But they do:
"As seen in Fig. 1, the highest-energy cosmic rays observed attain energies of
around 10^20 eV, and the total flux of cosmic rays with energies of 10^17 eV or
more that hit each square centimeter of the Earth’s surface is measured to be
about 5x10^–14 per second [5]."

And 5x10^-14 per second relates to 1x10^ 8 per second in what way? I had totally missed this logic in my previous argument, thanks for pointing me in the right direction. Obviously I will now need to determine the area of the beams used in square centimeters to accurately relate the 2, but as I have a 2X10^21 magnitude comfort zone to work with I feel comfortable in my assertion that nature and the experiment are not the same.
cheers cjameshuff, next prove yourself and CERN's safety statement wrong to prove me wrong, I look forward to that post.

Pippin, for starters, you might try relating flux PER SQUARE CENTIMETER to the surface area of the earth.

That is, unless you're saying the total surface area of the earth is 1 square centimeter...

The beams used in CERN are irrelevant. Cosmic rays are hitting the earth while I type this, and experiments of the same sort are happening all the time.

"and experiments of the same sort are happening all the time."

You're right, I've been banging mosquitos together in my backyard all week. I'm still amazed they spent billions of dollars to perform their experiments all while claiming these experiments have never been performed! Foolish scientists.

From the shear number of mosquitos this summer, I'd say they bang in my back yard all the time.

But he is right. The experiments at the LHC are like those at many other particle colliders, just with more energy and better detection equipment.

__________________

I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

thought it was roughly the same energy as the comis rays?

I wasn't sure if you were making a joke, so I'll make a serious response.

Somewhere, much earlier in this thread, someone asked, if cosmic rays are doing these experiments, why does one need the LHC. I posted links to several articles on exactly that - studies of cosmic rays looking for various subatomic particles (I'm too lazy to go search it out).

The problem, as pointed out earlier in the thread, is that these cosmic ray events are too random, and are high up in the atmosphere. Its hard to have a big detector at exactly the right spot to study the event. The LHC ensures that the events happen where you have your detector.

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

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

I've pretty much given up on Pippen.
He's in the same boat as Warren Platts.
Whenever someone comes along repeatedly claiming that they think otherwise but are only playing devils advocate- who then repeatedly and vehemently argue with you....

"Don't confuse my facade with facts. It's mind's made up."

According to CERN it is the same energy release, you just need to bang 1 billion mosquitos together every second for 100 million seconds. Even with all the rain of late I might run out of mosquitos,(or my arms will get tired). Meanwhile I'm still researching on my end. I still haven't come up with an answer, but I'm looking!
The key answer I'm still looking for if any of you are bored and want to help me out instead of just burning me in this thread:
Does a cosmic ray collision create a temperature(however so brief) of 100,000x that of the sun, or will CERN be generating that temperature through repeated collisions?

Do you mean they will produce roughly the same energy as cosmic rays? From what I read, I took it to say that they will produce energy much higher than any other collider, but still much under what cosmic rays natually produce.

__________________

I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

There have been cosmic rays measured with much higher energies than the LHC will generate.

The LHC will generate collisions of nominally 14 TeV, that is 14 x 10¹² eV. There was the so called "OMG" (Oh My God) particle that was observed at 10²⁰ eV, seven orders of magnitude higher energey. This research group is looking for ones above 10¹⁹ eV.

And I got unlazy, here is my earlier posting about cosmic ray research.

@ Pippin - I don't see the obsession with temperature. Temperature is not the critical thing here, in fact, describing the temperature of these very tiny, very transient plasmas is probably a pretty vague thing. The critical thing is energy. I think, in the press releases, they talk about temperature because that is something the public can kind of relate to. They can't relate to TeV.

I was trying to think of an analogy - I couldn't come up with a great one, but as a quick one: which is "hotter", two atoms at a million degrees, or 10 tons of coal burning at 500 degrees. I don't have an answer, because it is not really a meaningful question. And that's my point - temperature is not really a very meaningful way to describe these events.

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

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

Ok screw you guys hehe, I just emailed CERN with my question in their "ask and expert forum".
Fazor someone will yell at me even if I get this right. My understanding is that the LHC collisions will release(create) more energy than the majority of cosmic ray collisions, however there are still many cosmic ray collisions that occur of much greater magnitude.

Not even funny as a joke. That kind of language is frowned upon around here.

I don't know about a majority, I don't know enough about the distribution of cosmic ray events as a function of energy. But what does it matter? There have been many events of higher energy, even among the few we have observed. Multiple that by the surface of the Earth where we are not looking, and 4 billion years (the age of the Earth) and even if only 0.1% of all cosmic rays were higher energy than the LHC, there have been billions and billions of such events.

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

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

Screw us? Hehe. And our subatomic particle plush toys, too?

Hey, there's a special on the Higgs Boson on September 10!

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@ Pippin - I don't see the obsession with temperature. Temperature is not the critical thing here, in fact, describing the temperature of these very tiny, very transient plasmas is probably a pretty vague thing. The critical thing is energy. I think, in the press releases, they talk about temperature because that is something the public can kind of relate to. They can't relate to TeV.

If the "micro"(for lack of a better term) temperature of a single collision is equal to 100,000x the sun, then I am an idiot and some of the posters will hunt me down and beat me with sticks.
If the ambient temperature due to the cumulative energy release of previous collisions is 100,000x the sun while collisions are still occurring then CERN is misrepresenting the safety of their experiments to the public.

My apologies for that comment, it was meant in humor. It was my Cartman from Southpark imitation and was not intended to offend. I simply was laughing at myself for all of this foolish back and forth when I could and should be getting my answers directly from CERN.
Again my apologies. Laugh at me, laugh with me, but please laugh.

The energies are roughly comparable. A 7 TeV proton has as much kinetic energy as a 1 mg mosquito moving at sqrt(7 TeV/(2*1 mg)) = 0.75 m/s. At this velocity, Newtonian approximations are quite valid...so two mosquitos bumping into each other at 1.5 m/s. The mosquito, however, spreads that energy among roughly 6e20 protons and neutrons, and it doesn't come close to exceeding the binding energy of the mosquitos. Take a flyswatter to a fly and it splatters, do the same to your favored sibling and you'll likely only get the favor returned. Apply 14 TeV to a pair of mosquitos and they bounce, apply it to two protons and they form a tiny fireball of subatomic particles.


At 1 billion collisions/second, there will be a full nanosecond between events. The particles involved were moving at about 30 cm/nanosecond. The debris is not going to hang around for a full nanosecond after a collision at 299792455 m/s. On top of this, the beam at the LHC is composed of multiple bunches, with separate crossing points...the debris of each collision will most likely be well into the detectors by the time the next one occurs at the crossing point it happened in. So once again, yes, the temperature is for each individual collision.

"At 1 billion collisions/second, there will be a full nanosecond between events. The particles involved were moving at about 30 cm/nanosecond. The debris is not going to hang around for a full nanosecond after a collision at 299792455 m/s. On top of this, the beam at the LHC is composed of multiple bunches, with separate crossing points...the debris of each collision will most likely be well into the detectors by the time the next one occurs at the crossing point it happened in. So once again, yes, the temperature is for each individual collision."

Thank you cjameshuff. While that certainly proves me wrong it provides me with intelligent feedback that I can understand rather than "no, you're an idiot" so to speak. I have already emailed CERN with my question and will await their official reply which may take days. In the meantime I will accept that response as valid as I see no error in your logic. My apologies to all for rambling on. I will now go hide in the woods so you can't find me to beat me with sticks.

Before I run away. Accepting your argument and I do. That also speaks to my other complaint concerning the frequency of collisions per square centimeter per second in the experiment versus nature. Accepting that the energy and mass would be dispersed in a timely fashion I am more than willing to accept their method as simply a means of mass producing the collisions for experimental reasons in a manner similar to nature.
I withdraw that argument as well and apologize.

Thanks for the insults. Now I'm a coward besides. The fact is, I don't have a passport--I can't travel to Europe even if I wanted to. And even if I did, what would I do? I'm not an explosives expert, and even if I was, the ring is 300 feet underground. Setting off a truck bomb on top of the place won't work. It will take a bunker buster that I don't have access to. And so, if I have to watch the end of the world, I'd rather not do it from inside a Swiss jail, although I'm sure the jails there are very nice.

So I shall continue the war of words.

And are you going to feel all goofy like Nancy Leider did on January 1st, 2004?

Come on, Fazor--I go to a lot of trouble breaking down how the decision should be made for you and that's the best you can do?

Where exactly did I go wrong?

Was it the part about the dimensions?

Or how mBH's are trapped by the Earth?

Or the Hawking radiation part?

Or how the laws of physics don't really constrain the rate of mBH growth?

Or that the white dwarf argument depends on extrapolating the semiclassical approximation to multidimensional mBH's deep within the quantum gravitational regime?

Keep at them Warren! A lot of what they will be doing gives me the heebie-jeebies also, but my curiosity is greater than my fears so I'm looking forward to them firing it up personally. I still have a few lingering issues with their safety reports, but am now reassured that it was just poorly written and incompletely documented rather than the pack of lies I originally took it for.
Your fears are not unreasonable or unfounded though, I'm just too much for the advancement of knowledge not to take the risks. Hey sure we might blow up the planet, but we might also discover ways to abandon this planet and move across the galaxy to a much cooler one with the discoveries they make. You never know until they flip the switch!

Stuart insulted you by hinting about the value of statements from someone else? I think there's a tree somewhere out there severely deficient in being barked up to.

__________________
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin
"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson
Meet the OOONG TOE.

Mike,

Are you still here?

You didn't get eaten out from the inside?

Oh good! I'm glad!

Well, at least we know burritos are safe!

I don't see the obsession with temperature. Temperature is not the critical thing here, in fact, describing the temperature of these very tiny, very transient plasmas is probably a pretty vague thing. The critical thing is energy. I think, in the press releases, they talk about temperature because that is something the public can kind of relate to. They can't relate to TeV.

I was trying to think of an analogy - I couldn't come up with a great one, but as a quick one: which is "hotter", two atoms at a million degrees, or 10 tons of coal burning at 500 degrees. I don't have an answer, because it is not really a meaningful question. And that's my point - temperature is not really a very meaningful way to describe these events.

Temperature is familiar but very misleading.

While the temperature at the collision may seem extreme, it is highly localized (as in, restricted to the two particles colliding). They will not heat up the room since that temperature is an expression of kinetic energy, meaning they are moving very, very fast. (KE = 1/2mv². Consider the extremely low mass involved and you get an idea of how fast.)

Stop them (or even slow them down) as has been suggested in this thread and the KE has to go somewhere. The usual place is heat.

Using your experiment above, and making some very quick and dirty calcs, the two atoms have about 2x10^-17 joules of kinetic energy; the coal releases about 9 billion.

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

Time for a new thread:
"Is being downwind from Mike more dangerous than the LHC?"
Try to keep your sense of humor folks, if Warren is right we only have a few days left to laugh! (no offense Warren just going for the chuckle factor, not piling on)

No.
Much more than that.
The LHC may be starting up, but nowhere near conducting those experiments yet.

I'm for it too! I guess. . . . If someone could explain to me what's so significant about a Higg's boson--and what's with this "assigning" mass thing? What does that mean. And if they find the "God" particle, will this definitively prove God doesn't exist? I'm just trying to figure out the relevance to me, since it's my life their deciding to risk.

But I've got a question for you Pippen. Let's say warp drive will eventually come out of the LHC discoveries. Won't those same discoveries still be there 100 years from now or however long it takes to build one on the Moon or Eros or someplace where the home planet won't be at risk? You have dreams for the future. So do I. Imperial Earth! I'm all for it! But to get there, we've got to survive this century. That's our job. To hand this planet in one piece to the next generation. All of our eggs are in one basket right now. We don't need warp drive to colonize the rest of the solar system. Let's spread out a little, and do these kinds of experiments where they can't harm the home planet. We need to be more patient, and less impulsive.

Will you really die unhappy if the LHC never gets lit off? And if we don't light it off right now, how do you think future generations will judge us? If they later find out that there really was nothing to worry about all along, will they think of us as timorous luddites? Or will they respect us, the same way we respect those astronauts who willingly endured two weeks of quarantine, just to be sure.

And if they find out that the LHC would have in fact destroyed the world, they will bless their lucky stars for the wisdom of their ancestors.

And if we light it off, what will they think? The fact that they think at all will show that the gamble paid off. But with their 20-20 hindsight, knowing exactly just how primitive our science really is, will they think of us as reckless, foolhardy, macho cowboys in the same ambivalent way we look at those physicists who gave us the bomb?

And if they don't think about us. . . . Well, I guess they won't know the difference.

Why take a chance on aborting the future? It's like we're smoking meth while we're pregnant. It's a risk that's totally avoidable. What's the freaking hurry?

Pippin, only about seven hours to go, now, for the Large Head-on Collision!

In the meantime, get stuck in, into that pizza...

and:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7598996.stm

what a star....Dr Brian Cox!

__________________
clear skies

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. CARL SAGAN

Mak: Pass the pepperoni please.
Fazor: "Hail, Bautainia! We pledge our hearts to thee! Science and woo, some babbling too, and astron-oh-meee!"
slang: And it made ash out of yew and tree.