I love those images!

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

No worries at all. Sometimes I don't make myself clear.

Or maybe most civs extinguish themselves with a bowl of spaghetti.

Can't prove it's impossible.

Has Stuart just solved the problem of Dark Matter?

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Relight the Firefly!

"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

Just like my backyard elf.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

{Emphasis mine}

The Flying Spaghetti Monster wouldn't be so cruel! Oh, say it's not so!

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

"Hadron" is a cool word. Just like "Palisade".

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

I too am concerned about the Large Hadron Collider and if you read deeper so are many people, as such I actually have a forum devoted to the concerns over the safety, we are talking about th potential destruction of the planet, and consequently our entire race this matter should not be taken lightly.

it doesn't matter how "small" the chance is, it's still a small chance all of us will die.

and not just death, but any evidence of ouor existence goes down the tubes as well.

http://www.ebenonce.com/LHCConcerns/Forums/phpBB3/

The LHC concerns board is dedicated to being a rational voice.

But if you're seriously worried that it stands a chance worth worrying about that it would destroy the world, it isn't.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

To be a rational board your members would be required to accept rational evidence. As every rational evidence says that there is no danger, there would be no rational reason for such a board...

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"Who does not know anything, must believe everything."
Baroness Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach 1830-1916
our animal welfare board and organisation

Refreshments. Many groups continue to exist long after they are no longer necessary or useful because someone keeps bringing really good refershments to the meetings.

I think this may explain the longevity of Congress.

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

That, plus the ability to set your own pay and benefits for a "job" that is as easy or hard as you make it!

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

CERNs web site states that we have not been destroyed by effects of cosmic rays and micro black holes will evaporate.

However, cosmic rays travel too fast to be captured by Earths gravity, and Hawking Radiation is disputed and contradicts Einsteins highly successful relativity theory. Collider particles smash head on like a car collision and can be captured by Earths gravity, and relativity predicts micro black holes will not decay (Hawking called Einstein doubly wrong, yet it is Einstein who is repeatedly found to have been correct in his theories). There is currently no reasonable proof of LHC safety, LSAG (LHC Safety Assessment Group) has been trying for months to prove safety without success. I hold the minority opinion that it may not be possible because it may in fact not be safe.

Cosmic Rays from the legal complaint.

any such novel particle created in nature by cosmic ray impacts would be left with a velocity at nearly the speed of light, relative to earth. At such speeds, . . . , is believed by most theorists to simply pass harmlessly through our planet with nary an impact, safely exiting on the other side. . . . Conversely, any such novel particle that might be created at the LHC would be at slow speed relative to earth, a goodly percentage would then be captured by earths gravity, and could possibly grow larger [accrete matter] with disastrous consequences of the earth turning into a large black hole.

If this thing is so safe, why arent CERN scientists allowed to express any personal fears they might have about this Collider?

Alleged in the legal action: Chief Scientific Officer, Mr. Engelen passed an internal memorandum to workers at CERN, asking them, regardless of personal opinion, to affirm in all interviews that there were no risks involved in the experiments, changing the previous assertion of minimal risk.

(Statisticians generally consider minimal risk as 1-10%).

JTankers
LHCConcerns.com

At least you are trying to make a logical argument, which makes it possible to show where it is false. The particles in the LHC are moving at speeds close to 300,000 km/s, and the escape speed from Earth is 11 km/s. That means we would need two particles with an equal and opposite momentum to 11 parts in 300,000 to avoid making a black hole that escapes. Are you sure you want to argue that we expect "head-on collisions" of that kind of precision? Furthermore, the LHC websites referral to Hawking radiation is just trying to put off these absurd complaints, nobody really thinks that we need Hawking radiation to exist to avoid a black-hole danger. The real reason is that a black hole with the energy of a subatomic particle would be completely unimportant in every way, would be created by cosmic rays more often than at CERN, and would escape at close to the speed of light even if it were possible to make them that way.

A car accident has vastly more energy than an LHC collision, why don't you go trying to stop the manufacture of cars for fear their collisions might make black holes? No one can prove they don't, after all.So would LHC collisions, as I pointed out. Is that enough to put an end to this kind of argument, or will you just find another reason?

False. Come back when you've calculated the expected speed of these novel particles.
Big Brother mind control stops them. Er no, they don't have such personal fears.
Let's brainstorm why this might be. Because the risk is really 1-10%, or because hysterical media can't be trusted to understand when scientists say a risk is too small to consider?

This claim is very misleading.
We currently have two highly successful theories, which has stood up to everything that's been thrown at them.
General relativity and quantum mechanics.
They each work beautifully describing those phenomena they are designed to describe, and they both fail miserably when describing the part the other handles.
Arguing that Harking radiation contradicts general relativity doesn't actually say anything about Hawking radiation, it only says something about your ignorance of the areas covered by general relativity.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

My guess is that JTankers is just trolling, never mind. I guess the idea is, if you post an idea in enough places, it becomes true.

Professor Dr. Otto E. Roessler estimates 50 months Earth accretion time from a single micro black hole captured by Earth's gravity (www.golem.de/0802/57477-4.html, translation at http://www.lhcconcerns.com/LHCConcer....php?f=10&t=52)

I'm glad you are not a troll JTankers, but the "estimate" you cite is not an actual argument. It goes like this: "I include chaos theory, in some completely unconstrained and unexplained way, and I get that the usual timescale estimate of 50 million years becomes 50 months". That's not going to cut it, even for someone who has some education into how estimates work. The estimate is still only as good as the argument that leads to it, which is:
1) a micro black hole can be created (an unknown claim, yet is cited at "10 percent likelihood" somehow)
2) even though most such black holes will move at near c (a point you have yet to acknowledge, interestingly, as it is was the core of one of your arguments), every now and then you might have one at less than 11 km/s, and get caught in the Earth's gravity (no estimates made of how likely that would be, only that the vastly more numerous cosmic ray events don't count because they are not having head-on collisions with other similarly energetic particles)
3) if that happens, "chaos theory" magically tells us it will accrete the Earth in 50 months, not 50 million years as in other estimates of this process.

Now, I'll grant you that even if a more likely estimate is 50 million years, we should not be partaking in actions that could destroy the Earth on even that timescale. The real issue is, why are the new energy levels suddenly going to start making black holes that are different from any that have already been made, and why are they going to be moving at less than 11 km/s at the higher energies than at the lower ones?

I agree that one should have an idea what the risks are of one's behavior, but it is all too easy to just make believe risks and say "but you can't prove this isn't a risk, can you?" I'll bet you drive a car. Can you prove that there's no risk you'll run over someone's little baby, even with all the precautions you can take? How can you get into a car if you can't prove that you won't do that? At some point, we have to be able to say "I can't worry about remote risks, it is enough that I not be cavalier about the real ones that surround us all the time."

Jim. Boy, if that isn't the truth. Speaking of truth, though, the circulation of particle/antiparticle streams, after being created in pairs, involves stochastic cooling. Since the streams travel in countercirculating circles, their bunching can be estimated. If some have higher energies, a time signal is sent across the ring electronically, while the kinematics dictates that the bunch takes the semicircular path. The time signal arrives at an accelerating/decelerating point with sufficient lead to make a "bunching" correction...cooling the "hot" ones, warming the "cool" ones....like a drill sergeant barking orders to recruits. That's the essence of stochastic cooling. So they end up with pretty well matched energies. Consequently, when the diverter kicks them out of the circulation, to an interaction area.....the possibility that a particle/antiparticle pair will have net velocity of < 11 km/sec is not nil at all, and if a mini-black hole is created there, it could drift like ball lightning.
I'd say the argument from the Milky Way is more obvious. Nothing prevents a black hole from forming this way by the cosmic rays that bombard us every second. Yet we see no "disappearance" of arms of the Milky Way, or star clusters, or individual stars. We do see quasars that have blinked out in surveys, but that can be from transverse velocities carrying them out of gas clouds the way pulsars do. So it seems a lot of paranoia over nothing. pete.

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A third rate theory forbids.
A second rate theory explains after the fact.
A first rate theory predicts.
A. Lomonosov

"Not nil" doesn't say a whole lot-- the chance that I'm connected to The Matrix and CERN is an invention of my imagination is "not nil". Can you provide an estimate of the actual probability you are talking about?

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Logic is the grammar of truth.

Meaning and absolute certainty are incompatible, and profound meaning and absolute certainty are profoundly incompatible.

The only thing intelligence is capable of is recognizing itself.

The ability to make rules and exempt yourself from them has a certain attraction, too...:P

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

Woo woos BLACK HOLE IS NOT SOME MYSTERIOUS KILL DEVICE JUST A POINT OF DENSE MATTER, PROTON SIZED BLACK HOLE WOULD TAKE MORE THAN A TRILLION TIMES THE AGE OF THE UNIVERSE TO DEVOUR A PIECE OF BREAD IF THE HAWKING RADIATION IS CORRECT PLEASE STOP THIS IS SILLY!!

Not to be da doofus, but is that accounting for the increased gravitational pull as new mass is added to the hole?

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

I generally agree with this quote, but I do not agree that Einstein's theory of relativity is successful; his theory cannot predict effects that would be created in LHC ; in fact, no one knows for sure what theory is the correct gravity theory at this level.

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'Just be a good team player in life', Andrew Evans

I'd still be interested in knowing what level of risk for the Earth's destruction would be too high?

I agree this isn't it, but I am still curious.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "the Earth's destruction" (actually destroying the physical planet, destroying life, destroying the human race, destroying human civilization, etc.), but 60+ years of nuclear weapons has not seemed too high a risk, at least as far as the nuclear powers are concerned.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

Well, if all humans are wiped out, I frankly am not all that interested in what goes on afterwards (saw an interesting documentary about that recently, though...nuclear power plants would start blowing up very quickly if we disappeared!).

As I said, as technology advances, this question will become crucial, IMO. And as I (and others) have mentioned, scientists at the Manhattan Project were taking bets on whether or not they were about to ignite the atmosphere. Assuming scientists (who are, after all, as human as the rest of us) will always make the right decision could end up being suicidal in the future. I think we need to plan now for when these decisions really are serious.

And, again, I am not talking about the LHC.

So the black hole and most of the particles produced are traveling almost 300,000 kilometers per second, but about 20% of them will pass though more than 10,000 kilometers of Earth. Couldn't that slow them down enough to linger dangerously? Since we don't know everything about everything, other particles (including black holes) may carry significant risk considering almost 7 billion humans are possibly envolved. Neil

It is an interesting question (interesting enough that it might be worth breaking it off and discussing it in another thread).

And I was serious about the analogy to the cold war and nuclear weapons. Though that wasn't an experiment, it was a situation where a relatively small percentage of the human race (the governments of the nuclear powers, particularly Russia and the US), had (have) the ability to destroy a large percentage of the humans on this planet.

What checks and balances exist to control that level of power?

(and no, I'm not trying to get political, but it seems to me to be the only real world analogy that is close enough)

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

That depends on the interaction cross section between a black hole and a quark, presumably. The black hole should just zoom right through the nucleus unless it grabs a quark, and I have no idea if that is even possible-- quarks don't like to be separated from each other. You have the black hole gravity fighting the strong nuclear force, and what will happen there is totally unknown. What we do know is that cosmic rays are much higher energy than at CERN, so if we can make black holes at CERN, nature would be bombarding us with them all the time-- yet they don't rip holes through the Earth nor get slowed and trapped.

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Logic is the grammar of truth.

Meaning and absolute certainty are incompatible, and profound meaning and absolute certainty are profoundly incompatible.

The only thing intelligence is capable of is recognizing itself.