Particle Smashing: Why?

Absolutely.

 

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But why didn't Fermilab with all of its upgrades during its life so far not bring peoples concerns to bear on it?:shrug: It would seem to me that Fermilab is one forth the power as the LHC but no one ever commented about it creating a black hole, I just wonder why not. Now people are worried, but why not before now.

 

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"On the Shoulders of Giants we stand" [attrib.]

You have to imagine Science is like a Pyramid made of Cards, where each event where we research is a card. The Pyramid in this particular question has no height limit as it's every level is created with the passage of time. Every time you think we've reached a pinnacle, there are off-shoots starting a whole new chain of research events. Soon that pinnacle card is just another card in the layers that make up this ever increasing pyramids foundation.

Sometimes those cards that appear are just theory and need to be tested when of course it is possible to test. This might mean that technology has to adapt and evolve to allow the testing, Researchers then use this technological evolution to test what Theories exist to prove them true or not and of course extrapolate further.

CERN has already provided a lot of offshoots for their troubles, some of them obviously tangents from what their goal is, like for instance the birth of the Internet.

 

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Because 1) it wasn't trendy for idiots to worry about it back when Fermilab started up and 2) Fermilab didn't get as much publicity.

See, your problem is that you keep trying to reason things out as if there was some validity to these idiot's wild claims. There isn't. It's like asking why someone is afraid of vampires but not werewolves. You're not going to get a rational explanation for it because it isn't based on rationality.

 

Don't all these little colisions happen all the time in nature? It's just we'll be able to do the same thing in the lab.

 

See, there you go trying to use logic and reason again...

Yes, actually collisions with much, much more energy than this happen all the time in nature. Which is one of the major pieces of evidence that it's safe.

 

I need to stop that...I'm going to ruin my "street cred".

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Miniature black holes, vacuum bubbles, strange matter.

The mini black holes are probably going to vapour away through hawking radiation in a couple of milli- or microseconds, and if they don't it will still take some thousand of years to consume a nearby proton (or something) since the distances are so great at that scale.

I'm more concerned with vacuum bubbles, if it turns out that the universe isn't in the lowest energy state, and that there is a lower state then the whole universe will settle into that state instead. Which wouldn't be that nice for us. However there is many things that tell us that the universe is in the lowest state already.

Then we have the concern of the strange matter. If the strange matter has a more stable form than ordinary matter, then all ordinary matter will evolve into the strange matter instead (very fast I might add). But as with the vacuum bubbles, they think that ordinary matter is the most stable form of matter (as it has had time to evolve into what it is for ALOT of time).

There is a paper out there that explains all this (as the scientists obviously have done research about it).

The most reaffirming fact is that we are bombarded by high energy collisions all the time (at a higher energy than LHC can produce).

However no one mentioned that the temperature will be BELOW that of space! Couldn't that have any effect on the consequences? Is there other places where it naturally is colder than that of space?

 

I was reading in the paper today about the computer network that will crunch the data for LHC...over 60,000 computers. Gave me a little wood.

 

I like that description, Stryder.
Thanks.

 

That's a false analogy. You are comparing almost 4 orders of magnitude here while the LHC is less than one order of magnitude than previous man-made experiments.

A stick of dynamite about 0.28 kg with an energy density of about 7.5 MJ/kg, but it detonates at about 7700 m/s from whence comes its great destructive power.

A firework (by law since 1966) can contain no more than 50 mg of black powder which deflagrate (burns) at about 4.6 MJ/kg.

While the protons at the Tevatron are at 0.98 TeV and those at LHC are at 7 TeV and those in cosmic rays are in excess of 300,000,000 TeV -- near the energy of those maximum-legal fireworks.