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The Large Hadron Collider is shut down until spring
26 Sep 2008 03:15 pm
The universe protecting itself against destruction? Or simply Murphy's Law? Or is Murphy's Law the way the universe protects itself from destruction? Deep thoughts for a Friday afternoon . . .
I'm actually really bummed about this.
This is just a rumor I am starting, but I heard that it is clogged up with bad mortgage debt.
ooh I like your theories
You mean it's not W's fault? Gee, this must be the first thing in the past 8 years that isn't......
Otherwise known as the anthropomorphic principle. If the universe ceases to exist you won't know it; you will only be aware of the universe that exists; therefore, if the LHC will destroy the universe you will only exist in the universe in which the LHC breaks.
People from the future came back to sabotage it for one of the following reasons:
1) so that it would not destroy the universe (because they know by then that it would have done so, but that it didn't because they came back and sabotaged it); or
2) so that we would not develop time travel (because discoveries produced by the LHC would lead to the requisite knowledge) and go around sabotaging the past.
Prove me wrong.
Or is it destruction protecting Murphy's Law from the Universe? This is obviously not the worst possible moment, maybe when "Up with Life" reunion concert is about to start, is the worst possible moment.
It's actually because electricity is really expensive in Geneva in the winter. CERN has a deal with the city to shut off during the winter since it uses so much power.
There was a minor problem and since they were going to shut down in late October anyway, it wasn't worth cooling down all the magnets (which takes quite a while) only to have to shut down a couple weeks later.
The media has been irresponsible in reporting about the LHC and the end of the world possibilities, I might add...
OK, even if the LHC is perfectly efficient as a black hole creation source it won't be able to destroy the universe -- just the teeny tiny part we care the most about.
This does bring up an interesting question regarding your theory though. Is the Murphy effect localized to Earth, or is it a wider spread phenomena. Perhaps it only affects areas where humans or some subset of intelligent(perhaps less than fully so) life has been?
cooling down all the magnets (which takes quite a while)
Getting a vacuum down to 10e-11 Torr also takes a while...
People from the future came back to sabotage it for one of the following reasons:....2) so that we would not develop time travel (because discoveries produced by the LHC would lead to the requisite knowledge) and go around sabotaging the past. Prove me wrong.
Actually, I already went back and arranged for your parents to meet so that you would be here to post that comment. Seems your keyboard strokes have Chaos Theory effects that will enable time travel in about a decade or so.
OK, even if the LHC is perfectly efficient as a black hole creation source it won't be able to destroy the universe -- just the teeny tiny part we care the most about.
You care most about the odd atom here and there that an LHC-generated black hole would swallow up every few thousand years? What is the attraction, specifically?
The scientists 15 billion years ago weren't worried about Genevan electrical rates. They already had cold fusion.
I've never posted on this blog, although I read it a lot and love it. Thought I would post to explain a little bit about what's going on with CERN. I don't work there, but I'm in another field of physics, and have many friends who work there:
There are two causes for the delay:
1) Obviously there was a mechanical problem. But it will take weeks just to get access to the problem because the magnets are very, very cold. As anybody who knows anything about superconductivity knows... there obviously are no known substances that are superconductive at anything near room temperature. The reason it takes so long to warm-up is because you have to do it VERY slowly. You can't let anything warp or strain, and you can't let moisture get into the system.
2) Once they get everything back in line, it's time for about 2 months off. I'm reading it in a lot of places as some vacation due to using too much electricity, or other weirdness... this just isn't true. It's just that it's Europe, and they take massively long vacations en masse. Remember five years ago when France had a heatwave and more than 10,000 people died because everybody (including the doctors) were on vacation for the whole month of August? Welcome to socialism...
As for getting down to 10^-11 torr... that's actually a very quick process. Even with the massive size of LHC, there are massive cryo pumps all over the place. I'd be shocked if it takes more than a couple of days. The longer process is actually conditioning once you get down to vacuum in order to get all of the crap out of the walls. Either way, that's not a big process holding anything up.
On the plus side, that means we've got like 5 more months before the black hole destroys the Earth! ;)
aMouseforallSeasons,
I didn't intend to say that I am concerned about LHC causing problems. I'm not. It's just that the LHC destroying the universe is "right out" as they say in the Flying Circus.
Your post did get me thinking, though. Even if LHC does cause black holes (I'm skeptical, to say the least), only those with less than earth escape velocity are likely to cause problems. Even then, it could be quite some time before the Earth rips apart, depending upon the Shwarzchild radius and the early mass uptake rate.
What the heck are you talking about "earth escape velocities"? What do you think - that we're going to create black holes but they'll fly out into space and eat OTHER planets??
The expectation is that if black holes are created that they'll evaporate due to radiation in an insanely small amounts of time. They won't eat anything
One can argue that some of the theories we have so far are wrong, and maybe some of the black hole theories have flaws, but the collisions happening in LHC have happened in our upper atmosphere for billions of years. If a black hole was going to be created to destroy the Earth, it would have happened already.
I'd be shocked if it takes more than a couple of days.
When I went to a talk by someone who wanted to stick something inside the ring, he said a couple of weeks, but that was years ago and he might not have been an expert.
At that level, you have to worry about the vapor pressure of metals. Back in the day, I thought it a remarkable day to get down below 10e-7 Torr.
I suspect this will be a recurring problem. No one but me (and the voices) seems to understand that these supercolliders produce time warps which eliminate their own source. The last one, you recall, produced a time warp that deprived itself of its own funding.
Have you read Dr. Hawking's 1975 paper?[1]
Hawking Radiation conjecture makes several dubious assumes, negative energy, time reversal and no dark energy. Just not plausible.
"Just outside the event horizon there will be virtual pairs of particles, one with negative energy and one with positive energy."
"one could regard them as positive energy particles crossing the horizon on past directed world-lines and then being scattered on to future-directed world-lines by the gravitational field."
[1] http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS/Repository/1.0/Disseminate?view=body&id=pdf_1&handle=euclid.cmp/1103899181, Particle Creation by Black Holes, S. W. Hawking (12 Apr 1975)
Nah, 10^-7 torr is nothing. Most experiments at those pressures just use turbo pumps.
The amount of time it takes to get down to a certain pressure is obviously a function of the volume and the size and number of your cryo pumps. I don't know exactly what the situation is at LHC, but I'd be shocked if they don't have enough cryo pumps to get down to low pressure within a couple of days.
Cosmic rays, protons accelerated by the interstellar processes, have energies exceeding those which will be produced at the LHC. If we were going to generate black holes, it would already have happened. By the way, at sea level, you are standing in a cosmic background field of about 1.5 REM per year. Better hide. I suggest one of those nice Swiss tunnels where they do neutrino experiments. You and the wife could just take turns driving back and forth between Italy and Chamonix, or some such place.
CERN are incrdibly good at making equipment work at the outside limits of the technologically possible. I suspect that they will make the LHC work even though I also suspect that if redesigning it now they would replace much of the structural metal with composites. (Credentials: I once told them a design of theirs would not work: some moths later they withdrew the design without comment.)
The peak electricity demand explanation for CERN's winter shut-down was true. Nowadays, I suspect that justification has as much current validity as Universities shutting down in summer to free labour for the harvest.
Hawking Radiation conjecture makes several dubious assumes, negative energy
Negative energy has been experimentally verified by the Casimir effect.
On the plus side, that means we've got like 5 more months before the black hole destroys the Earth! ;)
And that much more time to place your bets on whether it will.
(Tip: No matter what the odds given, bet "no, it won't". You might lose but you'll never have to pay off.)
Hey, that theory is nice :) Thank you!