Sep 11th, 2008 at 10:22 am
World Not Yet Safe From the LHC
A lot of my friends were gloating yesterday that the activation of the Large Hadron Collider yesterday did not, in fact, lead to the end of the world. This, though, turns out to be based on a misunderstanding. The machine was activated, but as of yet no particles have been collided and, naturally enough, it’s the colliding that might lead to the end of the world. Long story short, we’re not out of the woods yet. Indeed, the first high-energy particle collision won’t happen until October. And worse, my understanding is that a collision could result in something (a very small black hole, I think) that destroys the world, but doesn’t actually do the destroying until some time after the collision. So be on guard.
54 Responses to “World Not Yet Safe From the LHC”
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September 11th, 2008 at 10:42 am
It could be like a Rapture for nihilists!
September 11th, 2008 at 10:43 am
You think you’re funny, don’t you Mr. Wise-Guy? Well, that black hole may be the only thing that saves us from a McCain-Palin Administration.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:46 am
I’m confused. Is this post suppose to be a joke, a useless warning or reality or a harmless waste of time?
September 11th, 2008 at 10:47 am
If a black hole from which light or substance cannot escape is to destroy the planet why hasn’t the existence of Sarah Palin already accomplished the feat?
September 11th, 2008 at 10:49 am
Actually, according to the anti-LHCers, it will take about 50 months for a black hole created in the LHC to destroy the Earth. As you say, the first high energy collision doesn’t happen until mid-to-late October. Which means that the world doesn’t end until December 2012, which gives you TWO end-of-the-world theories for the price of one!
September 11th, 2008 at 10:51 am
Alex Knapp,
That’s a relief. I really want to know how the election turns out before the Earth is destroyed.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Well, if the world is going to end in 2012 then I am not switching to CFLs.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:56 am
DC’s IEEE offices sent out a tongue-in-cheek e-mail stating “Should the earth be consumed by blackholes [sic] or sucked into a space time continuum on Sept. 10, the IEEE Washington office will officially close until further notice.”
September 11th, 2008 at 10:56 am
Destroy the Earth?!?!?!
Egad. I hope not. That’s where I keep all my stuff.
The Tick
September 11th, 2008 at 10:58 am
And worse, my understanding is that a collision could result in something (a very small black hole, I think) that destroys the world, but doesn’t actually do the destroying until some time after the collision. So be on guard.
I assume this post is 98% sarcasm. (But if it’s not, it should be: The observation that the beam isn’t colliding with anything yet is true, but even when it starts there is ZERO possibility of producing detectable, never mind dangerous, black holes.)
September 11th, 2008 at 11:00 am
The LHC will not destroy the world. Yglesias is practicing the politics of fear. Hyping phony threats is bad because it leads to missed opportunities. Its hard to know what benefits this experiment will lead to. Maybe there was a lot of better basic science that could have been done with the money. Still improving our understanding of physics and the beginning of the universe could be pretty awesome.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:04 am
Of course, you cannot get out of the woods that you were never in. What a totally non issue. Just like the world would end on Jan 1, 2000…
September 11th, 2008 at 11:05 am
I get that this whole thing is quite titillating to people who can’t be arsed to do the minimum amount of fact checking about the LHC to find that it is harmless[1][2][3][4], but these bullshit media stories about its potential to cause the end of the world have quite literally become deadly in their stupidity.
Please, don’t be part of the problem.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:06 am
Live LHC webcam!
September 11th, 2008 at 11:07 am
It’s not precisely a joke. Some scientists with about as much credibility as the global warming deniers hired by the oil companies are out making accusations that the collider is going to create a black hole, quasar, or strangelet which migrates around inside the Earth and wreaks all sorts of havoc. My favorite prediction was that beams of particles would appear in about four years through polar opposite sides of the Earth destroying everything in their path! People who think that the dinosaurs are a hoax are probably getting worked up about the end times.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:09 am
Good, harmless fun!
We should send death threats to the particle physicists involved, too, based on our misunderstanding of a non-existent risk. That’d be hilarious!
On preview, my humorlessness is well-accompanied.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Luckily, there’s a handy Web site where you can keep on top of this.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:14 am
http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
September 11th, 2008 at 11:15 am
This has happened before, you know: when Enrico Fermi built and tested the world’s first nuclear reactor in Chicago during WW2, there was a more than zero theoretical chance that, having started a self-sustaining chain reaction, there would be no way to stop it short of creating a small star where the earth had been.
IIRC, the way it was done was there were something like 50 2-ton blocks of graphite (pencil lead), and the inner ones had small pieces of plutonium (which had just been invented) embedded in them. In between there were rods made of cadmium, which is a kind of damper for nuclear reactions. I gather there is evidence of a natural nuclear reaction having occurred eons ago in Africa, but I don’t think they knew that then — so far as they could tell, humans had created a new, unstable element with radioactivity beyond anything ever found in nature, and were now going to see if it would grow — exponentially, which had never happened before except in things like stars.
There were grad students manning the cadmium rods, and others standing by with buckets of water that had cadmium dissolved in it. At Fermi’s signal, the students pulled the cadmium rods out of the pile, one by one, until it went critical — a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. Must have been an interesting moment, hearing all those Geiger counters clicking.
What I love about the scene is that the grad students surely had enough physics knowledge to appreciate what they were doing — including the slight but real theoretical risk that they were about to blow up the world.
“Okay, fellas — start pulling slowly….”
September 11th, 2008 at 11:17 am
Re “Indeed, the first high-energy particle collision won’t happen until October. And worse, my understanding is that a collision could result in something (a very small black hole, I think) that destroys the world, but doesn’t actually do the destroying until some time after the collision. ”
————–
Nice to know the Democrats have a Plan B.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Well this may be the only thing that saves us from the zombie and/or robot menace that Matt has so suspiciously stopped warning us about. coincidence? I think not.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Black holes? You poor naive sons of bitches. You know this is all a concerted conspiracy by the scientific community to create and run a machine that can capture and kill God, right? Smash his face in with Higgs-boson particles? Prove the superiority of science to religion?
Your world ending scenarios are childish.
http://thesebastards.blogspot.com/
September 11th, 2008 at 11:37 am
What a totally non issue. Just like the world would end on Jan 1, 2000…
Well, it did. Some people just haven’t noticed, yet.
September 11th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
“Hadron Collider?” — Emily Latella.
September 11th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
According to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the LHC did destroy the world. It’s just that the one that was not destroyed is the one we continue to exist and giggle and snark in.
September 11th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
wdn’t the black hole be somewhere around the size of dime? i’m far from anything resembling a physicist. but how strong of a gravitational pull does a dime-sized black hole have? cd it even pull someone’s finger off? i am clueless.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
No one is certain what a black hole of that size would do but the idea is that, since it sucks in matter, it would grow and eventually be bigger than a dime. Regardless, all physicists are fairly united in the belief that a black hole, of whatever size, on or near the earth would be a very bad thing. The point of contention isn’t a black hole, but whether or no the collider can/will create one…
We have, in point of fact, been colliding things for quite some time. The LHC just collides them at higher energies.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
I like how the site admin actually wrote up some javascript that would work:
I feel quite secure, now.
wdn’t the black hole be somewhere around the size of dime? i’m far from anything resembling a physicist. but how strong of a gravitational pull does a dime-sized black hole have? cd it even pull someone’s finger off? i am clueless.
Well, the volume of the black hole (size of a dime) is less important than its mass (weight of the burrito so heavy God couldn’t lift it); by definition, a black hole is incredibly massive even in a small space, and an object’s gravitational field, AFAIK, is more relate to mass than volume. Like, by a lot.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Funny, they don’t mention the end of the world in the LHR rap:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM
Of course, people in white coats are never to be trusted. . .
September 11th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Size, aka the event horizon, is determined by mass.
The problem with a relatively stationary black hole would be the (predominantly) one way nature of the mass transfer. While it might have very little gravitaional pull at first, it would only get bigger and never go away. If they made a black hole with escape velocity, it wouldn’t be a big problem.
If a black hole is small enough – a few proton masses, it would be likely to vanish due to Hawking radiation before absorbing any more mass, provided Hawking radiation really exists.
September 11th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
On the off chance that the LHC does create what would be a quantum black hole with a sub atomic-sized event horizon, the theory is that it would evaporate via Hawking radiation within nanoseconds, much like the rapid decay of all the other exotic subatomic particles that come spiraling out into the particle detection chambers.
September 11th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
As my wife said, when she read that they were trying to replicate the Big Bang, “Maybe they’ll get it right this time.”
September 11th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Nothing like depending on something nobody’s ever seen (Hawking radiation) to save the world! Sounds a lot like clean coal…
September 11th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Hawking radiation is a few turtles down on that iffy chain…
IF the LHC creates a Black Hole
AND
IF it’s of the right size
AND
IF its not moving fast enough
AND
IF Hawking was wrong
THEN
we’re screwed.
September 11th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
So which Presidential candidate would you trust to protect you from a black hole?
September 11th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
My friends, no one has every worried the Earth would be destroyed by a white hole, if you get my drift, my friends.
September 11th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Mr Yglesias-
Most [all?] of the responses here are snark. I wish I could think of one worthy of being in the Top 5, but I haven’t so I’ll just inject a little reality in hopes it doesn’t bring down the quality of the mien.
Firstly, it’s only right that, despite any net unfairness from your typically high standards not having formed some deferential toleraance, and also bearing in mind the apparent seriousness of tone in your post may indicate an elevated form of humor with which I am not familiar, most of these reader responses are mocking your post.
A little walk through:
[1] For the most part, Hawking’s “theory” is only “theoretical” in the manner of Darwin’s “Theory” of Evolution.
And not even, since while Darwin had data which was to some extent “observable”, his “theory” went quite a bit beyond bringing together under one through-reasoned set of mechanisms a lot of observations and scientifically-established “theories” of others before him and contemporaries researching in the same area: rather, in the process of reasoning through the principles of the mechanism he “theorized” explained the reliable data, Darwin broke some revered heads and busted some pampered butts.
Anyone who has actually read Descent of Man knows [a] it’s tough sledding to start, then it gets tougher as you realize the thrust of what is being said, and it only gets tougher as you try to hold it in mind in applying it to arguable exceptions, and [b] it’s freakin’ awesome how it has held over a century plus of explosions in the face of billions of bits of data, billions spent in research, and clear minded reconsiderations by millions of objective thinking people and several tens of thousands of extremely bright folks.
In contrast, for the most part Hawking’s theory relies on well-established scientifically confirmed concepts. Indeed, there’s a lot of folks in his world of stratospheric smarties who are prepared to dispute that he even deserves to be credited with it, because in large part Hawking’s being credited with this “theory” in owing to his [quite understandably] disciplined approach to re-articulation.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
[2] Look: if black holes were as simple as your post implies and several pretty darn funny responses here depend on for their arguable merit, then you wouldn’t have been here to post and attract all this bleacher creature noise.
What we refer to as Hawking’s theory recognizes [not "theorizes" - RECOGNIZES] that black holes ARE unstable, or else neither “they” would exist nor would “we” exist spend time blogging about them.
[3] Hawking’s theory [again] recognizes [not theorizes] that the ways in which black holes are unstable
[in THIS universe at least; obviously he & we are limited to this universe, although the same may be able to be said for so-called "American political conservatives" aka The Guardians of The Sacred Stoopid]
are limited by the dimensions in which matter exists in this universe and the principles and properties of such matter.
Now, I’ll admit that when one first gets wind of quantum physics, quirks, quarks and string theory, things can seem a bit more, how shall I put it: geeee ZUSSSS promoting. But the fact is that all of those things have been proven and are widely accepted as flowing from and consistent with the larger frameworks of Newton, Einstein and a whole lot of other folks with less effective press agents.
[4] “Unstable” as a term does not necessarily mean “dangerous”
[Messrs GW Bush, R Cheney & JS McCain & Ms S Palin notwithstanding]
but it might
[See comment in parentheses most directly above],
and in the sense used in Hawking’s Theory definitely does not. Unstable in this context means it is liable to, i.e. very likely to, degrade so rapidly it’s very existence
[or past existence]
is undetectable by conventional means, even as enhanced by the wizards of modern science and technology.
Indeed, among the challenges of the CERN project is in whether the technologies in use will succeed in recovering usable data.
[Those technologies themselves may be of greater importance; there has been much discussion about how the "Grid" will inevitably replace the "Web", and how soon, and what that will mean in terms of plugging the holes that the Stoopids currently in power have been unable to overcome in getting a clear bead on the pulsations in our large intestinal tracts.].
[5] The term “remote” has been bandied about in terms of some “untoward” incident with the Hadron Collider
[I agree that obviating a McCain-Palin administration would not qualify as "untoward"].
The chance of me plunking down a couple of bucks on a SuperBall Lottery with a potential return of several hundred mill, is “remote”.
The chance that a 6 handicap golfer i.e. a darn decent amateur player, might be able to defeat Tiger Woods over one 18 hole round, even were his left leg to be amputated, is “remote”.
The chance of the Hadron Collider creating a black hole that ends all animal and plant life on this planet as we now know it before we are able to do it some other way is approximately as remote as the chance that the American Christian fundamentalist conception of God is accurate
[although if it were, I'd readily concede He's a Republican].
September 11th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
“Hadron Collider?” — Emily Latella
“Radon Colonic?!?” – Emily Latella
September 11th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Time to buy some duck tape and bottled water, in case a black hole destroys the world.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Actually, this presents a pretty cool hypothetical, much better than the typical Hollywood “you’ve got 24 hours to live” deal (which is inevitably spent on sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, or getting revenge on your slo-mo killer, or both). Here, we prospectively have 4-5 weeks to live. How, other than an epic, Hunter S. Thompson-to-the-third-power binge of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, do we proceed on this leisurely stroll to oblivion?
(I assume Matt’s down for lots of transit porn.)
September 11th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
if a black hole were created by the collider, it would be sub-atomic in size, and it would take quite a long time to consume much of anything. It would grow at a geometric rate, though, so, at some point, it might be a problem. What point? Hard to say, my calculus is rusty on that point.
September 12th, 2008 at 3:39 am
“Is this post suppose to be a joke, a useless warning or reality or a harmless waste of time?”
How about all of the above, like most of Matt’s posts?
September 25th, 2008 at 7:25 am
Dont Worry we are all fucking going to be alright 1 percent chance out of 1000 doomsday but chances are never mate i reckon, we all do. well be fine.
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