars will take place is July 31, 2010 at 0 degrees 0 minutes 50 arc seconds in Libra, almost ideally on the cusp of Virgo and Libra (N. F. Michelsen, "The American Ephemeris," Astro, San Diego, CA, 1982, cf. positions of planets in July 2010). Nostradamus wrote, in Old French: IV-67: L'an que Saturne & Mars egaux combust, L'air fort seiche, long trajection; Par feux secrets, d'ardeur grand lieu adust, Peu pluye, vent chaud, guerres, incursions." The two verses are also connected by the equal numerology of their numbers (since 9 + 4 + 4 = 17 and 4 + 6 + 7 = 17; this method is often used by Nostradamus to connect verses with a similar content, about the same event). But the disaster is predicted to be only local, since one will be able to escape just by leaving Geneva in time (IX-44). Up to now now the rays of positively charged protons accelerated in opposite directions ("Le contre RAY POZ") and lead nuclei have been used in accelerators and planned for the LHC, but gold nuclei have been used to make new superheavy elements. According to the prophecy IX-44, all one has to do in order to avoid this fairly local disaster in Geneva is to avoid using gold as a target as well as accelerated gold nuclei!

  18. Toe
    Thumb Up

    Cool

    This is extremely COOL I want to see what transcends as the result of this impressive experiment!!

  19. Pete 43
    Alien

    Awsome

    How much can they lend us?

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    Peas

    Apparently, the beings on the other side of the portal know we are trying to open the gate and will help us test it, by first sending through a half bag of frozen peas. Higgs Bosons are peas.

  21. BOBSta
    FAIL

    Cost

    So the LHC cost how many hundreds of millions of euros?

    "[...]such that each stream has as much energy in it as a normal car going at 1000mph. Secondly, the beams are arranged in such fashion that the two streams swerve through one another occasionally, which naturally results in huge numbers of incredibly violent head-on collisions.[...]"

    Why not just buy a couple of Citroen C4's and accelerate them towards each other? Must be cheaper and easier than LHC. If nothing else, we'd be rid of two more piles of subsidised Franco-autocrap!

    And ignoring the opening a dimensional portal concerns, what about the possibility of creating our own big-bang and suddenly being on the outside of a rapidly expanding universe of our own making?

    Questions that need answers, methinks!

  22. phix8
    Alien

    CHTHULHU RETURNS

    it is HE who will come through the gateway ... when the stars are right.

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    Accident or what?

    "Do any of your really think our universe was formed as an accident?"

    Yes.

    Because the other option is that somebody made it and that somebody is, by definition, a god.

    When you have

    a) improbable option and

    b) fantasy option,

    I choose a). It at least has some contact into reality.

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