Big Bang experiment May 2008: Are you concerned?

Question

In May next year CERN switches on its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator and collider to try and recreate the Big Bang 'in miniature' - does this worry you at all? They admit they don't know exactly what might happen, but assure us it's going to be safe (?) - so maybe it's US who perpetuate the death and birth of the universe each time we evolve enough to switch on another LHC. What do you think?

Answer 1

It always worry me when scientists try to recreate what God did when he created the universe. He created the universe out of nothing.

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was [a] formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. 3 And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. (NIV)

And here we are experimenting with the very atom that God created with that very first light (that Big Bang), to find the answer that has already been answered?

I think we should not be tinkering with God's engineering. Instead we should experiment for the betterment of humankind and how to make this planet a better place to live in.

Answer 2

Yes - I have been following this story with some trepidation. Not because the experiement per se is flawed but because of the human factor - in particular the arrogance of human scientists. This is what their own website says: "The LHC will take the place of CERN's Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider, and will sit in its 27 Km long tunnel, about 100m underground. It will accelerate 2 separate beams of protons up to an energy of 7 TeV , and then bring them into head-on collisions (from here the name "collider"). The protons collision energy will then be of 14 TeV. But the LHC will not be limited to the study of proton-proton collisions as it can also collide heavy ions, such as lead, with a collision energy of 1148 TeV."

Is that scary or what? I have know idea what a collision energy of 1148 TeV is, but it sounds a lot!

On the 3rd April this year the damn thing broke anyway (see BBC link below).

I think the thing that scares me the most is the quote from the New Scientist. "Not surprisingly, what lies ahead is making physicists positively giddy. "We are like children waiting for Christmas," says JoAnne Hewett, a theorist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, California. "You can't imagine the excitement." Immense technical hurdles remain, however, not least the problem of handling the amount of raw data the LHC will produce over its projected 20-year lifetime, which could exceed that in all the words spoken in human history.

Help might be on the way in the form of a controversial method for automating the data analysis. Some researchers, including Bruce Knuteson of Fermilab and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, say their software is the fastest way to reveal hints of new physics. Others see it as a recipe for confusion and wild goose chases. The way future experiments are done and analysed may hinge on who is right."

Why? {:o[ Is all I can ask!

Answer 3

The danger with the LHC is the possibility of STRANGELETS - you can find info about these at Wikipedia or an online search. CERN claims the possibility of these being discovered is very very small, however it's NOT an absolute impossibility, which is why the LHC should NEVER to switched on, because if even ONE strangelet is created by this Big Bang experiment then (with no understatement) it's Doomsday for us and the rest of the universe. Basically a Strangelet is anti-matter that attracts all matter towards it and changes it into more Strangelets, thus consuming the universe into a mega Black Hole.

Creating anti-matter and Strangelets is the purpose of the LHC.

The news item below is quoted from the following link - http://www.misunderstooduniverse.com/France_Builds_Doomsday_Machine.htm - which gives a good description of the LHC and some feedback from physicists opposed to the LHC.

On Tuesday, March 27, 2007, there was a devastating explosion deep in the tunnel at the CERN particle accelerator complex that actually blew a 20 ton magnet right off its mountings. The explosion filled the tunnel with helium and forced a mass evacuation of the facility. While the facility was supposed to go online during the summer of 2007, the new startup is tentatively summer of 2008 after 17 miles of magnets have been repaired or replaced. This explosion, to those of us who count ourselves among the worried masses, appears to be an ominous foreshadowing of what could eventually become the Second-Coming of the Big Bang. Even Dr. Lyn Evans, who heads the accelerator project at CERN, said the explosion had been potentially very dangerous. "There was a hell of a bang, the tunnel housing the machine filled with helium and dust and we had to call in the fire brigade to evacuate the place," he said. "The people working on the test were frightened to death but they were all in a safe place so no-one was hurt." An investigation by the researchers found that basic math flaws had caused the explosion -- which gives one pause in contemplating how much faith can bestowed upon 6,000 scientists who can overlook basic math mistakes. Not only was this mistake made in the original design phase, but it was also missed on four engineering reviews carried out over a period of four years. The director of Fermilab, Pier Oddone, blithely wrote about the disaster stating that they had caused "a pratfall on the world stage".

It makes for uneasy reading and we SHOULD be reading about it and then doing SOMETHING about it. If someone had a vat of unknown chemicals and told you to jump in although they didn't know what would happen, but assured you it'd be safe, would you jump in? Only if you were NUTS! So with even the slightest of possibilities of creating Strangelets WHY are they doing this experiment? Are the potential gains to the military worth the possibility of universal destruction? HELL NO!

Military? Well of course... the whole point of the LHC is to create and harness anti-matter i.e. Black Holes and Strangelets at the costs of billions of billions of Dollars... think again that this is being done merely for scientific curiosity about the Big Bang - it is for military application and to discover new forms of energy greater than nuclear power.

Answer 4

When they talk about creating the "Big Bang" in miniature the operative word is miniature.

Sub atomic particles (i.e. particles MUCH smaller than an atom) will be made to collide.

No, they don't know exactly what is going to happen, if they did there would be no point in doing the experiment. They will be creating a great deal of energy but they certainly don't expect to create anything like the big bang from which the universe developed.

Answer 5

While the popular press talks of conditions that haven't existed since the big bang, that's not really true. CERN is indeed trying to create conditions that existed in the very early universe, but nature has beaten us to it. Cosmic rays with millions of times the energy that CERN can produce hit the earth every day. The difference is that CERN will produce its weaker conditions in a known time and place with instrumentation set up to observe them. We don't know what will happen - that's what makes it scientifically exciting. We do know what the limits are, and they aren't dangerous on any scale that matters outside the accelerator.

Answer 6

A little. Its one of a class of experiments I would really rather be done on the far side of Mars, or further out. On the other hand, I am pro-space and more than willing to spend the money so the experiments can be done, out there.
You may not know it, but at least one physicist has proposed a way to manufacture a black hole. Fortunately, it must be done about 1/2 way to Alpha Centari. Sometimes you have to trust the experts, but choose your experts well. If that particular physicist expresses concern over this one I'll pay attention and help try to stop it.

Answer 7

The answer is simply, NO.

Even if a black hole or even a "Strangelet" is formed, the life of these is estimated to be less than 1 pico second.

While according to the special and general theories of relativity, Mass = energy (e=Mc^2 : e/c^2=M) the amount of energy even the LHC can generate in it's near-light speed collisions, isn't enough to produce anything with the mass capable of threatening the earth. Plus the collision takes place in a (near) vacuum. What's the Black hole gonna eat?

JBV^_^

Answer 8

No. There's zero probability this could induce a phase change in the universe's natural laws, which is the only conceivable risk to our world as a whole. Even if they managed to create a new 'big bang' it would not expand into our universe but would create a new one!

For those of you who might be worried about the Fermilab explosion, read the links below.

Answer 9

nicely, you realize, they might in simple terms open up a tiny black hollow and despite if as they say that if that have been the case that it would in simple terms final for a fragment of a 2nd. in spite of this, time stops interior a BH doesn’t it? i might heavily think of that if we've been on the cusp of destroying this planet that such tries could be stopped by using any between the 30 some peculiar extraterrestrial species that count so heavily on earth's water supplies.

Answer 10

I can't see how whatever happens at CERN can compare with what is going on in the sun every second. I shouldn't worry about it.

Personally I do think it is a waste of time and money, but it seems to interest some people.