Cool vid about CERN and a physicist who claims a big black hole is possible…

btw, great site for anyone into technology, electronica, circuit bending, etc..

Stranglets are scary. Cool find.

Take a more complex structure and drop it on the floor often enough and you can see all the different parts of the complex structure. Now you take such parts and drop those on the floor often enough and you will just get shards, pieces, and although you can then randomly name those and take great “scientific” satisfaction on having “discovered” them - you will not actually helped much except showing that you can smash smaller and smaller things to bits and can name the shards inventively.

To create a black hole one needs a lot more mass-energy then available at CERN, especially since there is no such thing as a mass-particle/god-particle/graviton/higgs-boson. The best that could happen is the creation of a virtual particle at the exact center of CERN, but they don’t even have a lab there and again the amount of mass-energy wouldn’t be enough to even create one of the shards mentioned before.

Or: to find anything of this scary, you’d first have to actually agree with some highly improbable scientific hypothesises: if black holes could be created this way, you’d have random black holes appearing suddenly all across the universe.

Ender_mBind - 03 November 2010 11:38 PM

Take a more complex structure and drop it on the floor often enough and you can see all the different parts of the complex structure. Now you take such parts and drop those on the floor often enough and you will just get shards, pieces, and although you can then randomly name those and take great “scientific” satisfaction on having “discovered” them - you will not actually helped much except showing that you can smash smaller and smaller things to bits and can name the shards inventively.

To create a black hole one needs a lot more mass-energy then available at CERN, especially since there is no such thing as a mass-particle/god-particle/graviton/higgs-boson. The best that could happen is the creation of a virtual particle at the exact center of CERN, but they don’t even have a lab there and again the amount of mass-energy wouldn’t be enough to even create one of the shards mentioned before.

Or: to find anything of this scary, you’d first have to actually agree with some highly improbable scientific hypothesises: if black holes could be created this way, you’d have random black holes appearing suddenly all across the universe.

Haha, quick, someone send Steven Hawking and everyone at CERN a link to this post.

Except that I call them useless particle smashers I’m actually agreeing with them (on this). As a CERN guy in the film also mentions: these types of collisions happen all the time in the universe (he even says in the atmosphere) - if that would create actual, full blown, black holes (like the german guy claims)...  you’d have random black holes appearing suddenly all across the universe.

For some reason, I don’t think it’s as simple as you put it.  The intro mentions that apparently the LHC’s the hottest known place in the universe, something like a million billion degrees celsius…so how can those types of collisions be happening all the time outside of it?

Just wondering how you claim to know there’s “no such thing” as a god-particle. Sure you don’t want to call up CERN and tell them it’s time to turn the thing into a subway? 

The intro is the regular type of media intro: sensationalizing… note how it says its the coldest and hottest place at the same time. Note that it’s also said that it is a very strong vacuum - which has no temperature (because it has no moving, shaking, particles that account for temperature).

Radiation, fast moving particles, happen outside it all the time. Such particles can be travelling up to lightspeed and will be going (about) everywhere in any direction. In an infinite universe, collisions are as such bound to happen all the time - and acc. to Einstein there’s no way this can happen at a greater speed difference then lightspeed.

In other words: collisions inside the LHC cannot be “worse” then those occuring naturally, because the particles cannot go faster inside the LHC then outside it (they go at 0.999999991 times lightspeed inside the LHC according to CERN; higher speed collisions are possible outside the LHC and should occur all the time, all over the place.) If such collisions created black holes, those would be popping up randomly across the universe.

The use of CERN however could be a good one: finally disproving a lot of outdated physics (like “particles”, “big bang”, “higgs-boson” etc), though because of confirmation bias that may take a while to get admitted. (note how its “broken” all the time and how there hasn’t been a single real result published yet). As such, lets not make it a subway yet. >:)

OK, so perhaps the collisions are not “worse” or different per say, inside the LHC, but could it be that the collisions are focused that poses a risk? The potential for many micro-black holes within a small space/time, I think, is what the critic was getting at.

The U.S - Russian experiment involving the behavior of protons is the best example for the following:
Perhaps we only find things because we expect to find them. The experiment above occurred independent of national affiliation. Actually, neither party realized they were ‘doing’ the same experiment. The U.S scientists observed one behavior type of protons, while the Russian scientists observed another behavior. The ‘problem’ is that proton particles should behave in the same way when subjected to the same STP conditions. The US group expected result A, whule the Russian group expected result B. Both happened.

Extrapolate to LHC, CERN, and new particles: We continue to find smaller and smaller ‘pieces’ of matter. Quarks are further broken down into even funnier-sounding particles. Think about the duel property of light (2 slit experiment). Perhaps the only reason we are finding smaller and smaller pieces is because we are expecting them to be there. To an extent, we may be literally creating reality. I do not understand the mathematical reasoning of QMs, but I think the general idea deals with complete randomness of waves, interference, and patterns that create physical matter. (I could be wrong.) Spontaneity may have order. The entire system might have a responsive ‘brain.’

But what happens if other life in the universe has advanced far enough to see deeper? Is our universe a ‘donut,’ ‘sphere,’ or ‘conical tube?’

cjpience - 05 November 2010 10:51 PM

The ‘problem’ is that proton particles should behave in the same way when subjected to the same STP conditions. The US group expected result A, whule the Russian group expected result B. Both happened.

Or you could consider it as an excellent example of confirmation bias in physics. This is why such experiments should be duplicable, testable by others etc. There’s a chance that if others do the same experiment they could come up with disproving both earlier teams (or confirming one, or explaining why both are right). That is just regular scientific method.

cjpience - 05 November 2010 10:51 PM

We continue to find smaller and smaller ‘pieces’ of matter. Quarks are further broken down into even funnier-sounding particles.

Yes, that is why I call them useless particle smashers.

Say you let a whole cubboard full of earthenware drop off the roof: the cubboard would burst open and you’ll find its contents (cups, plates, mugs, whatever). Now you take one of the plates and throw that off the roof as well… the result would be all different types of shards - which you can then name inventively according to your own made up set of rules on what constitutes a new piece of earthenware.

Most the “new” particles cannot actually exist (very long) without the full pattern of the original particle they are the shards of. Are they actually real building blocks of the universal pattern, or just bits and pieces of such actual building blocks? We get more and more tech to smash the plates from a higher floor and more and better tech to still detect and measure the tiniest of shards… does that actually constitute science or are we just being a bull in a china shop?

cjpience - 05 November 2010 10:51 PM

But what happens if other life in the universe has advanced far enough to see deeper? Is our universe a ‘donut,’ ‘sphere,’ or ‘conical tube?’

The universe is infinite… as such it has no shape (you can never be outside it to observe it, nor does it have an edge to define that shape).

You do have a point in your post however: the main thing that all quantum physics ignores is the fact that there’s a sentience, an entity… there has to be, or you (the observer, I, ego, god, the quantum physicist etc) could not actually be doing the quantum physics.. or even read, or write, this post - or try to comprehend it.

Do not confuse the observer effect you describe with that though: that is a result of the heisenberg uncertainty principle. (like position and momentum can’t be simultaneously known to arbitrarily high precision)

The difficulty may arise in translating mathematical concepts into words, which means calling observable events that can be expected to occur with a high degree of probability “particles”. It’s using the same language for relativistic concepts to describe events on a subatomic scale.

But how much does this language limitation affect the math? It could be that on the chalkboard, these “particles” are described more accurately, taking into account observation, Heisenberg, etc. The fact they are looking for “new” physics, to me, is a way of saying “events that can’t be explained by the existing model”. You may be able to adapt the mathematical model to explain new phenomena, but language will still remain crippled.

What was it that Terence McKenna said about the Big Bang? If you can believe that the universe just sprung up out of nothing, then what won’t you believe? The idea that scientists claim there was an explosion (a thing, or experience) a long time ago (do we fully understand time?), from whence everything (particles) came, is the mother of all improbabilities.

Ender_mBind - 06 November 2010 01:38 AM

Yes, that is why I call them useless particle smashers.

The collider is a tool like anything else. It could be that by observing new phenomena, physicists will be forced to revise, maybe even replace existing models, if they could keep enough scientific integrity to not worry about pleasing their “funding agencies” as the head put it. Unlikely, though, imo.

digilatex - 06 November 2010 07:26 PM

What was it that Terence McKenna said about the Big Bang? If you can believe that the universe just sprung up out of nothing, then what won’t you believe? The idea that scientists claim there was an explosion (a thing, or experience) a long time ago (do we fully understand time?), from whence everything (particles) came, is the mother of all improbabilities.

(...)
The collider is a tool like anything else. It could be that by observing new phenomena, physicists will be forced to revise, maybe even replace existing models, if they could keep enough scientific integrity to not worry about pleasing their “funding agencies” as the head put it. Unlikely, though, imo.

Welllll… I guess just as we were typing this, both events have occured: they took a break from trying to find new particles and instead created a Mini Bang by smashing lead ions into eachother… So I guess yes: there can be results from this tool.

Obviously, if one creates a Mini Bang by smashing lead ions into eachother, one may have to reconsider how the Big one was generated… Some scientists some 12 billion years ago decided to smash even heavier stuff in an even larger accellerator?

Fact of the matter remains that they just showed that you need something to go Bang… which kinda goes against the “beginning of everything” idea.