Are we being sucked into Switzerland yet?

Far be it for me to want the world to end...
No, hell! Let me make myself perfectly clear:

I wake up every morning, drink a bottle of beer, pull open the curtains and hope to see a post-nuclear landscape. It's been a long time coming and for a while (after the collapse of the Soviet Union) I suffered years of depression...
However, I have all my hoped pinned on the US and Israel starting the end of the world.

All my hopes?
No. I have another!
(that's me paraphrasing Yoda, by the way).

CERN.
Okay, it's a long shot. Seemingly an 0.3% chance that they'll create a black hole and suck us all into infinity (sort of like a prostitute I once met, but that's a whole other story for a whole other forum).

Does anyone know if they've kick-started the Large Hadron Collider yet?

The Large Hadron Collider... god damn, that sounds so sexy I need to run off to the toilet.

Originally posted by shavixmir
Far be it for me to want the world to end...
No, hell! Let me make myself perfectly clear:

I wake up every morning, drink a bottle of beer, pull open the curtains and hope to see a post-nuclear landscape. It's been a long time coming and for a while (after the collapse of the Soviet Union) I suffered years of depression...
However, I have all my hope he Large Hadron Collider... god damn, that sounds so sexy I need to run off to the toilet.

Oh, they will produce black holes alright! A lot of them. Millions of them.

...of the same kind that are pruduced every day, every hour, every minute, even every second in out upper atmosphere naturally. When high energetic cosmic particles with extremely high velocities hits terrestrial particles in our atmosphere a lot of black holes are created. It hasn't harm anyone yet. We will notice when it does. Or maybe not.

The term is "micro holes", and have masses minor that of a neutron, the size even more miniscule.

Originally posted by FabianFnas
Oh, they will produce black holes alright! A lot of them. Millions of them.

...of the same kind that are pruduced every day, every hour, every minute, even every second in out upper atmosphere naturally. When high energetic cosmic particles with extremely high velocities hits terrestrial particles in our atmosphere a lot of black holes are created. It term is "micro holes", and have masses minor that of a neutron, the size even more miniscule.

And besides, the lifespan of such miniholes is about a nanosecond so there wouldn't be much time for it to eat...
And no, they haven't fired it up yet, next month I think.
The same debate raged about the first A bomb test in Nevada, would it set off a chain reaction in the atmosphere and destroy the earth.
The short answer: No.

Ah, Switzerland. Renowned for Toblerone, Watches and now Black holes. Being neutral sure has had it's advantages.

Originally posted by Zort Boy
Ah, Switzerland. Renowned for Toblerone, Watches and now Black holes. Being neutral sure has had it's advantages.

Won't be bothered by those pesky magnetic and electic fields if you are neutral....

I think the colider is driving some crazy already.

http://blog.ted.com/2008/08/dropping_mad_sc.php

Originally posted by shavixmir
Does anyone know if they've kick-started the Large Hadron Collider yet?

Nope. First part injections in August, first full circle by a bunch of protons planned for the start of September, world-ending black hole planned just in time for Sinterklaas. Put it on your list.

Richard

I was just thinking about all this again...

Right. So this experiment costs over 80 billion dollars, right?
And what they're saying they want to find out is why some energy turns into matter and some doesn't (matter is energy as well though, but slowed down).

Right?
Now, if they find this little reason they can call it God or whatever.
Right?

Now. I'm all in favour of investing in a little knowledge to help the masses. That's why I'm a communist. But, you can shove a stick up my arse and call me a kebab, but this isn't a 1st grade maths book and we're not living in Bolshevick Russia.

I cannot believe 80 billion has been invested just for "unusable" knowledge. Somehow, somewhere, someone is expecting to reap profits from this of WAY over 80 billion euros.

So? What are they doing down there?
Are they creating a new energy source? What?

Originally posted by shavixmir
I was just thinking about all this again...

Right. So this experiment costs over 80 billion dollars, right?
And what they're saying they want to find out is why some energy turns into matter and some doesn't (matter is energy as well though, but slowed down).

Right?
Now, if they find this little reason they can call it God or whatever.
Right?
...[text shortened]... .

So? What are they doing down there?
Are they creating a new energy source? What?

Now, 80 billions is not much, spread out to the member nations of the CERN organisations. The Iraqi war is more expensive and more meaningless.

We know already that matter and energy is interchangable. We've done it, we've made the experiments, we've made our observations, and we've explained it.

The thing we want to observe is the Higg's particle. The theory says it should be there, we've found a method to observe it. If there is such a thing as a Higg's particle, responsible to the mass property of particles, then we think we will see it. To call it 'the god particle' is supersticious.

What we're doing, is not to make a profit out of 80 billions of dollars, but to enhance and refine the knowledge of science, to explain things, to build a road to further knowledge.

We're not creating a new energy source. What this leads to, the future alone knows.

Why do I use the word "we"? Like me and my friends?
No, with "we" I mean all people of our world, all of us, the humankind as a whole.

Originally posted by FabianFnas
Now, 80 billions is not much, spread out to the member nations of the CERN organisations. The Iraqi war is more expensive and more meaningless.

We know already that matter and energy is interchangable. We've done it, we've made the experiments, we've made our observations, and we've explained it.

The thing we want to observe is the Higg's particle. ...[text shortened]... o, with "we" I mean all people of our world, all of us, the humankind as a whole.

A nice philanthropic answer.
However, the Iraq war is nothing but a grande investment. Weapons, oil, contracts... basically the tax payer invests a lot of money (the war machine) and business men and corporations reaps the rewards.

Nobody in this world is investing 80 billion (however small the amount seems) without a more than reasonable chance of earning more than that back.

I'd love to believe they were investing for the benefit of mankind and general knowledge... but I don't believe in Gods, tooth fairies or the milk of human kindness.

Originally posted by shavixmir
A nice philanthropic answer.
However, the Iraq war is nothing but a grande investment. Weapons, oil, contracts... basically the tax payer invests a lot of money (the war machine) and business men and corporations reaps the rewards.

Nobody in this world is investing 80 billion (however small the amount seems) without a more than reasonable chance of ea ...[text shortened]... general knowledge... but I don't believe in Gods, tooth fairies or the milk of human kindness.

I agree with the Iraqi war. Some gets oil, some loses oil. Finding massdestructive weapons was just a cover up, a way to make the war 'philantropic'.

But noone knows what to do with the Higg's particle. It's just a piece of the grand puzzle that we call science.

Originally posted by FabianFnas
I agree with the Iraqi war. Some gets oil, some loses oil. Finding massdestructive weapons was just a cover up, a way to make the war 'philantropic'.

But noone knows what to do with the Higg's particle. It's just a piece of the grand puzzle that we call science.

Are they just after the Higgs particle though?
Are they not up to other things at the same time?

Originally posted by shavixmir
Are they just after the Higgs particle though?
Are they not up to other things at the same time?

As I've got it, this is an upgrad of the whole facility. Higgs motivates the upgrade, but, of course, the ongoing projects are progressing as usual.

Originally posted by shavixmir
Are they just after the Higgs particle though?
Are they not up to other things at the same time?

This sort of research came up with nuclear technology. Pure science is strange that way. You know they'll come up with something dramatic sometime, but when, where and what? Nations that don't invest in science become second rate powers because their technology falls behind.

That's the best answer I can find - that Europeans are forward looking enough to see the connection between pure science and the health of your Union.

CERN claims to have invented the World Wide Web too.

One big technology that's just over the horizon is antimatter technology, and these guys work with that stuff too I think.

Originally posted by AThousandYoung
CERN claims to have invented the World Wide Web too.

Claims?

Quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web:
"The World Wide Web (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a Web browser, a user views Web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigates between them using hyperlinks. The World Wide Web was created in 1989 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland and released in 1992. Since then, Berners-Lee has played an active role in guiding the development of Web standards (such as the markup languages in which Web pages are composed), and in recent years has advocated his vision of a Semantic Web."