Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet? | Hacker News Reader

Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet?

hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com

97 pointsumangjaipuria53 comments

Apparently, when energy becomes matter, it creates some sort of cloud of javascript context in which the variable worldHasEnded is defined.

I don't think that was covered in my college physics textbook.

I wouldn't count on it working in IE6.

But it'll run fast as lightning on Chrome!

By the time this is over, there will be a thousand things that were "not covered in my physics textbook". :)

I can hardly wait!

From the page source: "if the lhc actually destroys the earth & this page isn't yet updated please email mike@frantic.org to receive a full refund"

Awesome. They have an Atom feed. That way I can stay up to date.

I wonder if anyone else got the joke about the Atom feed...

Anywho, I'm absolutely going to add their feed as a widget on my blog.

    " I'm absolutely going to add their feed as a widget on my blog."

this is a great idea, the LHC is already very popular, why not instead of constantly blogging about the world ending, just add a widget to inform us if that happens.

Can it come in the form of a bright light?

constantly blogging about the world ending

I think you'll find the same guys that constantly blog about the world ending are the same ones that believe the government* is trying to steal our thoughts, so the only way to prevent that is by wearing tin foil hats.

I've read this same doom and gloom argument before, during the Manhattan Project when a physicist named Edward Teller raised concerns that a nuclear reaction could ignite the atmosphere, which was later disproven.

The adding of the widget is more or less a joke as I found the site amusing.

(*Government may refer to many different organisations, US gov, illuminati etc...)

I have a great idea for a new startup! Imagine what it would be like if you could consolidate all the "has the world ended" and "is it christmas" sites into one personalized page. You could even share it with your friends. Personally, I know my friends would truly love me for the remainder of their existence if I gave them a few seconds heads-up on the world ending. "Wow, thanks jro@#$(&#3," they would say.

Anyway, can I have like $1_000_000 VC now? It's social!

Best part of this site:

  if (!(typeof worldHasEnded == "undefined")) {
  document.write("YUP.");
  } else {
  document.write("NOPE.");
  }

Even better: <noscript>NOPE.</noscript>

turns off javascript

IF YOU WANT TO SAVE THE WORLD, TURN OFF JAVASCRIPT IMMEDIATELY!!!

Take that Chrome and your faster JS engine!

But they haven't collided anything yet. They only turned on the two beams independently of one another to see if it worked or not. So I think there is still hope for those who need to forget about the things that they don't understand the more they think about it.

So... they haven't crossed the beams yet?

I think they're hoping to get it working by November and fully operational sometime next year.

The LHC safety report (http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html) makes the good point that whatever LHC will do, Nature has already been doing for billions of years. Cosmic ray collisions have far higher energy, and over the lifetime of the Earth, about a million LHC lifetimes of interactions have taken place. Si if the Universe should be destroyed, Nature should have taken care of that by itself a long time ago.

How might the discoveries of the LHC experiment be applied? For instance, is it likely that the knowledge gained will allow the creation of new technology? None of the news articles I read touched on this point.

Particle physics tends to be pure research, but there's a chance that they might find something entirely unexpected that might bubble up into research into renewable energy or material science.

Many areas of physics start out as pure research and are applied much later to life changing technologies.

One of the most famous examples of course being the photoelectric effect, which kinda went dead for many decades until it started being applied in digital cameras.

The photoelectric effect was an important step along the way to quantum mechanics, without which there'd be no transistor, and probably no personal computer, or Hacker News.

In case anyone else is wondering what transistors have to do with quantum mechanics

http://madsci.org/posts/archives/mar2000/952639215.Ph.r.html

> How might the discoveries of the LHC experiment be applied?

Why is this even a question?

The results of the LHC experiments will (hopefully) give us answers about assumptions in the Standard Model of physics and a load of theoretical speculations besides.

The results will allow us to interpret measurements already taken in a new light and will alter the means by which we measure (and/or interpret) things in the future.

The LHC experiment will not end the world, nor will it suddenly give us all flying jet cars.

It will (again, hopefully) advance our knowledge of the universe we live in.

Commercial interests are not a factor. Why do people keep moaning about the price tag and speculating on the industrial aspects when they're not busy predicting the end of the world?

"Why do people keep moaning about the price tag and speculating on the industrial aspects..."

Maybe because billions of dollars of taxpayer money are being used to fund this project. You can spend your own money however you want, but if you want public funding, you will have to put up with questions about whether this expenditure will actually make the world a better place for ordinary people.

"but if you want public funding, you will have to put up with questions about whether this expenditure will actually make the world a better place for ordinary people."

Strange how no one seemed to care how much money the War in Iraq would cost, or whether spending that many trillions is justified, but 4 billion to do what is vital for our existence, that of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, needs justification.

Careful, if you start comparing the spending for Iraq to pretty much anything, the opportunity cost of Iraq is enough to drive you insane. You can take some solace in the knowledge that even without Iraq, science would have been underfunded.

For the cost of Iraq we could have skipped a couple generations of particle accelerator. At this rate of Science funding it'll be 100 years until we build the planetary scale accelerator to test string theory.

Strange how no one seemed to care how much money the War in Iraq would cost

I cared; I think it's an absurd waste of money. I think all forms of governmental spending need justification. That's what fiscal responsibility is about.

"Why is this even a question?"

Because not everyone is a physicist.

Has anyone ever figured out (or even estimated) how long it would actually take to destroy the world if we did succeed in creating a black hole on the surface?

Assuming it didn't evaporate and started out at rest, it'd presumably fall straight through the floor, picking up mass as it went, but I'm not sure exactly how much. Once it got to the core it would overshoot, hollowing out a bit more of the core, but some kind of drag would eventually slow it down, leaving it in some kind of oddly-shaped cavity near the core. I have no idea whether this would wind up stable, but I'm guessing that eventually the core would collapse towards it, and once it started losing its structure the whole planet would collapse in.

But I have no idea how long all this would take. Minutes? Hours? Years?

If that machine creates a black hole, it will be the mass of two protons, and have an effect only on other objects within a length of a few protons. It will cease to exist within seconds, the only evidence being a slight change in the speed of protons passing nearby.

Why would it fall through the floor? The LHC creates 100,000 times stronger gravity then the earth in a confined space. Would the black hole not be confined in a small spot that is no larger then a speck of dust with temperatures colder then space. With nothing to feed from and an environment unlike anywhere else, would it ever survive for longer then the short burst...

We would probably die pretty fast, because all the atmosphere would be sucked in, plus the black hole would create a big shock wave while sucking the earths surface and probably the great amount of radiation would kill us instantly, im no physicist, all i know about black holes, i know from the discovery channel and wikipedia, if i am wrong, please tell me, im dieing to know :D

If it were small enough, it could only suck in a few atoms at a time. So, it could take a substantial amount of time to expand in the beginning.

Would it grow exponentially? Would it be possible to cut around it and launch it out into space?

You couldn't cut around it, because it would fall out the bottom of any container you tried to put it in.

Perhaps you could give it a charge (by firing electrons at it) and then confine it electrostatically or magnetically.

I've heard from some pretty reliable sources that a small black hole WAS created, but gravity pulled it towards the Earth core. It simply got away and now they are trying to ignore the incident. Who knows how long it will take it to eat Earth inside out?

Hmm interesting. What happens if a mini black hole is launched into the sun. Is it possible it just gets consumed?

The black hole would consume the sun eventually, yes.

How would they even be able to tell if they'd done it?

I can't see that the atmosphere is likely to get sucked in -- not in the early stages. Until it becomes very massive (i.e. has absorbed a significant portion of the Earth's mass) it's only going to have a significant effect on things that are very close to it.

http://twitter.com/cern/statuses/916122478

Someone posted this link over at Reddit. Gave me a chuckle.

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/70q4l/live_lhc_w...

LHC Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment Webcams

http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

If a black hole were created on earth, the earth would not collapse into it, rather, the earth would be pulled towards it, and because the entire matter of the earth could not be absorbed that quick, the earth would swing away from it, then go into orbit around it. A black hole is not that dangerous. It's about as dangerous as a mini earth.

Anyways, where would all the matter come from to make it have so much force?

That site is just spreading FUD.

Reminds me of my OS design final project, where we added a syscall for "IsComputerTurnedOn" that returned true if the computer was turned on, undefined otherwise. ;-)

beos had an is_computer_on function. look at the bottom of this page:

  http://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/TheKernelKit_SystemInfo.html

I really need to test that "is_computer_on_fire" function. I somehow doubt that it'll have an accurate reading.

No, it's just inspired a popular physics rap:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM

Funny... I keep checking the site to see if it changes. I'll have to subscribe to the feed.

NOPE

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