End Of The World: Caused By An Experiment?

[Parmigiano]

Don't worry guys...

I'm only 120 km from Geneva, if things goes wrong and I'll see the Alps collapse at morning when I drive to work I'll shot a post here so that those who will have some more time to live may find the best way to use it...

 

[timshatz]

I don't know if anything is fater than it, but I think light can bent by gravity. Isn't a black hole just a big gravity well? It sucks everything into it.

If I recall correctly, that's what Albert E got the Nobel in Physics for. Photoecentricity. Or, the affect of gravity on Photons.

I dunno, I understand it and I guess you have to give something to the pointy heads to play with (like a big friggin' donut shaped ring in the middle of Switzerland, I like football, they like smashing particles together-keeps both of us out of trouble).

But if it's going to end the planet, can't these pointy heads go do it out on Mars or something. Granted, the cost is astronomical and currently it's technically infeasable, but it'll keep them busy for the next 20-30 years setting it up and these guys get off on that stuff.

 

[Freebird]

Nice - Thanks for that, since every weapon ever invented has a foundation in physics. I wasn't commenting on other possible uses of this study.

Just being cheeky...

What the heck will smashing sub-atomic particles together prove??? Am I the only one that is bored as nuts with scientists trying to "prove" where the earth/universe/life came from???

I think that many people had the same idea about the Manhatten project, just a bunch of eggheads wasting time...


I wonder what science the "next generation" of weapons will be using?

If the scientists find a way to disrupt/alter the strong or weak nuclear force, could lead to some interesting possibilities

 

[Freebird]

Don't worry guys...

I'm only 120 km from Geneva, if things goes wrong and I'll see the Alps collapse at morning when I drive to work I'll shoot a post here so that those who will have some more time to live may find the best way to use it...

Hmm, wonder what could be done? Beam me up Scotty?

 

[Captain Dunsel]

Would be nice if it showed how to use zero point (vacuum) energy. Would be a lot cheaper than oil.

CD

 

[mkloby]

MK .... you're to smart a person to be asking such a sophomoric question like that.

Obviously not. You want to pursue such technology to develop a possible weapon or energy production, fine - I get it. But, what benefit will help humanity to know what happened in a fraction of a second after the big bang?

The way I look at it - there are people dying of uncurable diseases and other important issues that deserve limited attention, research, and resources. What will knowing this fraction of a second do for us?

 

[RabidAlien]

If the scientists find a way to disrupt/alter the strong or weak nuclear force, could lead to some interesting possibilities

I'm still holding out for my flying car. Its the future now, where's my flying car?

 

[pbfoot]

Obviously not. You want to pursue such technology to develop a possible weapon or energy production, fine - I get it. But, what benefit will help humanity to know what happened in a fraction of a second after the big bang?

The way I look at it - there are people dying of uncurable diseases and other important issues that deserve limited attention, research, and resources. What will knowing this fraction of a second do for us?

Jeez don't ask me I was brutal in physics in school , but there are articles out there that will make more sense then by babbling

 

[Flyboy2]

Nothing is faster than the speed of light because light will always move fast enough that it will catch any object moving at a given velocity. Einstien's theory of relativity.

Light isn't affected by gravity because it can act as a wave and a particle and when it interacts with gravity acts as a wave

 

[pbfoot]

Nothing is faster than the speed of light because light will always move fast enough that it will catch any object moving at a given velocity. Einstien's theory of relativity.

Light isn't affected by gravity because it can act as a wave and a particle and when it interacts with gravity acts as a wave

How Gravity Affects Photons for gravity and light and there are things that are faster then light

 

[Flyboy2]

Dang thought i nailed it
Thanks for the information PB

 

[Marcel]

and there are things that are faster then light

Which things are faster? As far as I know none have ever been found. Tachyons are pure hypothetical.

 

[JugBR]

Then a small physics quiz
Is there anything faster then the speed of light
And is light affected by gravity

nothing is faster than speed of light, but the speed of light by itself isnt a constant, since it could be affected by gravity.

light travels faster in one situations and slower in others. but any other thing in the same situation would travel slower than light.

btw: time and space are not linear constants, example:

when you are doing a thing and you enjoy it, time pass faster than when you are bored with some unpleasant thing.

 

[pbfoot]

Which things are faster? As far as I know none have ever been found. Tachyons are pure hypothetical.

I'm trying to get the exact source I heard about this it is possible it was a laser beam in a medium I can't remember . Remember I flunked physics some 40 years ago

 

[timshatz]

Nothing is faster than the speed of light because light will always move fast enough that it will catch any object moving at a given velocity. Einstien's theory of relativity.

Light isn't affected by gravity because it can act as a wave and a particle and when it interacts with gravity acts as a wave

Ok, now that somebody's thrown that out there, I want to toss out a question that's been bugging me for a while. Actually, it's two questions.

1. If a photon is moving at the speed of light throught the universe starts to decay (which it must), the particles leave at the speed of light. So a particle leaving a photo in any direction towards the direction of travel must be moving at the speed of light.

2. Two photons (or any other like particle, I just use photons for simplicty) are created in a start at the same exact instant going opposite directions. If two photons leave the star (for our purposes, the star is kinda small, size of Jupiter) in opposite directions, are they both not traveling in excess of the speed of light with relation to each other. The question can be asked with two companion stars and crossing particles as well.

Anybody have any ideas on this one cause when I ask the pointy heads in the physics world, they don't seem to have a good line on it. And it seems a relatively simple question (probably covered by General Relativity).

 

[syscom3]

I can just imagine some people saying after Maxwell developed his laws of electomagnetism amd Tesla broke ground with AC generators ....... "now just what in the heck is this good for"?

 

[mkloby]

Is anyone going to comment on what good knowing the fraction of a second after the big bang is supposed to bring to humanity? It's a serious question, and nobody has responded.

 

[ScOoTeR1992]

hay has this thing happened already. I don't know what time it was going to start, over here time wise anyway

 

[pbfoot]

Is anyone going to comment on what good knowing the fraction of a second after the big bang is supposed to bring to humanity? It's a serious question, and nobody has responded.

Those guys in Switzerland keep sending my resume back unopened
I really don't know what the benifits could be but thats why I'm not making the big bucks in Switzerland .
Maybe stuff beyond my comprehesion , time travel , alternate power sources , medicine, weapons

 

[ScOoTeR1992]

Particle physicists believe they will throw open a new frontier of knowledge on Wednesday when, 100 metres below ground, they switch on a mega-machine crafted to unveil the deepest mysteries of matter.

The most complex scientific experiment ever undertaken, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will accelerate sub-atomic particles to nearly the speed of light and then smash them together, with the aim of filling gaps in our understanding of the cosmos.

It may also determine the outcome of novel theories about space-time: does another dimension - or dimensions - exist in parallel to our own?

After nearly two decades and 6 billion Swiss francs ($A6.6 billion), an army of 5,000 scientists, engineers and technicians drawn from nearly three dozen countries have brought the mammoth project close to fruition.

At 9.30am (1730 AEST) on Wednesday, the first protons will be injected into a 27-kilometre ring-shaped tunnel, straddling the Swiss-French border at the headquarters of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).

Whizzed to within a millionth of a per cent of the speed of the light, the particles will be the first step in a long-term experiment to smash sub-atomic components together, briefly generating temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the Sun in a microscopic space.

Analysts will then pore over the wreckage in the search for fundamental particles.

"We will be entering into a new territory of physics," said Peter Jenni, spokesman for ATLAS - one of four gargantuan laboratories installed on the ring where a swathe of delicate detectors will spot the collisions.

"Wednesday is a very major milestone."

The LHC is massively-muscled machine compared to its CERN predecessor, the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider, and an ageing accelerator at the legendary Fermilab in Illinois.

It has the power to smash protons or ions - particles known as hadrons - together at a whopping 14 teraelectron volts (TeV), seven times the record held by Fermilab's Tevatron.

The leviathan scale of the project is neatly juxtaposed by its goal, which is to explore the infinitely small.

Physicists have long puzzled over how particles acquire mass.

In 1964, a British physicist, Peter Higgs, came up with this idea: there must exist a background field that would act rather like treacle.

Particles passing through it would acquire mass by being dragged through a mediator, which theoreticians dubbed the Higgs Boson.

The standard quip about the Higgs is that it is the "God Particle" - it is everywhere but remains frustratingly elusive.

French physicist Yves Sacquin says that heroic work by the LEP and Fermilab has narrowed down the energy range at which the devious critter is likely to spotted.

Given the LHC's capabilities, "there's a very strong probability that it will be detected," he said.

Some experts are also hopeful about an early LHC breakthrough on the question of supersymmetry.

The supersymmetry theory goes way beyond even the Higgs. It postulates that particles in the Standard Model have related, but more massive, counterparts.

Such particles could explain the unsettling discovery of recent years that visible matter only accounts for some four per cent of the Universe. Enigmatic phenomena called dark matter and dark energy account for the rest.

CERN Director General Robert Aymar is confident the massive experiment will yield a correspondingly big breakthrough in penetrating these mysteries.

"It is certain that the LHC will yield the identity and understanding of this dark matter," he said in a video statement.

CERN has had to launch a PR campaign aimed at reassuring the public that the LHC will not create black holes that could engulf the planet or an unpleasant hypothetical particle called a strangelet that would turn the Earth into a lump of goo.

It has commissioned a panel to verify its calculations that such risks are, by any reasonable thinking, impossible, and France too has carried out its own safety probe.

Either way, the end of the world will not happen on Wednesday, for the simple reason that the LHC will not generate any collisions that day.

These will probably be initiated "in a few weeks" as part of a phased programme to commission the LHC, testing its equipment and evaluating work procedures before cranking it up to full strength, said Jenni.

Looking at the daily mountain of data that will have to be analysed, "it will take weeks or months before one can really hope to start discovering something new," he cautioned.

"The LHC is more than a machine. It is the intellectual quest of our age," the British weekly New Scientist said in this week's issue.

"With luck... today's physics textbooks will start to look out of date by the end of 2009."

here we go this is off another science website