Quote:
Originally Posted by Pippin
Ok I'll provide a definitive answer as to why I believe there is a fundamental difference between what occurs in nature and what will occur in the lab.
The first collision will be similar to a cosmic ray collision. However further collisions occurring in each test will occur under increasing temperatures. The energy release of each individual collision will remain consistent, but the final collisions in the "experimental programme" will occur at "temperatures more than 100 000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun, concentrated within a minuscule space". This is not the temperature at which cosmic rays collisions take place in nature. They fail to qualify that in their safety statement.
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I doubt there is any interaction between the individual collisions (I'm not a particle physicist). The "clouds" of protons are of such low density that for all practical purposes they are still a vacuum and collisions are actually rare, tiny events, that on the scale of protons are extremely far apart. And though the two-proton plasma created in a collision might be "hot", the total energy content is still very tiny, and gets quickly carried away in the shower of fragments from the collision.
I would not take the "100,000 times hotter than the Sun" comment as a literal, scientific description, but more as a public relations line from the CERN PR office (ohhhh, isn't that coool).
Just my humble opinion.