aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Flibbertigibbet said:
That's just scaremongering by people who don't know a thing about it.

Neverender said:
I think of the possibility of being killed by such a thing and I just lol uncontrollably. The thought of being killed by something with such a stupid name is too much.

Kaplan said:
I'm not worried. The folks at Reddit and Fark have already sent the CERN people a Crowbar, Half-Life Strategy Guide, and a Head-Crab doll, just in case they start a resonance cascade.

On top of that, they've got Gordon Freeman on staff already, so we're set.

Raldan said:
Too bad we won't get any meaningful data for months. But yay, beam injection.

Flibbertigibbet said:
They haven't started any collisions yet. They're just doing some low intensity stuff with a single beam.

We've still got a month until the end of the world(!!!!!!!!!!!) of physics as we know it.

minsk said:
What are you all watching this on?

Flibbertigibbet said:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM
http://science.howstuffworks.com/large-hadron-collider.htm

These two links might help you understand.

In general they're trying to find the Higgs Boson particle which may explain why things have mass. The thing is that a Higgs Boson particle has never been observed before so they're trying to recreate the conditions after the big bang by colliding particles at 99.99999999999% speed of light. By looking back at how the universe started they're hoping that the Higgs Boson particle will be emitted at the collision. If it isn't emitted, they'll need to develop new theories.

They're also hoping to prove why gravity is such a weak force in relation to other forces. They think that there are possibly more dimensions than the three we can perceive, and gravity is spread out along these dimensions making the force seem weak in our dimension. By colliding particles, they want to observe where everything went after the big bang.

They're hoping to make many more discoveries than intended, because you never know what will happen at 99.999999999999999999999999999% speed of light.

Flibbertigibbet said:

That's right. It's not possible to send any matter or information at 100% speed of light, but we can get pretty close now.

There are however things that can travel faster than light.

Flibbertigibbet said:

Thank you too! I'm excited about all the things we could find out, but I'm also excited about the unforeseen consequences. I've always wished I could die in a black hole. Just so I would know what it felt like.

It's a win/win situation no matter what happens =D

Flibbertigibbet said:
Yeah I know they won't cause any harm, but I sort of wish they would.

I agree with the Grid as well. ISPs should think twice about charging so much after seeing what the grid can do compared to their services (at least in New Zealand).

OranSolus said:
Yes, there are some theories that state there are as many as eleven dimensions!

StephanBlackhawk said:


My paranoia level is very high. Thus I'm going to drink to for the next 2 hours and 40 minutes.

Asrialys said:
Now it's time for some Hadron weaponry...

Kaiserpingvin said:
Bah. The risk of this destroying Earth is pretty much nonexistent. There are plenty of other ways the Apocalypse could come, instantly, at any given random second. Supervulcanoes, for example. There's thirty of them - Yellowstone National Park is one. Yes, the whole park. It explodes every 600.000 years on average, and when it does it's massive. Really masive. several thousand times more than Mount Saint Helens. Sure, humanity would survive, but that barely. And the kicker is, it's ben 630.000 years since it last had an explosion. Thank Haruhi vulcanoes and related magmastreams are fond of deyfing their once established patterns.

We have asteroids. There's a few cilivization-endangering ones passing by every now and then without us noticing before it's already passed us by a (comparative) hairs breadth.

We have gamma ray bursters. Of course, we think that there's nothing that could cause one close enough to us (which is a couple of hundred lightyears, I believe), but then we're not very certsain what causes them. What we know is that they are so full of radiation and other energies not even bacteria would survive. And it's instant.

We have idiotic world leaders armed with nuclear weapons and their prestige and power on the line. No conflict seems to be brewing anywhere between them - except the ever-present Pakistan/India conflict - but at the global scene things can change very fast.

Then we have totally random cosmological events that we don't know anything about. For one, the reaction they are trying to create in the LHC? It has already happened, several thousand times, in our atmosphere. And sooner or later, stuff can go awry.

And of course - we have the possibility the Universe might be a quantum fluctuation. Which means EVERYTHING could just randomly vanish. Luckily there's not much to suggest this hypothesis as a credible theory.

So don't worry about LHC! Worry about every single other thing that exists!

OranSolus said:

Yes, a Hadron Cannon sounds really cool. Not exactly sure how it would work, but I had better hear the line "I'm charging the Hadron Cannon!" in an anime within a year!

Kaiserpingvin said:
Well, a hadron is simply any particle that consists of several quarks - neutrons, protons, pions, kaons, and so on. So if we're to be sort of broad with the term, any contemporary cannon is a hadron cannon as it fires thousands and again thousands of hadrons - the ones that constitute the atoms.

So much for an awesomely cool name :/

Issun said:
To be honest, until you mentioned it I didn't even know it existed.

Flibbertigibbet said:
Yeah I know they won't cause any harm, but I sort of wish they would.

I agree with the Grid as well. ISPs should think twice about charging so much after seeing what the grid can do compared to their services (at least in New Zealand).

Neverender said:
This was very educational. Now I know about many other ways in which I could perish.

Kaiserpingvin said:

It's great material for a Dan Brown novel, though. Just add dangerous buddhist sects, mysterious ancient conspiracies around the true nature of a koan and sexy Russian theologists in stockings.

tr1ggers4d said:
Dan Brown has already used CERN for angels & demons with yet a totally unexpected series of plot twists. But seeing as how original he is, I'm sure he'll write another book with that's totally novel involving LHC and totally unexpected plot twists.

Kaiserpingvin said:

Yes. He did so bad research CERN even made a page about his factual errors.

(I quite dislike him. That someone with so bad writing is a teacher in English is ludicrous.)

tr1ggers4d said:
Hahahaha, I didn't know that. I need to check out the page later; I knew he was ridiculously wrong at some points, but not so much that CERN would dedicate a page for it.

As for his writing, it's not only repetitive but also quite simple. But eh, it's popular, kind of like how harry potter is.

Kaiserpingvin said:

Here it is. Love the first question.

And yeah, he and Rowling are on the same level in my snobbish Pynchon-and-Joyce-slurping tastes. Enjoyable, but they both write pretty badly.

...We're off-topic, I think.

tr1ggers4d said:
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