Large Hadron Collider discovers new pentaquark particle

I don't need to be a farmer to recognize bulls**t.

 

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I'm utterly confused at this point. So previously they were thought of As an unstoppable reaction, then their minds changed when they were capable of creating them?

 

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As for things outside of the court issue, apparently many people even on this forum agree with Walter Wagner.

In a previous post: q-reeus whom is a senior member even posted;As for the number 3 fear introduced by hahnaz - strange matter catastrophe, I would rate it as vastly greater than either mBH or vacuum decay scenarios, but still very small:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_matter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet


This is confusing at this point. So the possibility of these strangelets is real. The COM collisions seem to have more energy then any phenomena ever observed.

 

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Not long after the prospect of making nuclear weapons was realised to be real, one of the points discussed was the possibility of any chain reaction to ignite the atmosphere.
Needless to say the chances were deemed insignificant enough to go ahead with the project.
Similar claims were speculated with the experiments conducted at the RHIC.
Your suggestion, or anyone else's for that matter, that scientists would recklessly endanger the whole planet, then or now, to conduct experiments is crazy in the extreme and nothing more then baseless scaremongering.

 

It's a good thing I'm not the boss of CERN.

Scaremonger: "If you turn on the collider, it could start a chain reaction that might destroy the entire planet!"

Me: "Oh dear, nevermind... it will be glorious!" *maniacal laughter*

 

Not quite as straight-forward as you imply. The concern was, with the fusion-weapon testing, for the potential for ignition of a Nitrogen fusion chain-reaction in the atmosphere. Nitrogen nuclei can fuse with themselves in an exothermic reaction. However, they have to be very close together to fuse. There was enough uncertainty, back in the day, as to the exact fusion cross-section for Nitrogen fusion (the error-bars were still relatively broad), that there remained a small but non-zero chance to ignite such reaction, based on the then-known information. I believe it was calculated to be about 1/100,000 or thereabouts. Since only a handful of people knew of this, and the prevailing attitude was 'Better Dead Than Red', those handful decided to go forward with the testing. I've read the since-declassified report on that. As it turns out, we now know it was impossible to do such.

With respect to the LHC, the concern is the potential for a fusion chain reaction with strangelet nuclei fusing with nearby He or H, being capable of fusing with such nearby nuclei, and growing larger, in an exothermic reaction. I have seen no calculations as the probability of such strangelets being produced and such fusion-reaction occurring or not occurring. That is partly because this is an unknown area of theoretical physics, unlike Nitrogen fusion which was known and data existed on it. At the most, I've seen Wilczek write that it was 'unlikely' with respect to three separate events that must occur, making it altogether 'very unlikely'. This was followed by his maniacal laughing if he's wrong, because 'oh well', no one will be around to say he was wrong. This cannot be modeled in nature, so far as we know, because such high energy collisions with very-high-Z nuclei are not known to occur. Cosmic rays of such high-Z exist, of course [I've found both Uranium and Lead in the cosmic rays], but their measured energies are all much lower than what will happen at the LHC, if pb-pb collisions are allowed to happen at the proposed energy.

 

A paper written on nitrogen fusion in the atmosphere, since declassified: http://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/docs1/00329010.pdf

 

Be that correct or not, that was not the point I was making.

 

I'm surprised Rpenner is not trying to disprove Walter Wagners point. I actually see a lot of people repeating it, COM collisions with such energies as PB-PB have not been observed in nature there fore we cannot state strangelets will not be created.

 

That is not true. There are cosmic ray that have way higher energies than the LHC collisions can produce.
High energy cosmic rays.

 

He already did. Wagner is the illiterate not rpenner. You want to believe his illiterate bullshit. Have at it. None of the people repeating it have the scholarship to know what they're talking about. The folks at CERN do. If Wagner actually believed his argument he would have filed the lawsuit.

 

It is well known that there are low-Z cosmic rays of very high energy. That is qualitatively different than high-energy cosmic rays.

It is the COM energy that is of consequence. Just ask A. Einstein. Energy is relative. If you are travelling along side of a high-Z cosmic ray that is at a very high energy relative to Earth, at very close to its speed, it would not appear as a high-energy cosmic ray to you, the traveler travelling along with the cosmic ray. It would appear as a low-energy cosmic ray. The people at the LHC know about this. You do not (it would appear). Consequently, they look to the COM energy, and seek to maximize it by having beams colliding from opposite directions, rather than the old-fashioned way of simply running a beam into a stationary target. There are no high-E, high-Z cosmic ray collisions of the COM of the pb-pb for the LHC in nature anywhere near Earth (a few might take place in deep space when one of the high-E high-Z cosmic rays runs head-on into another one of nearly opposite direction and energy, mimicking the LHC. That was an argument put forth in support of the RHIC in 1999, that that type of collision occurs in nature and therefore such strangelets created by such a process would be 'harmless'. I pointed out that theory suggests they would be radioactive and would decay into harmless matter in a matter of seconds to hours, and therefor could not effect nearby star systems, eliminating their argument. There has, thus far, been no further safety argument in that regard. You cranks who don't understand relativistic physics should get off this website.

 

You're the clueless crank. Your discussion is juvenile what if bullshit without asking somebody who knows first. That's why you didn't file your suit to stop the experiment. Quit scaremongering in this forum. It's been established that your argument is bullshit. And you accepted it when you didn't file the lawsuit to stop the startup. Get it crank. IE at some point along your path to shut down the LHC experiment and save the world you realized that you're full of crap and bailed out.

 

It's not a point. How can one stand on a platform of ignorance and have a point? Wagner was content to talk about raising money, but wasn't serious about getting professional representation for his anti-LHC lawsuit. Wagner himself doesn't believe in doing more than attention-seeking behavior and miseducating children on the principles of probability.
http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/hzqmb9/large-hadron-collider

Hadronization is the low-energy freezing out of QGP fireball, dominated by low-mass quarks and anti-quarks. You get mostly mesons with |B|=0, plenty of lone (anti-)baryons with |B|=1, precious few (anti-)nuclei with 1<|B|<5 and the super-rare (anti-)nuclei with 4 < |B| < 10.
Some small fraction of these (anti-)nuclei will be formed with a non-zero strangeness (hyper-nuclei), but because non-strange quarks are produced as well, there is no net gain in strangeness per baryon at time of hadronization. But we already know the properties of light nuclei and light hypernuclei, so the types of objects that the LHC can produce are in the known category of objects which do not pose existential peril.

For every 7000 \(\pi^{+}\) mesons, there are expected about 350 protons, 350 neutrons and 224 \(\Lambda\) baryons, 39 \(\Xi^{-}\) baryons, and 7 \(\Omega^{-}\) baryons but only one deuteron. There are less particles with high numbers of strange quarks because the strange quark mass is not negligible at the relatively low temperature of QGP freezeout and so there are less strange-quarks than either up or down quarks. There's also lots of anti-matter which is why there are so many mesons. Similarly, nuclei with baryon number higher than 1 are super rare because of the need for 3n quarks to escape to the surface of the fireball as a unit.

Looking at 1 billion \(\pi^{+}\) mesons, here are the relative numbers for a well-vetted model.
\(\begin{array}{lr} \textrm{Meson} & \textrm{Relative Number} \\ \hline \\ \pi^+ & 1,000,000,000 \\ K^- & 164,000,000 \\ \phi & 20,700,000 \\ \hline \\ \textrm{Baryon} & \textrm{Relative Number} \\ \hline \\ p & 50,100,000 \\ \Lambda & 32,000,000 \\ \Xi^- & 5,550,000 \\ \Omega^- & 953,000 \\ \hline \\ \textrm{Nucleus} & \textrm{Relative Number} \\ \hline \\ ^1 H & 50,100,000 \\ ^2 H & 141,000 \\ ^3 H & 3,060 \\ ^3 He & 3,070 \\ ^3_{\Lambda} H & 864 \\ ^4 He & 11 \end{array}\)
Both increasing numbers of strange quarks and baryon number make the outcome more unlikely. Extrapolating from these numbers, a procedure not authorized by the model -- but suggested by the exponential fall-off with baryon number, a \(^{12} C\) nucleus would only have a relative number of 0.0000000000000000187 (or \(1.87 \times 10^{-17}\)) which means it's got an estimated chance of forming of 34/Avogadro's number per head-on Pb-Pb collision. (Or less than 10 times that for a post-upgrade LHC.) At merely 200 collisions per second, that's just 1 chance in 28 billion of creating just one carbon nucleus per century of continuous LHC operation in Pb-Pb mode. Since the Sun is expected to burn out in a mere 50 million centuries (and no one expects the LHC to be in continuous operation for even 1 century, and the odds of human civilization crashing aren't zero over that timespan), the chance of this happening is negligible.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.6382
http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.2098

Since small dangerous strangelets aren't predicted by any model consistent with relevant data, the burden falls on Wagner to demonstrate that small dangerous strangelets are phenomena of the actual universe, rather than hypothetical behaviors of models not tied to experiment. Only then may one have a sensible discussion on what that probability of the event happening is. Instead papers with dubious parameter settings and/or models with low orders of approximation of reality are presented as if they were relevant evidence. When the evidence matters, Wagner brings the irrelevant.

Other researchers have experimentally confirmed hypernuclei with baryon number higher than 200 (obviously NOT formed at the LHC) with no reports of stability or danger. Thus the burden is on Wagner to detail how a product of the LHC produces a runaway reaction with existential consequences. This he has not attempted. At all the crucial points he starts waving his hands and equating a disaster scenario in a movie script with a physical scenario not involving special effects.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.0769

 

Think it possible raising money was the point.., and that filing a lawsuit a mistake.., that foiled the purpose of the point?

.. Or did he make money on it in the end?

 

I don't know.
I do know that his web page was soliciting donations. I read online someone self-report a $2k donation. If one believes that report, one might believe it was just one of many. I never saw that 501 tax-exempt status was applied for.
In outlays, we know Wagner paid out for filing fees and the Government was awarded costs (things like Xeroxing) in their win of the appeal. There was also an unknown amount of airfare for Wagner (and I believe Sancho) to make it to the Hawaiian appeal. So even if you believe the self-report of a $2k donation, there's no clear proof of net profit.

 

Forgive me if my understanding is minimal, but your contention is that CERN calculated the risk of a strangelet disaster being 1 in 28 billion?

 

No -- I'm showing that a empirical model of NUCLEUS formation suggests that if you ran the LHC continuously and exclusively at maximum Pb-Pb mode for 1 whole century the odds of creating a Carbon-12 nucleus, identical to the ones already in your body, is just 1 in 28 billion. The empirical data shows the chances of a particular nucleus falls off rapidly with baryon number. Carbon-12 nuclei are harmless for the purposes of this discussion -- Carbon-12 nuclei that the odds are that you'll die before a single one is formed are extra-harmless.

Since the field of hyper-nuclei (nuclei where a strange-quark containing baryon is substituted for a neutron or proton) with low baryon number (<200) has already been well-studied by much less powerful machines, the conclusion is the the LHC is very, very bad at making nuclei, and a bit worse at making hyper-nuclei. It exists to blow protons and therefore nuclei apart -- what's left over is very similar to the primordial constituents of the universe -- Hydrogen, some helium, perhaps traces of lithium and beryllium.

No one knows if stable strangelets lumps of strange quark matter can be formed in our universe because astrophysical observations of neutron stars have not yet constrained the Equation of State for baryonic matter to know what happens to neutron star collisions. But if it is possible to form them in the Big Bang, then they should not be all of microscopic, stable and corrosive to normal nuclei or we would see evidence of their danger in the sky. And if they can only form in the interior of neutron stars, then the LHC is also safe. And if they are not stable down to a mass of \(10^{-20} \, g\) then the LHC is also safe. We aren't talking physics until a concrete scientific model of strange quark matter is proposed. This the scare mongers have not done in 9 years and will not do, because while demonstrating a particular model is excluded by empirical observations certainly advances science, it does not advance their agenda to make you pay attention to them.

 

RPENNER - I think you are not only well versed in this subject but astonishingly so. Your intelligence and knowledge on the subject matter make you feel safe, while others like me drown in fear. As irrational as it may be to fear the LHC, one point that Walter Wagner does bring up is that we just don't know because of the astounding Collision Energies. I believe it was Q-Reeus another senior member whom also stated the fact that we don't know makes it possible however unlikely. How ever far expansive our model is it still does not explain a wide range phenomena, and I think that is Wagner's point. What if we are missing something, what if something happens not explained by our model (This happens all the time). I'm sure you will not lose any sleep over the planned Pb - Pb collisions, but I appreciate you trying to disprove people whom fear the collisions.

 

As bad as the scare mongering is, and that is all it is, the LHC is not producing collision energies equal to what happens naturally. What it does is produce collisions under controlled conditions where they can be studied.

Freedom of speech is a great thing, but one must always remember that just because a person's right to speak is protected, does not make what they are saying true.