Thread: The Large Hadron Collider

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Anyone a physics geek like me? I should clarify that, I think it's interesting but I'm no means a geek capable of carrying on more then a VERY HIGH LEVEL conversation about the topic!

Today they are turning on the Large Hadron Collider. It's the world’s largest partial accelerator and the largest machine ever made by mankind.

They say that this machine will replicate particles as they were moments after the "Big Bang". It will accelerate particles up to 99.99% of the speed of light before crashing them together. When that happens, it will create a miniscule area that will be 100,000 times hotter then our suns core.

Pretty cool if you ask me. Most of it is way over my head, but if you look at it from merely an engineering perspective....the pictures are worth their weight in gold, very dramatic and beautiful if you ask me. Amazing how we humans can create something so big!

Some say that this could be a doomsday machine as well. The biggest fear is that the machine may create microscopic black holes that will grow bigger, go to the center of the earth and gobble up the earth. The proponents of the LHC say that this is impossible as the earth is bombarded with particles every day for the past 100 million years (or whenever the big bang was) with energies far greater then what this machine is capable of producing and there have never been creations of black holes due to this.

I guess we'll see! They say that their first full speed test will be sometime in Mid October after they fully commission it....so if all goes well, hopefully there won't be any pesky black holes gobbling up the earth before we get to display our Halloween decorations!

Well, if they create any black holes that will blink us out of existance, hopefully it's AFTER Halloween!

I too have a science background and I am also really interested in it. I think it's amazing.

Heard about it on the news and the possible black holes. There was a book I read years ago that had the same theme. The black holes would desend into the center of the earth but, then shoot out the other side. The gravity of the earth was strong enough that it pulled them back to the center and shot them out the other side, etc. etc. As they would shoot through they would gobble up everything and shoot out the other side and shoot through buildings, animals, people killing them by eating holes through them. Don't know if that will happen now, most likely not but, scientists have been wrong before. lol Can't wait to see the results and if they plan on making a bigger one later.