Large Hadron Collider Concerns

Discussion in 'Astronomy, Exobiology, & Cosmology' started by __your_Zahir_, Aug 10, 2008.

  1. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    from now closed LHC status thread:

    I had already skimmed this paper as it is a reference in the recently revised Safety Report (In fact that report borrows very heavily from this paper.) I have not put forth the effort to follow its details. (Not sure I could - It has been 42 years since I earned my Ph.D. in physics.) I am not “anti-LHC.”- In fact, I gave three quick simple reasons why in Paul Dixon's thread at:
    http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2003401&postcount=1606

    is nonsense, so I should not be considered as "typical anti-LHC nut," but I do have a remotely possible concern, which I expect and hope you may be able to kill for me.

    First, however, I know of the "cosmic ray hits neutron star" argument and it is quite reassuring, but not impossible to negate, I think. Here is what I said on that in post 1524 of Paul's thread:

    "... the people at LHC, etc. … believe that the existance of neutron stars proves it has never happened as by their calculations even the fast BHs made by cosmic rays would have stopped inside and eaten all the neutron stars; but, many thousands of them, as pulsars, do exist etc. So for Paul not to be a "false profit" we also need either:

    (a) Even these "Fast (V = ~ C) BHs would be stopped in neutron star" calculations are wrong,
    Or
    (b) Cosmic ray production is relatively recent and local in origin and has not had time to find all the neutron stars that originally existed. I.e. some neutron stars ARE being eaten NOW and are seen as Paul's Type II supernovas. Note the recent large Argentine Auger detector of very high energy cosmic rays does show narrow space localization. (Why not a short production time period on cosmic scales also?)

    PLUS:
    "Paul not a false profit" needs some strange reason why these type II supernovas all look alike despite the widely different mass of the neutron star that is being eaten. - Perhaps the CR's BH eats a small fixed amount of the neutron star and "belches" the remaining mass out into space? ..."


    Please look at posts 1566 & 1580 of Paul's thread to see what I think may be a remotely possible, but highly improbable, real concern. See:

    http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=1976366&postcount=1566
    http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=1980117&postcount=1580
    and even the earlier:
    http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=1955247&postcount=1524
    from which the above quote in blue was taken.

    I know nothing about the limits on the production of Tiny Black Holes, TBH, which you seem mainly to be commenting on in your post. I am concerned with those that either are created charged or acquire charge within the Earth. I hope you can tell me in terms I can understand why this is not a concern.

    Also do you know of any argument that shows that Quantum Effects cannot also stabilize tiny black holes, as they stabilize atoms against electrons radiating and spiraling into the nucleus as predicted by Maxwell’s equations? I.e. how do we know that the “final flash” ending the existence of the TBH is not “quantum blocked,” allowing the TBH to be stable?

    Personally the best argument I know implying that TBHs are not stable is that time is reversal for these sub-atomic events, so If they can be produced, then they can die by at least the reverse process, if the “final flash” of Hawking’s radiation is blocked by some “quantization effect.” I hope you have a stronger argument.

    Thank you.
     
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  3. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    It's only a small area and short space of time by human standards, not nuclear ones and not fundamentally. Since we have Lorentz-invariance down to the 0.0001 fm level at least, the "closeness" of the events to one another has no physical implications. Lorentz invariance tells us that the "fabric of space time" can't wear out in a spot, because there is no absolute space or time to wear out.
     
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  5. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    Off topic and irrelevant.

    But you don't share this concern, so by repeating it you are fear-mongering just like those responsible for driving that Indian girl to suicide.

    But stranglets are cold matter and the LHC is much hotter than RHIC. So if the RHIC makes no stable and dangerous stranglets, why should we expect LHC to? They are seeking hot nuclear matter like QGP not cold nuclear matter like Americium and stranglets.

    Wagner minored in physics. He's even coy about the nature of his law degree.
     
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  7. Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

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    actually technically they are correct, this will indeed help end the world. Unless of course they are using all zero emission power and equiptment
     
  8. Lamont Cranston Registered Senior Member

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    I know the guy in the picture. His name is Fritz, and he's a janitor at the Downtown Manhattan Police department. He's always hard at work mopping close to Inspector Joe Cardona's desk.
     
  9. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    Brief update on the court case. On Tuesday, the judge found an issue raised in the government papers which he would like clearly explained by the Plaintiff's before the hearing begins.
    This would an issue since Plaintiffs swore to the court clerk that CERN was fairly served and the court frowns on beating up the court clerk with false statements. If the government is right, then Wagner and Sancho aren't just wrong but in the wrong.

    But congratulations on your CBS radio segment, Walter!
     
  10. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    The article goes on to say that the particles are comparatively rare, but that 15 of similar strength have been measured. Given the small proportion of particles that are measured, that must mean that millions (billions?) are hitting the earth each day.

    If we take the energy of the LHC particles as 1 millionth of these natural high energy cosmic particles, then instead of the 142g baseball travelling at 60mph, we have for comparison a 1.42mg grain of salt travelling at 6mph.
     
    Last edited: Sep 11, 2008
  11. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Much of the discussion here is repeating more than year old discussion in Paul Dixon’s thread.
    For example the above was stated, and even illustrated by “time magnifier” analogy in post 1067, back in April of 2007:
    For another example:
    and
    Repeats post 1228 (Paul’s thread) comments of more than a year ago (part now bold):
    But I respectfully disagree with rpenner’s conclusion here (and noted this difference years earlier also):
    While certainly cosmic rays hitting nuclei in the upper atmosphere are collisions far more energetic than man will ever make - accelerator diameters larger than the Earth required - there is an important difference. Any Tiny Black Holes, TBHs, produced BY COSMIC RAYS would still be traveling essentially as the speed of light and pass harmlessly thru the Earth. In contrast if the LHC can make TBHs AND if they are stable (perhaps due to some quantum effect that blocks their "final flash" of Hawking's radiation as all atoms are stabilized by quantum effects from the radiative decay Maxwell's equations demand.) then some of the LHC's TBHs will have less than Earth escape velocity. Those that are gravitationally bound to Earth will oscillate thru it repeatedly. Even the LHC safety report agrees with this.

    The important question is: Does anything significant happen. The safety report concludes NO -at least not before the sun grows cold; however it ONLY considers the effect of the TBH tiny Event Horizon, EH, as it interacts gravitationally with the tiny nuclei of atoms to come to this conclusion. The possibility that even an initially neutral TBH could "eat" one of the "zillions" of electrons it passes thru in each meter of travel within the earth is not even estimated in the safety report.* Once charged by even a single electron the (TBH-) will now interact much more strongly with the nuclei via the electrical rather than the gravitational force. It will rapidly lose Kinetic energy by scattering and simply sink to the gravitational center of the Earth.

    Atoms at the center of the Earth have rapid random thermal motion. Now the question becomes: How long a time passes, on average, before one's nucleus yield at least a quark (with +1/3 of the electron's charge) due to the extremely strong (greater force than a train's locomotive can make) electrical attraction when the separation is less than the proton diameter, if it does not "eat" the the entire proton. If the (TBH-) should "eat" an entire proton it becomes neutral again. Then the TBH repeats this process, growing in mass and event horizon size with each "meal." Thus, this is a self-accelerating process.

    I do not think it necessary even after it has eaten the mass of thousands of iron nuclei to consider the gravity of the TBH at all. I bet, that the random thermal motion of earth-core atoms is still the main means by which "meals" are delivered to the TBH, but probably then, these meals will be the entire nuclei, not just a quark or proton at a time. Eventually, the gravity of the growing not as tiny TBH will contribute and capture whole atoms that happen to be passing near it. I.e. it will effectively make a microscopic "void" near the center of the Earth. Then it becomes more appropriate to speak of "plastic flow" of core material into this void, instead of random motion. Once the BH (not not calling it "tiny" any more, but its EH is still probably less than 0.01 mm.**) is being "feed" by organized plastic flow, the entire Earth will vanish inside in a few hours at most.


    I certainly hope at least one of the two "IFs" I mentioned above is not satisfied (and expect this to be the case) so Earth is probably in no danger. I just think that it is necessary to examine this (presumably) remote possibility in the hope of finding some physics that blocks the above outlined accelerating growth, or at least show that the time required to reach the "tiny void" stage is also comparable to the life of the sun.

    I have spent several years posting in Paul's thread mainly to show how silly his "Type II supernova" concern is. Thus, I hope my concern will be given serious consideration and I not just be dismissed as one more "chicken little." - Again I expect there is no danger, but this (and perhaps other?) concerns backed by serious physic (even without adequate math) should at least be taken seriously and hopefully, destroyed by better physic.

    CAN SOMEONE POSTING HERE DO THAT PLEASE?
    ------------------
    *Doing that is very complex. I outline a possible approach for making that estimate in a footnote of post 1566 of Paul's thread.

    **0.01 mm is "huge" on an atomic scale so "plastic flow" is what is happening. Because the pressure at the center of the Earth is so large, I expect this plasic flow into the growing 0.01mm void will be super-sonic! If it should ever get to this stage, the entire Earth will disapear in an hour or so, but the moon will not change its orbit. "Moon men" will however wonder why there was that final flash of black body thermal radiation (a micro-quasar) and where Earth went.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 11, 2008
  12. quantum_wave Contemplating the "as yet" unknown Valued Senior Member

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    This is an interesting link also:

    http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw76.html
     
  13. Lamont Cranston Registered Senior Member

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    Many thanks indeed to those who have contributed to the discussion on cosmic ray energies, etc.

    So if a proton in the LHC has an effective mass of 1.4 mg, a head on collision will contain a mass of 2.8 mg. What amount of energy will be released from a single head on collision?

    If E = mc2 is obeyed it will be

    E (J) = 0.0028 x c2

    Thats assuming 100% conversion. What % of mass to energy conversion is actually expected in these collisions?
     
  14. Lamont Cranston Registered Senior Member

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    deleted
     
    Last edited: Sep 11, 2008
  15. quantum_wave Contemplating the "as yet" unknown Valued Senior Member

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    *intended humor* Hmmm, 1,000,000%? *
     
  16. Lamont Cranston Registered Senior Member

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    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    I hope you are kidding
     
  17. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    Protons at LHC are at energies of up to 7 TeV.
    \(7 \, \mathrm{TeV} / c^2 \, = \, 1.25 \, \times \, 10^{-20} \, \mathrm{grams}\) That's about 100 million billion times smaller than your "1.4 mg"

    But since protons are composite (we know this from deep electron scattering experiments) even "head on collisions" don't involve all of this energy in pair-production. About 2 TeV is about the best you can expect, which typically results in a shower of dozens to hundreds of hadrons and leptons, (since they will also be highly relativitic, you can't just add up rest masses of particles).

    So "efficiency" when measured in rest mass is much less that this 14% top expectation. And as always, 50% of this new stuff will be antimatter.
     
  18. Lamont Cranston Registered Senior Member

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    137
    Thanks for that.
     
  19. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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    rpenner:

    I don't mind answering/addressing such concerns, but perhaps you should start a separate thread that pertains to the suit, as it is off-topic for this thread.

    Clearly you are keeping abreast of the court's doings, as I received that notice only yesterday. The defendant's contention is that the service [of Summons and Complaint] by use of a licensed Swiss process server upon the Legal Department at CERN was improper and therefore invalid; and that additionally it should have been written in French, the official language of that Swiss canton. The Court asked for clarification of the Hague Convention that pertains to service. The Hague Convention was adopted as an additional means of effecting service, whereby a party may provide the documents to his embassy in a host country, with a request that they be served on the host country's government for service upon a defendant in that host country. The Hague Convention does not require service by that method, but allows for that procedure to make things easier for a party effecting service. It also allows the traditional method utilized by plaintiffs. Such will be explained to the Court in the briefing thereon. The Hague Convention also allows for papers to be served in English or French, with an ability to have them translated into some other language of the host country, if necessary. CERN's language is English, and the Summons and Complaint were in English. Additionally, the Federal rules allow for service that actually effects the service, as was done on CERN. They do not contend they did not receive the documents; they just want to say thank you for the US $530,000,000+, but they could care less about the US court system.
     
  20. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    BenTheMan, rpenner, Walter and others active here all know more about this physics than I do, but none have responded to my request for “destruction to zero” of the quite remote possibility for disaster by the physic I described as briefly as I could in blue section of post:
    http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2004690&postcount=228
    I did not expect Walter to comment but was hoping someone would expose something wrong with this unlikely danger. I suspect that people are just being kind to me by not telling me that the existence of neutron stars proves that my remote possibility has zero probability. However, I know about that argument and while it is very reassuring, it is not “water tight” as I pointed out in part of Paul’s thread post 1524, which contains the following weak rebuttal:

    People at LHC, etc. … believe that the existence of neutron stars proves it has never happened as by their calculations even the fast BHs made by cosmic rays would have stopped inside and eaten all the neutron stars; but, many thousands of them, as pulsars, do exist etc. So {for there to be a non-zero probability of this danger} we also need either:
    (a) Even these "Fast (V ~= C) BHs would be stopped in neutron star" calculations are wrong,
    Or
    (b) {very high energy} Cosmic ray production is relatively recent and local in origin and has not had time to find all the neutron stars that originally existed. I.e. some neutron stars ARE being eaten NOW and are seen as Paul's Type II supernovas. Note the recent large Argentine Auger detector of very high energy cosmic rays does show narrow space localization. (Why not a short production time period on cosmic scales also?)


    Idea here is that high energy cosmic rays may be BRIEF (ON COSMIC TIME SCALE) pulses (perhaps not even spherical expanding pulses, but more like pulsar beams)*, and even if thousands of years duration in their generation, they may not have hit many neutron stars. Or the neutron stars/pulsars we see/hear may have formed after they had passed thru some modest star at that location. (Stars often have lower density than Earth.) The Auger detector data does seem to indicate that only a very small region of the heavens is sending very high energy cosmic rays in Earth’s direction now. I.e. some supernovas ARE triggered by the type of remote disaster physics the post 228 blue text worries about.
    ----------------
    *Vaguely like "bullets" fired out into the universe that would rarely hit a neutron star. (Lets not make the mistake of thinking on human time and space scales.)

    Again I ask:
    Can someone PLEASE show that the physics of post 228 here is flawed?
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 11, 2008
  21. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    Technically, it was an agent of the Swiss court system, from which they have had diplomatic immunity for the last 53 years. Perhaps you haven't seen the letter from the Swiss embassy which is also entered into the docket?

    [Docket item 58]

    Google quickly finds the document "Agreement between Switzerland and the European Organization for Nuclear Research Concerning the Legal Status of the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland"
    http://documents.cern.ch/archive/electronic/other/legal/articles/LSL00000012.pdf

    Because, you goofball, the LHC fearmongers depend on chargeless black holes to be their bugaboo. The charged black holes predicted by the most basic model of parton+parton->black hole would (provided they could exist and didn't immediately evaporate as existing theory demands) be easily stopped by solid matter.* To wit: the presence of the moon in the sky proves that cosmic-ray black holes don't exist or aren't dangerous to human civilization or have a non-Hawking mechanism for quickly boiling off any charge.

    The G & M paper is forced to consider and reject the third posibility using the long lifetimes of white dwarfs and neutron stars, and so we are left with just the first two cases: Cosmic-ray black holes don't exist or aren't dangerous to human civilization.

    Remember: Spreading baseless fears = murder

    * Charged relativistic sub-femtometer black holes would quickly dump all their momentum in solid rock, even when created by Cosmic rays.

    And not only are these fears baseless, they are directly addressed by the LSAG report.

    http://lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/LSAG-Report.pdf

    http://cdspages.web.cern.ch/cdspages/1120625.htm
     
    Last edited: Sep 12, 2008
  22. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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    Thanks for the link. Saved me a little time. That agreement, of course, is between CERN and Switzerland, and is only binding on Switzerland. It is designed to provide immunities, etc. for CERN employees while in CERN employ, but in Switzerland. The process server's status with Switzerland that we utilized is irrelevant for the service, and not relied upon in the motion. All he had to be was a human being, which certainly he was, and able to state the truth, which certainly he did. How he got inside CERN remains a mystery to me, but he did, and that's all that legally matters.

    But on a more general note - wow - you could get away with murder in Switzerland while at the CERN site, and avoid being prosecuted by Switzerland [unless the Director General elects to waive the immunity - which would probably happen]. This is rather like those rare murder cases that happen on cruise ships - where do you prosecute?

    And, as I said, this is more properly in another thread that could be started, so if you have further insight on this issue, please start a thread on it and send me a PM to respond, so I don't miss it [I don't always see every thread that's started].
     
  23. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    No, I couldn't. CERN, its buildings, properties, representatives, officials and experts enjoy diplomatic immunity. I do not.

    In your complaint, you yourself referred to it as a "European agency" -- how the hell would that work if they didn't have diplomatic immunity? How could you invest billions in a tunnel that straddles international borders if every shouting match between the countries turned into a custodial battle?

    As to starting a new thread, I'll consider it, but I don't know that any of the areas is entirely appropriate.
     

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