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Quoted from another thread?

"It doesn't matter, in 2 weeks we'll all cease to exist because some dummies in france are gonna turn on a nuclear particle smasher that's gonna create a black hole and swallow the earth. It's on CNN so it must be true!

http://rss.cnn.com/~are/rss/cnn_topstories/~3/323315474/index.html

How does this make you guys feel?

As a physics teacher I know we really don't have anything to worry about... the speeds these particles are going to be moving at happen all the time in our upper atmosphere and atoms are constantly smashing there. Miniature black holes are created everyday because of this. The think with the mini BH is that the life of one is only a few minutes, they evaporate... thats right black holes emit radiation called hawkings radiation (the stuff stephen hawking got famous for). As they emit this they evaporate.

As for sucking things in... they only would have the gravitational pull of 2 atoms... not very dangerous.... there is no magical increase in mass that attracts more things and sucks whole worlds in like we see in cartoons or movies... you will find that this is not a scarey number if you do the math

anyways, how do you guys feel about this big particle accelerator?

As an ex-Physics teacher I have to agree. Its a sad indictment on the quality of science journalism that no-one ever bothers to - ooh, I don't know - ASK A SCIENTIST!!!!!


P.S. This should really go in 'Off Topic'. If I had any idea how to move it I would!!

hehe I posted that.. I saw it on CNN and thought it was funny. But, that's CNN for you. It's not news unless they can turn a story around into making people think we're all going to die. thats the only reason the general public watches the news, they want to see heads rolling in the street every time they slow down to stare at an accident. News is just another form of entertainment these days.

The thing with that article though, is it really doesn't seem to tell you what the machine really does... i mean, is it just a great big camera for taking pictures of atoms? thats all I got from reading it...

Doom and gloom!

Seriously, I saw that story earlier this week and realized that not only do these people not know what the machine does, they probably don't know what a black hole is beyond the sci-fi/cartoon "It's a black hole, we're all doomed!"

I'm annoyed that the French are the ones working on fusion technology and not the US. The galoise smoking cute girlfriend French???

In combination with Honda's new hydrogen car the future still looks bright, just not dino juice powered.

@necros - the machines in CERN take particles (some negativelly charged, some positively charged and fling them in opposite directions round a 27km long ring at stupid speeds. At 4 key places the two streams can be made to cross (Egon - don't cross the streams ), at which point the particles annihilate. Each of the 4 sites is, in effect, a giant camera to see what happens (all that energy basically creates a bunch of wierd subatomic particles in a similar process to what happened at the big bang - just on a smaller scale).

Don't you just love science

@jfrazell - the US are working on it at places like fermilab in chicago, its just that CERN is bigger and better equipped (not to mention being the home of the internet, so its all their fault...)

I thought Al Gore invented the internet?

I'll have to second chimera here because it needs to be said

DON"T CROSS THE STREAMS!

"I thought you said it was BAD to cross the streams, Ray?"

Chimera_Calvin wrote:@necros - the machines in CERN take particles (some negativelly charged, some positively charged and fling them in opposite directions round a 27km long ring at stupid speeds. At 4 key places the two streams can be made to cross (Egon - don't cross the streams ), at which point the particles annihilate. Each of the 4 sites is, in effect, a giant camera to see what happens (all that energy basically creates a bunch of wierd subatomic particles in a similar process to what happened at the big bang - just on a smaller scale).

ah ok.. but then... why do we even need that? like what's the overall purpose for it? Or is it a "just because we can and we have a bazillion dollars to spend" kind of thing?

Al Gore is also responsible for global warming!

Necros wrote:

Chimera_Calvin wrote:@necros - the machines in CERN take particles (some negativelly charged, some positively charged and fling them in opposite directions round a 27km long ring at stupid speeds. At 4 key places the two streams can be made to cross (Egon - don't cross the streams ), at which point the particles annihilate. Each of the 4 sites is, in effect, a giant camera to see what happens (all that energy basically creates a bunch of wierd subatomic particles in a similar process to what happened at the big bang - just on a smaller scale).

ah ok.. but then... why do we even need that? like what's the overall purpose for it? Or is it a "just because we can and we have a bazillion dollars to spend" kind of thing?

It's Blue Sky research. There is no immediately obvious practical application. However, high tech projects often spin off lots of side benefits because they stimulate all kinds of advances in engineering and materials science, such as room termperature semi-conductors.

If CERN discovers how matter is made, it might be possible to use that knowledge to make new types of matter, or learn how to control the fundamental forces that shape time and space (Da! Da! Daaaa!)

If not, we are still employing a lot of engineers and physicists which has benefits in encouraging youngsters to go into these fields and invent electric cars and superfast computers and stuff.

Scientists say its safe.

CNN reporters say we're going to die.

Those scientists would be well advised to listen to the reporters for the planet's sake...I'm sure they know what they're talking about. <sarcasm>

It's a well known fact scientist have been wrong errr right for years now. It's a crap shoot any way I look at it.

Why do scientists need to investigate this?

Didn't SG1 fully cover the time distorting effects of a black hole and its effect on a stargate and surrounding area?

jfrazell wrote:I'm annoyed that the French are the ones working on fusion technology and not the US. The galoise smoking cute girlfriend French???

In combination with Honda's new hydrogen car the future still looks bright, just not dino juice powered.

Its one of the follys of capitalism. We will do it when stupid business people see potential for profit. Argh, scientists and engineers should run the world. Not lawyers and business persons. With out science and engineering we would all still be living in caves.

Yes but they also tend to go for that whole "nature red of tooth and claw" viewpoint. That tends to be...bad.

Kilkrazy wrote:It's Blue Sky research. There is no immediately obvious practical application. However, high tech projects often spin off lots of side benefits because they stimulate all kinds of advances in engineering and materials science, such as room termperature semi-conductors.

If CERN discovers how matter is made, it might be possible to use that knowledge to make new types of matter, or learn how to control the fundamental forces that shape time and space (Da! Da! Daaaa!)

If not, we are still employing a lot of engineers and physicists which has benefits in encouraging youngsters to go into these fields and invent electric cars and superfast computers and stuff.

That’s all good and well but where’s my flying car?


In other news, does anyone remember when CNN started and it had standards and serious topics? For just a second there we had 24 hour news that informed the world instead of running killer bees stories. It’s a shame that went away.

smart_alex wrote:Its one of the follys of capitalism. We will do it when stupid business people see potential for profit. Argh, scientists and engineers should run the world. Not lawyers and business persons. With out science and engineering we would all still be living in caves.

Then you’d just end up politicising science. It isn’t the business men and politicians that create compromised, bad policy, but the nature of business and politics. Take our best and brightest scientists and put them in charge of the multi-nationals and government depts and you’d just have them making the same decisions our CEOs and politicians are making, with no-one working on my flying car.

Your flying car?

Here in Oz we've had them for years, they even appear on google earth...
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2006/01/30/1138469638185.html

Waaagh_Gonads wrote:Your flying car?

Here in Oz we've had them for years, they even appear on google earth...
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2006/01/30/1138469638185.html

Heh, I used to work about twenty minutes from Bicton. Meanwhile, that's somebody else's flying car. Science promised me a flying car, dammit.

It doesn't matter what the French do, because wind and solar are the way to go. You can completely charge up an electric car for less than the price of a gallon of gas, and it won't explode no matter the Mythbusters or Michael Bay do to them!

smart_alex wrote:

jfrazell wrote:I'm annoyed that the French are the ones working on fusion technology and not the US. The galoise smoking cute girlfriend French???

In combination with Honda's new hydrogen car the future still looks bright, just not dino juice powered.

Its one of the follys of capitalism. We will do it when stupid business people see potential for profit. Argh, scientists and engineers should run the world. Not lawyers and business persons. With out science and engineering we would all still be living in caves.

Yeah, but whenever I play the University of Planet , their networks
get infiltrated by every other faction on Alpha Centauri, even those Gaia's
Stepdaughters.

Wow I don't know how I missed this. I just listened to the podcast, Skeptoid the other day and one of his casts was about this particular subject and the lawsuit from the former Naval Nuclear Engineer and the other guy who founded the reasons for their lawsuit to stall this project based a large list of hypothetical garbage.

Here's the link to the podcast. He has a little over 100 episodes, and they are all good, but stay on the topic of critical thinking and skepticism.

malfred wrote:Yeah, but whenever I play the University of Planet , their networks
get infiltrated by every other faction on Alpha Centauri, even those Gaia's
Stepdaughters.

Hence the requisite mad dash to Pre-Senient Algorithms and the Hunter-Seeker Algorithm project.

BTW CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, so they're not just French.
And part of what the Large Hadron Collider is doing is trying to understand gravity.

Sounds like something to keep an eye on, interesting stuff.