Large Hadron Collider restart delayed till October

:(

That's too bad D:

Take your time, CERN. The rest of us are eager and anxious, of course, but we all understand that rushing something like this could be disastrous, and that you're doing something on a scale never attempted before. So take your time, and do it right. We'll wait.

Most of us can live pretty well without black holes and strangelets, especially when no security analysis considering all risks was done.

Sorry, Alizee, but that's a lie. A _VERY_ detailed safety study was done, and the results have been publicly available for a long time. For a summary, see http://public.web...-en.html

For a more detailed summary of the technical details containing numerous references, see http://cern.ch/ls...port.pdf

Bottom line: Cosmic-ray proton-proton collisions at _MUCH_ higher energies have been occurring in the Universe and even within the Earth's own atmosphere for many billions of years --- yet the Universe is still here, and the Earth is still here. Therefore, the alleged `risk' is quite literally ASTRONOMICALLY SMALL. Anyone who thinks otherwise has not studied the relevant physics --- they've been reading propaganda from ignorant scaremongers who have no clue what they are talking about because their `knowledge' of `physics' comes from from comic books and bad fiction novels.

Expensive lemon. I hope they get it fixed though.

I feel like a kid again! Eager anticipation and excitement coupled with doubt due to the probability of bitter disappointment in the end.

Sorry, Alizee, but that's a lie. A _VERY_ detailed safety study was done. A _VERY_ detailed safety study was done

Where the risk of charged black holes is evaluated, for example? How quickly the Earth may be swallowed by charged black hole with compare to uncharged one?

"We're pretty confident about the dates"

Bwahahahahaha!

Most of you idiots refuse to comprehend that the earth, and every other planet, is naturally victim to particle collisions regularly over it's entire lifetime and at energy levels far exceeding the LHC - the only difference is we're doing it in a lab, and the ignorant masses naturally fear everything always.

There's a probability for you to turn in to a giant elephant right now, you better kill yourselves before you suffer such a horrible incident, please.

@ Slotin:

Read the report. As SpeakerToWolves said, it includes all relevant risks if it is comparing with what is already happening on higher energy scales and flows.

You ask how these things correlate. These are independent collisions, so already included by cosmic ray sources also being independent. This is also already happening with no ill effects.

But if you want to do the effort, that statistical independence should clue us in on how to do the math.

[Hint: The risk when multiplying ASTRONOMICALLY SMALL risks together is on the order of ASTRONOMICALLY SMALL^2, which is ASTRONOMICALLY SMALLer than the already ASTRONOMICALLY SMALL risk from each.]

SincerelyTwo, good point. And IIRC the expected time for such quantum fluctuations actually making some macroscopic change, such as a Boltzmann Brain, is larger than the universe life time. Perhaps they are on the order of ASTRONOMICALLY SMALL^2, illustrating that people here already are concerned with such 'risks'.

[I put these as 'risks', because probabilities that aren't certain to be observable during a universe lifetime seems to me need some analysis to make sure they are meaningful, as the scaremongers and their supporters happily consider. If they exist, do we imply that we live in a multiverse? Or are the distributions existing just on the principle that these frequencies are in principle observable?]

..it includes all relevant risks..

If it does, just try to quote phrase "charged black hole" in it...;-) No doubt, that most of existing analysis are deadly incompetent - they neglecting everything, what we can assume for the case of micro-black hole placed at the center of planet. Most of ignored influences (charge, magnetic field, reactive force of accretion radiation, thermal motion, etc.) are increasing the risk and speed of catastrophic character of disastrous event by many orders.

My only problem is, why LHC was allowed to upgrade at all without such analysis. Now the civilization has only minimal control over further evolution of LHC experiments by now.

Uups, sorry. I misread Slotin, the situation was probably about moving from, in principle, an inertial frame to another. Not about nearby collisions affecting each other. My bad.

That changes the energy (and momenta), but again are well covered what is already happening at larger energy and momenta.

The risk when multiplying ASTRONOMICALLY SMALL risks together is on the order of ASTRONOMICALLY SMALL^2, which is ASTRONOMICALLY SMALLer than the already ASTRONOMICALLY SMALL risk from each.

OK, I will try to give you an cheap & easy hint, how it could be really working in my broken English: cosmic ray protons are 10E{18} times more energetic, then LHC protons, right?

But the cosmic ray protons are colliding with stratosphere matter, which is 10E{6} thinner, then the underground of LHC. This increases a risk by six oders of magnitude or so.

Furthermore, the protons of cosmic ray are individual particles. But LHC protons are coming in bunches of 10E{6} higher proton density and frequency. This increases a risk by another six oders of magnitude or so.

In addition, the effective crossection is diminished by non-zero rest momentum toward Earth by six orders of magnitude. But at the case of head-to-head proton collisions the resulting momentum and velocity of products of collision may be zero, so they would have a lotta time to interact with their neighborhood. This increases a risk of disaster by another six orders of magnitude or so.

In such way, we have 10E{18} times increased risk of black hole formation for LHC collisions with compare to cosmic rays in stratosphere without any problem.

Now the only remaining question is: are the LHC proponents so giant trolls, they didn%u2019t even realize it - or they ignore this risk analysis purportedly? In both cases such people are simply incompetent to control such sort of experiments.

Alizee, you refuse to read the report and illegitimately declare that it neglects "everything" when in fact it covers "everything" by the comparison made. That is laughable for the rest of us, so you can as well stop.

The analysis you ask for is already done, you should deal with it.

you refuse to read the report

Stop trolling and just quote the analysis of influence of black hole charge, it's magnetic field, reactive force of accretion radiation or thermal motion to the speed of swallowing of matter by microscopic black hole from your report. Just because I've read this report already, I can say safelly, none of these risk factor was ever analysed in it. It's just general babbling without real numbers.

Alizee, your model doesn't make sense as you don't compare risks, a comparison of these processes over the total time they act. I suggest you read the report to learn how to do this.

In my opinion the risk of BH swallowing the planet is rather low due the high activation energy required - but the problem is, they%u2019re not even required to form during LHC experiment, as the risk of strangelet alternative formation is much higher high - simply because we observed it already!

The muon pairs formation during recent Tevatron experiments in Fermilab well outside of collider pipe may be related to recent pentaquark and tetraneutron evidence and it can demonstrate the stabilization of large matter clusters via supersymmetry and the danger of strangelet formation.

We can understand the dark matter, WIMPS and supersymmetric bosons as a surface tension effects of gravitational field. At the case of large distances / energy densities the energy density of space-time curvature near large particle or galactic clusters can become a dominant force, because it manifests itself as a additional mass density of vacuum with antigravity effects.

In particular, the formation of tiny dense particle clusters can stabilize the exotic forms of matter due the hydrostatic pressure inside of tiny particle droplets like the neutrons inside of neutron stars or atom nuclei by such way, these droplets can escape from collider pipe and they can start the avalanche conversion of normal matter to another strangelets under development of giant explosion, which could vaporize a substantial portion of Earth.

Therefore the latests Fermilab results should serve as a very last warning of people before high energy LHC experiments planned. The confirmation of supersymmetry could become a supersymmetric event for science as well: the best triumph of mainstream science and it%u2019s very last mistake at the same moment.

..a comparison of these processes over the total time they act..

This is just another risk factor: the collisions is atmosphere are momentary, the collisions of proton jets in accellerator would take whole long hours.
I'm just saying: here are aparent safety risks following from these points:

1) head2head collisions, zero momentum of products toward Earth, they%u2019ve a lotta time to interact with it
2) multiparticle collisions: when some piece of heavy matter appears in the accelerator line, the whole content of LHC will feed it by new matter
3) proximity of dense environment with compare to stratospheric collisions of gamma rays
4) the strong possibility of formation of charged and magnetic black hole. As we know, real black holes have always charge and they rotate rapidly. But only gravitational interactions were considered so far, while gravity is way, way weaker, then EMG forces..
5) The surface tension effects of large dense particle clusters, which CAN stabilize the unstable forms of mater and interact with atom nuclei
6) The risk connected with formation of dense clusters of quite common neutral particles, which are stable well outside from LHC energy range, like the neutrons.

None such effect were mentioned in your security report. So I just want to see all of these risk factors reviewed and estimated in relevant probability analysis.

..the expected time for such quantum fluctuations actually making some macroscopic change, such as a Boltzmann Brain, is larger than the universe life time..

Probability of Boltzmann Brain formation is different problem. With increasing number of particles this probability increases fast, because the number of possible states increases geometrically like number of permutations. In system of 10^{23*23} particles the probability of spontaneous Brain consisting of 10^{23} particles will be just unitary in each time interval.

What I recommend is to create a public web page, where all security risks thinkable may be added on anonymous basis, whereas some group of responsible scientists would add a publicly available security analysis to these risk factors. The name of person responsible for completeness of security analysis of LHC project should be known for publicity - without it such project cannot be started at all.

Sorry, Alizee, but that's a lie. A _VERY_ detailed safety study was done, and the results have been publicly available for a long time. For a summary, see http://public.web...-en.html



Bottom line: Cosmic-ray proton-proton collisions at _MUCH_ higher energies have been occurring in the Universe and even within the Earth's own atmosphere for many billions of years --- yet the Universe is still here, and the Earth is still here. Therefore, the alleged `risk' is quite literally ASTRONOMICALLY SMALL. Anyone who thinks otherwise has not studied the relevant physics --- they've been reading propaganda from ignorant scaremongers who have no clue what they are talking about because their `knowledge' of `physics' comes from from comic books and bad fiction novels.

You could do the most detailed safety study in the world but it still wont cover everything.....

Especially mystical entities like black holes, dark matter and dark energy...

Alizee, stop being an ignorant schuck and do some research before posting again. You were given a starting point a day ago.



Here it is again for convenience:

http://public.web...-en.html

Alizee - you are correct that the collisions at CERN will have zero net momentum. This would be incovenient to fix due to the way bunches in both directions have to be at the same speed to stay within the beamline.



However your density worry is unfounded. Cosmic rays hit the moon, too, which takes matches density of the earth.



Furthermore cosmic rays hit white dwarfs, which are roughly six orders of manitude DENSER than the earth.

And white dwarfs survive at least long enough to cool down, and only seem to explode if matter is added to them to reach their limit of 1.4 solar masses.



And neutron stars are far denser even than white dwarfs. So cosmic rays with an energy eight orders of manitude higher than CERN can acheive (or 100 times higher than the entire bunch of protons) regularly smack into neutron stars roughly 14 orders of magnitude denser than the ground around CERN. And any resulting strangeness, even though initially moving near the speed of light, would slow down very quickly (in the first millimeter of the neutron star) and would have plenty of matter to munch on if it were hungry.



Since neutron stars survive cosmic ray bombardment long enough for their spins to slow down, CERN is not going to destroy the world.

Especially mystical entities like black holes, dark matter and dark energy...

Exactly! Batman, Superman and Peter Pan included! You name it.. ;o)

Now back to topic:
I think that the risk of black holes @ LHC can be safely excluded as those are only stable and/or able to gain mass at 2 very distant scales. One being at sub-atomic level (limited by what some call "neutron" repulsion force). And the other one being somwhere around 3-4 times the mass of our sun, compressed by star implosion below a specific critical radius (overcomming the repulsion). Meaning that at "our scale", even if there was a BH created, it would either last VERY shortly (and "decay") or it would not be able to gain any more mass as of the above mentioned repulsion force "not letting" any more mass to come close enough.

As for the momentum of the collisions being "non-zero" towards Earth - that is plainly impossible as it would require a perfect collision of perfectly identical particles, which is not going to happen. There will allways be rest momentum, and no 2 collided proton pairs will be the same.

So, in my humble opinion, if LHC is gonna destroy the world, it should not be by a BH :)

On a side note: How hard would it be to "contain" a very low mass "microscopic" black hole in a specialy designed array of magnetic fields ( vacuum) to keep it away from roaming and getting near other mass to "feed"? Not that I think a BH could ever exist at those scales, but just plainly hypotheticaly.. should be doable.. (?)

Alizee, it took you an awful lot longer to write those ridiculous posts than it did me to rate them 1 star (zero would be more appropriate) thus removing them from having to be viewed.

I can't wait for your next raving fit!

:-)

All Lies. Sorry to disappoint both the LHC supporters and non supporters.



The only fact, is no one knows exactly all the outcomes. Good or bad has nothing to do with it.

Built to prove or disprove theories and assumptions that have yet to be backed by any solid, consistent real world proof about what actually is taking place or will take place inside the LHC at its highest energy level.

Accept all potential outcomes as neutral until real and consistent data/proof takes place from the LHC itself.

.. Cosmic rays hit the moon, too, which takes matches density of the earth...

Single particle can never make such problem, like whole jet of colimated protons. The question is, how much times the probability of strangelet would increase? Ant his should be a subject of security analysis, not general babling about thermodynamics. After all, some scientists are believing, strangelets are responsible for solar flares, moon craters or even earthquakes. The belief of yours, they don't influent anything even at Moon may be simply wrong.

http://www.space....513.html

Before some years scientist believed, something like cold fusion is virtually impossible due the high potential barrier. And what happenned? Watch the video here...

http://www.lenr-c...Navy.htm

..is no one knows exactly all the outcomes..

Some people simply know more then others, face it. And we know about risks already. For me it's surprising, how easily such large weapon can be produced, if people around it believe, it can harm nobody. The largest such device will be, the more people remain thrilled, but not frightened by it. They affraid of small thieves and bullets, but they tend to ignore income of dictators and wars because of their small gradients of danger in time like frog boiled in warm watter. In such way, a quite tiny group of irresponsible voluntaristic scientists maintains destiny of whole civilization without problem - a way way easier, then authors of SciFi ever believed.

neutron stars survive cosmic ray bombardment

The trick is, we can change into such neutron star, instead. In fact we can change it into fast evaporating dense cloud of tiny neutron stars - tiny dense droplets of neutrons smaller, then the hydrogen atom.

btw The life on surface of neutron stars is more safe with respect of possible strangelet impact. Magnetosphere of neutron stars behaves like Earth atmosphere with respect of meteorites or solar radiaton. Every faster charged particle would evaporate in contact with magnetosphere immediatelly well before it can reach the surface.

http://imgsrc.hub..._gif.gif

still no answer to where the sooty deposit came from or what caused it, could it have been a fall of soot from a black hole Ha ha? Taking time I agree with though, about 30 years will probably do me. Some of the commentors here should remember its gone arse over tit once allready.

Too bad for the delay, but I guess 2-3 weeks are not so much after a year in repair.
As for the people worried so much about charged black holes-how much charged black holes have you seen? How much event horizons has anybody seen? The answer of both things is ZERO. When I see a convincing evidences that this mathematical object called a black hole exist, then I'll worry about the possible creation of such black holes in LHC.

denijane I get the slightest of fellings that might be a millisecond too late.

Ant, with the same effect, you should worry that LHC might produce Godzilla or the Big Foot. Then it will also be too late. Or who knows, we might get back in time and the resulting particle shower might kill Homo Sapiens instead of Neanderthals. How about that, huh? There's a chance!

But you don't worry about that. You worry about black holes-objects that only popular press "really" know what they are and what they can do. The scientists are much less sure about them and they will continue to be unsure until gravitational wave detectors catch something (anything?!). Yes, there are astrophysical objects that look like black holes, but the key moments in black holes are the event horizon and the singularity in the centre-until we see them (or at least the first), these heavy objects are not black holes, but dark heavy objects. And since the space is full of dark heavy objects, I don't see a reason why we should freak out we could create a miniature versions of them.