I know this question might have already been asked before, but about the LHC?

Question

I've been pretty anxious and apprehensive about the LHC lately, and i was just wondering should i really be worried about it? Is there truly any threat of destruction?

Answer 1

No more so than the KHC. I mean, what's the difference? They're only letters.  If you erase them, you can just write them over again later.

Answer 2

it's been asked 2-3x a day for the last couple of months...

i'm not repeating it [the full explination in detail] for the 50th time.... no, it poses absolutely no danger.... aside from some complete one in a trillion, destroyer of the laws of physics, unimaginable anamoly.....

you have more of a chance of being bitten by a shark in the desert then the LHC posing any harm to the city, country or continent it's built in....

Answer 3

No.

Answer 4

It would be very cool if the LHC can create a black hole.  Such a black hole will be very small, and will evaporate very quickly.  It will not be dangerous.

The way that such a black hole might be produced is if you take two atoms and have them hit each other head on.  This might produce an object that, briefly, will have the density required to become a black hole.  Bit it will still be the mass of a couple atoms - that is' not much.  So it won't have much gravity. The LHC will be able to deliver the most energy of any such machine ever built.  So if anything built so far can do it, the LHC can.

Cosmic rays are typically hydrogen atoms that have their electrons stripped off.  So, they're naked protons.  And, they've been accelerated to near the speed of light, and at very high energy.  Many of them have much higher energy than the LHC could hope to achieve.  These things rain down on Earth all the time.  Several have passed through your body while you've been reading this.  And, these cosmic rays smash into atoms in the atmosphere, your body, and the Earth all the time.  If they create black holes, they clearly aren't dangerous.  You're still here, right?

Answer 5

11 dimensional string theory, (and 26 dimensional M theory), has not produced anything.

It is possible that the extra 7 dimensions of space in string theory, (that are not perceived), are mathematical deception that first appeared with 5 dimensional Kaluza-Klein Theory.

String theory is possibly deception involving adding dimensions of space to the already existing 3 dimensions of space one dimension at a time at 90 degree angles to the previous dimension.

That string theory is possibly invalid is stated at the end of the wikipedia article on string theory.

Answer 6

Ya we get this question a lot here so forgive us if we come off as annoyed... we aren't mad at the person asking, we're just tired of the question. We are actually nice here... "Quasar" aside...

But, about your question.

The LHC poses no danger WHATSOEVER. The worst POSSIBLE outcome is that it doesn't work, and we wasted millions of dollars. And that would suck. But black holes swallowing the world? No.

Lets start with a very basic astrophysics lesson. Black holes don't always have an infinite amount of gravitational force. There are tons of "roaming" black holes which range in size from a tennis ball to a planet. Fortunately, no planet-sized black holes are near us. The gravitational pull of black holes if calculated by its mass. For ever kilogram of mass, there is a force of .000000000066726 N. This means for every kilogram of mass that I have, I have .000000000066726 N of gravitational force. The black holes the LHC is set to create will only have the mass of a couple hundred protons. But for calculation's sake, lets pretend the LHC exceeds all wildest expectations, and creates a black hole of 1 kilogram. This black hole would have .000000000066726 N of gravitational force. My dog weighs 10 kg. His gravitational force is .00000000066726 N. So my dog has a better chance of sucking up the world than this black hole that exceeds all expectations of the LHC creating.

And these black holes won't exist for more than a thousandth of a second. There is something called "Hawking radiation". It is the principal that black holes emit radiation... highly charged particles of matter is has consumed that has been compressed to the point where we have these highly charged particles. These particles come out of the black hole, and thus the black hole looses its mass. Because of this, these black holes won't live for more than a second.

To put it in prospective, if the sun were to suddenly disappear, and a black hole of the same mass would replace it, the planets wouldn't be sucked in, they would just continue the normal orbit. The mass is exactly the same. Now the lack of light would present a few problems, but we wouldn't be sucked in.

And when we say that "it is going to recreate the initial conditions of the big bang" it simply means that we are going to create temperatures and densities of roughly the same value as those which appeared at the beginning of the big bang... we aren't making another big bang. People seem to think that they know more about this than the thousands of astrophysicists and particle physicists that are running the LHC.

And we have already performed some of these experiments. In 2003 we ran a couple experiments almost the same to the runs we are going to run in a couple months, and the world didn't end then, so why would it end now?

Answer 7

There is not the slightest reason for concern.  The machine has done some test runs, and Europe is (so far as I am aware) still there.