Large Hadron Collider
“People in india have stopped eating, are flocking to temples, and one girl has killed herself because the LHC may destroy the world, according to the fear-mongering thugs at india TV (a news channel that makes fox news look fair and balanced)”
By now you must have heard about the new “Doomsday” device designed by thousands of physicists, built under farmland on the France/Switzerland borders; the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC for short. If you haven’t, Google is your best friend…
Quite a few seem to have thought that Wednesday, September 10th, 2008, was the “End of Days”, as we call it in the religious circuit. CERN successfully guided protons around the collider first in a clockwise direction, and then counterclockwise. The whole test took less than an hour, and was quite a success.
The huge controversy that’s floating around the LHC is that there are dangers of forming a black hole using this device. In anticipation, there has been fasting, praying, and a suicide in reaction (or dread) of the foreboding end of the world – by black hole. I think this one actually trumps the dinosaur-extincting meteor… Uhmmm, there are a few atoms that are going to be circulating within this collider at any time, so if we do manage to create a black hole (and I think we give ourselves too much credit there), it just might be big enough to swallow a fly that made its way into the LHC…
In any case, if you are not convinced that the LHC is the least of our worries at this point, then, no need to fear! (Sorry for the bad pun)… The countdown has begun to a full scale experiment; mark your calendars to the new date for Death by Black Hole… October 21, 2008. Cheers!
You are absolutely right. Microscopic black holes have (supposedly) very weak gravitational fields. You could not fell any attracation sitting next to a mini black hole.
And another comment. Black holes do not devour anything that stands on their way. To fall into a BH you must have a trajectory that crosses its event horizon. If your speed is tangential to the vector that points from your position to the center of the BH you will revolve around the BH without falling into it.
If we replaced for instance our sun with a BH the only change we would experience would be the absence of light, a greater revolution speed of the planets and a larger precession of the perihelion of the orbits closer to the BH.
By: Spyros on September 16, 2008
at 11:32 am
hmm. interesting..
By: Poerloalo on April 24, 2009
at 4:41 pm