On hadron colliders, dark matter and black holes

[torstan]

@jfrazierjr - This won't give us any energy. Rather we pump energy in to get the particles up to speed and then study the results after they collide. It's like pumping a load of petrol into two trucks, watching the fireball when they collide and then measuring how far the bumper went.

@RP - the protons will collide in a vacuum - the center of the pipe is as empty as the engineers can get it to reduce the chance of them accidentally hitting something other than the proton that is coming the other way. Therefore the collision itself is almost identical to a collision in outer space. In fact, at the atomic scale, even gas is mostly empty, so it's functionally the same as collisions in the atmosphere too, which is where the cosmic ray interactions happen. What happens to the debris afterwards - when it flies off and hits the solid bit, the detectors, is essentially just garbage collection. We pick up the bits and see what happened. So the detector doesn't influence the collision itself. In this way, the collision should be as identical to a collision that occurs outside a detector as possible. Otherwise all we'd be studying was how physics works inside a detector - which wouldn't really help us to understand the wider world

[jfrazierjr]

That requires a supercomputer and we've built something called the Grid (yes, we're no good at names) - a supercomputer that spans the globe that consists of networked computers in universities in countries on every continent. You can submit a job to the Grid and it will use the processing power of computers right across the Grid to do the job. It's the largest distributed computer resource in the world and will eventually be made available to everyone, just like the internet.

AHHH... soooo even if you don't directly blow stuff up in a hugh explosion that rips the fabric of space/time, you will be responsible for building a skynet like entity that will eventually destroy humankind....

Like I said, Torstan destroys the world...

Joe

[torstan]

Anyone read Angels and Demons? I'll support any conspiracy theory that says CERN should have a space plane. That would be cool.

(yes - they have antimatter, no - they could never use it to blow up the Vatican)

@Neon -The Mist? How did you hear about that. That's strictly..... definitely not something I've heard about....

[RPMiller]

Which of course, just brings to mind one of my favorite sayings:

What are you referring to? That statement came completely out of the blue.

[torstan]

Well, at least Skynet would run linux (yep - Grid runs linux).

Incidentally there's another collider reference - last terminator had one I think....

[jfrazierjr]

What are you referring to? That statement came completely out of the blue.

The conspiracy theory bit.

Now... where did I leave my tinfoil hat????

Joe

[RPMiller]

The conspiracy theory bit.

Now... where did I leave my tinfoil hat????

Joe

Hm... It doesn't appear to be working... Trying again...

FNORD FNORD FNORD

Sir, I think we have someone that is immune. We need a memory erase team stat!

[RPMiller]

@jfrazierjr - This won't give us any energy. Rather we pump energy in to get the particles up to speed and then study the results after they collide. It's like pumping a load of petrol into two trucks, watching the fireball when they collide and then measuring how far the bumper went.

@RP - the protons will collide in a vacuum - the center of the pipe is as empty as the engineers can get it to reduce the chance of them accidentally hitting something other than the proton that is coming the other way. Therefore the collision itself is almost identical to a collision in outer space. In fact, at the atomic scale, even gas is mostly empty, so it's functionally the same as collisions in the atmosphere too, which is where the cosmic ray interactions happen. What happens to the debris afterwards - when it flies off and hits the solid bit, the detectors, is essentially just garbage collection. We pick up the bits and see what happened. So the detector doesn't influence the collision itself. In this way, the collision should be as identical to a collision that occurs outside a detector as possible. Otherwise all we'd be studying was how physics works inside a detector - which wouldn't really help us to understand the wider world

Interesting. I'll be very intrigued to hear about the data collection and the results there of.

Have they given any percentages on chance of success for the whole experiment?

[NeonKnight]

@Neon -The Mist? How did you hear about that. That's strictly..... definitely not something I've heard about....

When you started talking other dimensions.

OK, I know of the standard 4: length, height, width and time (basicially the previous 3, as in I am the same entity as I was last year but I appear different in the most basic of laymans' terms.)

The 5th dimension and upwards have been theorized as other realities that over lay our own but we just are not in sync with them. This of course then gets into the whole paranormal aspect of that is where the monsters and ghosts and UFOs and what not comefrom.


******WARNING SPOILER INFO BELOW******

In the Steven King novella/and movie The Mist a Military installation was able to open a portal to another dimension and of course that was were all the baddies came from. So, when you mentioned the collider could be used to study the existence of other dimensions beyound the 4 known....

[töff]

What if the black hole sits there, getting larger and larger until it ate the world?

Larry Niven had a story based on the speculation that the Tunguska meteorite was in fact a black hole that went right through the Earth.

I've long been fascinated by particle physics, although I am an utter tyro. Cheers to everybody who's working to expand the collective knowledge of our species!

p.s. Yeh please don't suck the Earth into a black hole, kthnxbai.