Large Hadron Collider is now active

If our sun were to collapse into a black hole tomorrow (ignoring the processes that lead a star to becoming a black hole, and making a gross assumption that no mass was lost in the process), other than us freezing to death from lack of heat from the sun, nothing would happen to the actual earth, it would still orbit as if the sun was still there.  It is only within the event horizon where things get weird, and for a sun of our size that would be a fairly small volume, considering the current size of the sun.

The creation of baby black holes is mostly meaningless.  Most people think Black Holes are giant vaccuums where giant red killer robots named Maximillion get drawn into some weird alternate universe and spewed out.  Nope, they are nothing but very dense matter making a very high gravity gradient out of the formula g = Gm/r^2  big enough m, small enough r, and g becomes very very large.  The trick is the r where an event horizon would occur is often very small compared to the regular size of the collapsed material, so what the heck could a baby black hole suck in before it evaporates from hawkings radiation?  Not much.  The only real fear is that we are destroying (or at least trapping) information.  According to Hawkings' latest theory that makes our entire universe irrelevant.    So much for Zaphod Beeblebrox being the most important thing in the universe.

Anyway, I guess the hopes is to find the Higg's Boson, or perhaps clues to dark matter.  But as I pointed out to some of my students today, beware of the claims of magic hocus pocus, when radiation was discovered they thought that was magic, and people would pay a lot of money to bath in spas filled with water from a uranium mine so the radiation could 'heal' them.  The same crazy claims of quantum physics are made in movies like "What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?" I have people who I thought where fairly sane people taking this movie seriously.  For people like us it takes about 30 to 50 years before we truely begin to see where physics was going.  Will we throw out the standard model?  Will we be able to pull the higg's boson off of materials as a sort of inertia dampener that we hear about in science fiction?  Who knows?  After all, any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

What I find funny is that I found out today about this from my biochemistry teacher- she was telling us about how she didnt think it was a great idea but that if the world ended at least she wouldnt know...because she would no longer be there...the class gave a hearty laugh until they realized that she wasnt joking...

I continued to laugh...

Here is a handy link for those who are concerned about the earth's fate. Trust the interwebs to answer the question of if the Hadron Collider has caused the earth to self destruct.

LHC Monitor

Mike or Cameron,

isn't it also true that black holes can lay dorment, and pass us by without causing a blip?

Here is a handy link for those who are concerned about the earth's fate. Trust the interwebs to answer the question of if the Hadron Collider has caused the earth to self destruct.

LHC Monitor

LHC Webcam