I would be amazed if none of that has occurred in nature in the last 13.7 billion years.
Secondly. it amazes me how you took one assumption, factored in another assumption only to conclude with statements of World Destruction.

You are beginning to appear as one unwilling to step down off the soap box than one who is trying to verify safety.

No, it does not. It says that the mentioned plasma existed just after (meaning right after) the Big Bang. It nowhere stated that it exclusevly existed after the Big Bang.

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

Since when does CERN claim that a single partice in LHC can?

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

Hey Van Rijn,

I've come around to your way of thinking when it comes to what the LHC was designed for. The LHC cannot be designed as a black hole factory, because otherwise they would never have used the double beam design! The double beam design is totally dangerous if there's the slightest possibility that black holes could be produced. A true black hole factory would only use the single beam design so that any black holes produced would be flung harmlessly away from the Earth, just like cosmic rays. We wouldn't be having this discussion if the LHC was of a single beam design. Talk about a major design flaw! I guess you'll have that, though, when you use 20th century technology to investigate 21st century particle physics. . . .

But this idea suggests a simple fix and compromise that can make everyone happy: only use one beam at a time at the LHC. The energy produced will still be 35 times more than RHIC produces. That's pretty good, and ought to keep them busy until a new single beam collider with even more energy can be constructed.

This is a faulty calculation based on the temperature thing above. I should say- Misapplied.

You have obviously no idea what you are talking about. Hint: a single beam will not give a single hit and therefore no experiment.

The one point I have been trying to hammer on that none of you LHC boosters seem to grasp--although it is very simple--is the extreme value of the Earth.

Think first of the dollar value of everything you own, and everything you expect to earn in the future. Now integrate that over 8 billion humans. Now add the free ecosystem services that that nature gives us for free but are worth a lot of money. E.g., all that solar radiation and oxygen and stuff. Don't forget about the valuable recreational opportunities that nature also gives us. That's the present value of the Earth.

Now, you seem to think we're going to buy it anyway in a supernova GRB 100,000 years from now--and the human species has only been around for 100,000 years anyway, so let's just limit our concern for the future to 100,000 years. So multiply your the result of your first integration by 100,000--that's the total dollar value that's at risk

Now think of everything you value that would be totally sacrilegious to put a dollar value on: your kid, grandma, apple pie, freedom, the right to life, and the pursuit of happiness. Now somehow add that somehow to your dollar figure. You might want to add a value bonus to your many-segmented friends that only God and you can love--but are still valuable in themselves, I would say.

Now you have the total value of the Earth.

Now figure the probability that the world will be destroyed. The way you do that is to poll everybody on Earth who has an informed opinion on the matter what they think the probability is that the conclusion of the CERN safety report will turn out to be wrong. I did that exercise and thought that probability might be as high as 12%. The lawsuit against CERN says it could possibly be as high as 70%. Baron Rees said 1 out of 50,000,000. I saw someone else (an LHC booster) give a figure of 1 out of 300,000,000. Many others, like Fazor, say it's the same as a burrito in a microwave--i.e., essentially zero. But to be fair and democratic we would have to pool all the subjective probabilities (because they are all subjective, by definition).

Then take the median result of your poll. (You'd better take the median, because high values like mine will skew the results.) Now you have the probability that the world will be destroyed by the LHC--a value that should closely agree with what the British odds makers would come up with.

OK, now multiply the probability that the LHC will destroy the Earth times the total value of the Earth. The result is how much we should be willing to spend on preventing that risk. I guarantee you that the result will be much larger than the cost of a brand new, single beam collider that would not produce black holes that could get trapped by Earth's gravity.

Heck, if everyone on Earth chipped in 1 euro each to build CERN a brand new, 14 TeV, single beam collider, it would be the cheapest insurance that anyone ever bought.

That's why I won't get off my soapbox.

So what?

It's not in any danger from us. That's what we are trying to hammer into YOUR head.

We are at greater risk from forces offworld.

You've got that backward my friend.

That's not true at all. Read the Wikipedia article on "collider". It says there are two possible setups:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but to have a single beam collider equal the performance of a double beam collider, all you've got to do is double the kinetic energy of the single beam collider.

No, I know where it comes from.
The LHC has a copper block, where they would send the contained particles to in case of an emergency to empty the ring and to avoid a damage of the LHC. All those particles combined would cause the mentioned melting, not a single one hitting it.

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

The LHC is no more designed to create black holes than my car is designed to splatter bugs. The production of MBHs would settle some major questions such as the existence of extra dimensions, and would give physicists a clear direction for further testing and development of theories. Given the fact that such collisions occur throughout the universe and do not produce anything of danger, of course they hope for MBHs. This does not mean they expect them, it would be a surprise bonus to the other research they are performing.

The LHC is designed to produce 14 TeV proton collisions and 2.76 TeV per nucleon lead ion collisions. One of the major reasons for doing so is to verify the existence of the Higgs boson, or give a lower bound for what is required to do so. This is only one of the experiments it will do, however. It will refine measurements and provide data for testing current and future theories. The knowledge gained may only be of indirect benefit to the average person, but the benefit is ultimately unbounded, the loss of stopping where we are is absolute.

These collisions do happen all the time everywhere in the universe, the conditions in the collisions produced at the LHC are not unique. Yes, natural collisions do produce temperatures 100000 times those at the core of the sun, and even higher. Temperature and energy are directly proportional. The LHC and other particle accelerators simply produce these events repeatably and reliably with particle types and energies known before hand, and inside the equipment required to gather the desired information. It is compared against the big bang because "temperatures reached in tiny collisions all around you that have been occurring since shortly after the beginning of time" is not particularly informative.

Personally, I hope for strangelets. My understanding is that they are positively charged and do not absorb electrons, but gather them in orbitals like normal nuclear matter. The positive charge prevents normal nuclei from merging with them similarly to the difficulty of fusing normal elements, the electron clouds allow chemistry. Custom-made hyper-massive elements! Perhaps strangelets could even be placed in arrays on silicon chips as computational elements, or coupled with a small ion accelerator to use the conversion of normal nuclear matter into strangelet matter as a clean and plentiful power source. I don't expect them, though.

Let me put it in terms you can understand: do you think it would be a good idea to buy a lottery ticket for $1,000,000 USD for a 99.99% chance to win $1,000,001 USD?

If so, boy, do I have a deal for you!

Now who's talkin' chickin little!

That is nowhere NEAR an adequate analogy.

Here's another intuition pump, then:

How many of you boosters thought that it was a good idea to quarantine the astronauts who returned from the Moon? Raise your hands please.

Now why did you think that was a good idea? We already knew about the vacuum on the Moon, the temperature extremes, the UV radiation, as well as the requirements for life on Earth, not to mention the fact that pathogens on Earth have been honed by millions and millions of years of evolution to prey on the particular biochemistries found on Earth. According to biological theory at the time, there was no way that life would be found on the Moon. But they did it anyway. They weren't crazy, were they?

They were quarantined because they had been in space for weeks without a proper shower.

And why not? cjameshuff--I've got to give him credit--is the one booster who understands my point. That's why he goes to the extreme lengths of saying we will go extinct if we do not light off the LHC, whereas if we do, our immortality will practically guaranteed! And if I thought that were really the case, then I would have to agree that lighting off the LHC is a good idea.

Yeah, I had a couple of bunkmates who should have been quarantined as well!

It's neither.
And- You just totally distorted what cjameshuff said. Did you think the rest of us had not read his posts and would be fooled?

The reason why it is not is because you are feigning that there is a great risk present- which is not actually present.

Is there a non-zero chance? yes. Is it small enough to be considered negligible? Yes.

Is there also a non-zero chance that the Entire Planet Earth may suddenly and spontaneously explode for no reason? Yes. Am I concerned? Not in the least.

Wrong. Replacing the "or" with a comma is grammatically incorrect and does change the meaning of the sentence.

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

I agree if the sentence is to be taken as implying that G&M did in fact use 'conservative or "worst case" assumptions' in the sense that they replaced some or all of their uncertainties with conservative assumptions or they replaced some or all of their uncertainties with "worst case" assumptions, or they replaced some or all of their uncertainties with assumptions that are both conservative and "worst case".

So I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, and chalk up that little "or" to a simple typographical error or a benign Freudian slip of the tongue that shouldn't be given too much weight (as perhaps was Praga, who bent over backwards to be respectful of G&M).

But I guess you are right, Jim, and I am wrong. Because otherwise, why would G&M go to the trouble to point out two missing letters?

But if that's the case, think about what that implies: that G&M did not in fact use "worst case" assumptions to replace all of the uncertainties they encountered. And that in turn implies that their analysis is not in fact entirely based on "worst case" assumptions. Therefore, their claim that the LHC will be harmless is in fact uncertain--by their own admission!

How disingenuous of them to say there is no risk!

All the more reason to not trust what CERN's paid flacks have to say. . . .

This ridiculous and frankly frivolous argument of semantics demonstrates that you have made up your mind as to whether or not the LHC is a "threat" and that you have chosen to not only not be dissuaded by facts, but to even stoop to even the lowest levels in order to make a case.

I recall watching an HB doing the same thing in the CT forum the other day...

I think that's where I am being misinterpreted also. I do not believe great risk is present, nor do I believe the earth will explode or implode when they turn it on.
All I wanted to say is that in my opinion their safety review isn't worth the paper it was printed on. To support my opinion I attempted to cite examples from CERN's mission statement that appeared to conflict with the assertions they made in the safety review. Ask a test pilot for an experimental aircraft if it is safe, the answer will be yes it is safe. Ask if it is 100% safe, the answer is no it isn't. But the test pilot will still get in and fire it up. If the test pilot answered, yes of course it's safe birds fly all the time, I think we'd all look at him/her funny and that's how I feel about the safety report.

Now as for the existence of Quark-Gluon Plasma occurring elsewhere I will provide relevant source material, rather than just stating: "CERN didn't say it doesn't exist elsewhere."
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/...luon-hunt.html
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/22043
http://www.bnl.gov/RHIC/QGP.htm
"QGP is also thought to be the state of matter in the dense cores of neutron stars."
Cern also didn't say that they weren't throwing a big party for us all, so they must be throwing one? nice logic....

Do you feel like the CERN safety report is inaccurate as to the fact that the "risk" is so exceedingly minuscule as to be negligible?

Ask those same guys to write up a report about how likely it is that you will be teleported across the Universe- without a ton of math etc- and you may find yourself reading a very similar response.

I simply applied the logical sense of what "or" means. Look up "truth tables", and you'll see what I mean. Well, I guess they could have meant "or" in the either-or exclusionary "soup or salad" sense, meaning that they either replaced the uncertainties with conservative, but non-"worst case" assumptions or they replaced the uncertainties they encountered with conservative, "worst case" assumptions (since all "worst case" assumptions are also conservative assumptions, whereas not all conservative assumptions are "worst case" assumptions.) Which only strengthens my case that G&M's analysis is uncertain because it does not include "worst case" assumptions throughout.

(And what's with the scare quotes that they used anyway? Does that imply that their "worst case" assumptions were not in fact worst case assumptions???)

Thus the hole in G&M's defenses that they opened up by bringing attention to Praga's alledged "misquotation" gets wider and wider. You guys really should leave this one alone. Just a little free advice. . . .

The point of counter-revolving beams, as I understand it, is to maximize the energy of the collision in a center of mass reference frame. A beam striking a stationary target wastes a lot of energy accelerating the stationary particles by conservation of momentum. Having head-on interactions cancels the momentum vectors, allowing all the energy to go into the creation of new particles. I'm not sure of the equivalent energy to get the same effect of a stationary target as with 14Tev opposed beams, but I'm betting it's a few orders of magnitude greater.

__________________
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

Also the test pilot is only risking himself and his plane (and a few unlucky people who might be in a house he happened to crash into)--and not the entire planet!

There really isn't much need to.
I'm reminded of LeBuff's performance in Transformeres; "It was a typo and I ran with it."

You're running Warran Platts, but the only person that seems to think you are getting anywhere is you.
Just to tickle the switch on the treadmill, however, I might ask you.
Can you provide any conclusive evidence that:
1.) They were dishonest
2.) Their expertise and professional opinions are irrelevant and yours are superior
3.) that you understand the Complete nature of the system well enough to override their analysis.
4.) That their math is flawed.
5.) That you are not hyperreacting to FearMongering and making a mountain out of an anthill?

I'm not an expert at CERN.

I don't have anywhere NEAR enough knowledge to even qualify as an intern.

And yet, having now gone over that safety report three times, I feel confident that the LHC is perfectly NON hazardous and I am Well Aware of what Non Zero chances imply.

And they do not imply what you are trying so desperately to imply.

As Warren likes to illustrate (though a bit more blatantly, such as claiming I said anything resembling "our survival will practically guarantee immortality for humanity!"), small changes can severely distort what is being said. It is wise for the physicists to insist on attention to detail. They will be discussing complex ideas and they can not allow the opposition to do this to anything they say.

It is not at all certain that we will survive long enough or be able to ensure that something of Earth survives beyond the planet itself (or beyond us), but it is certain that if we follow Warren's philosophy that we will eventually die here on Earth, and likely do horrific amounts of damage in the process. This is not saying "chicken little", it is a statement of fact. Resources are limited and humanity is capable of growth beyond them...it may not happen at all soon, but it will eventually happen. Given how long it took us to arrive on the scene and how narrowly we survived to reach where we are, it seems very unlikely for any replacement to arise should we go extinct. I wasn't the one to bring survival of the biosphere into the discussion, but if it is to be considered, there are the facts.

On the one hand, there is a chance for something surviving beyond Earth, and of near term benefits of potentially enormous magnitude...and an incredibly small chance of losing everything, dwarfed by many orders of magnitude by other hazards both avoidable and unavoidable. On the other, there's the "safe" certainty of eventual total loss.

Once again, the chances of the LHC being dangerous are absurdly remote. They are non-zero, but nothing has a zero chance of destroying the world. If you were to apply the same philosophy consistently, you would be too afraid to do anything. The only only reason any of the objectors have for considering the LHC to be more dangerous than a common microwave is gut feeling and intuition. You can construct increasingly intricate, convoluted, and utterly untested and unsupported "theories" to explain our continued existence in such a terrifyingly dangerous universe that something like the LHC can destroy the world, or you can accept that there's no rational reason not to go forward.

Ok, now please don't misquote me, I am not stating or suggesting that the following will occur or that CERN is actively trying to create a blackhole. As to whether they are capable of creating a blackhole please review the following material.
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/sc...ron_stars.html
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/sc...ack_holes.html
We know that CERN is attempting to create QGP(quark-gluon-plasma), a state that they believe the universe was in immediately after the big bang and is suggested to exist in the core of neutron stars. It is theorized that both neutron stars and blackholes are both formed by the collapse of large stars. The difference being the mass vs. radius. 1.5 times our suns radius with 5 times(or less) its mass creates a neutron star when it burns out. 1.5 times our suns radius with greater than 5 times its mass creates a blackhole when it burns out.
From everything I have read creating QGP requires more than just 2 protons.
http://www.bnl.gov/RHIC/QGP.htm
So it would seem to me(yes I am an idiot) that by increasing the mass-radius ratio in the LHC experiment on purpose or accident, it would emulate the conditions of blackhole, rather than the conditions in the neutron star.
Again not saying this will happen, not saying they are trying to do it. Just wanted to put that out there for discussion and dissection (not vivisection!)