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Is this going to cause the end of the world??

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what are these stupid scientists thinking....if there is a 1 in 5000000 chance of destroying our world...it still can happen no matter how small the chance. READ THIS ARTICLE!!!!!1!!

MEYRIN, Switzerland - The most powerful atom-smasher ever built could make some bizarre discoveries, such as invisible matter or extra dimensions in space, after it is switched on in August.

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But some critics fear the Large Hadron Collider could exceed physicists' wildest conjectures: Will it spawn a black hole that could swallow Earth? Or spit out particles that could turn the planet into a hot dead clump?

Ridiculous, say scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French initials CERN — some of whom have been working for a generation on the $5.8 billion collider, or LHC.

"Obviously, the world will not end when the LHC switches on," said project leader Lyn Evans.

David Francis, a physicist on the collider's huge ATLAS particle detector, smiled when asked whether he worried about black holes and hypothetical killer particles known as strangelets.

"If I thought that this was going to happen, I would be well away from here," he said.

The collider basically consists of a ring of supercooled magnets 17 miles in circumference attached to huge barrel-shaped detectors. The ring, which straddles the French and Swiss border, is buried 330 feet underground.

The machine, which has been called the largest scientific experiment in history, isn't expected to begin test runs until August, and ramping up to full power could take months. But once it is working, it is expected to produce some startling findings.

Scientists plan to hunt for signs of the invisible "dark matter" and "dark energy" that make up more than 96 percent of the universe, and hope to glimpse the elusive Higgs boson, a so-far undiscovered particle thought to give matter its mass.

The collider could find evidence of extra dimensions, a boon for superstring theory, which holds that quarks, the particles that make up atoms, are infinitesimal vibrating strings.

The theory could resolve many of physics' unanswered questions, but requires about 10 dimensions — far more than the three spatial dimensions our senses experience.

The safety of the collider, which will generate energies seven times higher than its most powerful rival, at Fermilab near Chicago, has been debated for years. The physicist Martin Rees has estimated the chance of an accelerator producing a global catastrophe at one in 50 million — long odds, to be sure, but about the same as winning some lotteries.

By contrast, a CERN team this month issued a report concluding that there is "no conceivable danger" of a cataclysmic event. The report essentially confirmed the findings of a 2003 CERN safety report, and a panel of five prominent scientists not affiliated with CERN, including one Nobel laureate, endorsed its conclusions.

Critics of the LHC filed a lawsuit in a Hawaiian court in March seeking to block its startup, alleging that there was "a significant risk that ... operation of the Collider may have unintended consequences which could ultimately result in the destruction of our planet."

One of the plaintiffs, Walter L. Wagner, a physicist and lawyer, said Wednesday CERN's safety report, released June 20, "has several major flaws," and his views on the risks of using the particle accelerator had not changed.

On Tuesday, U.S. Justice Department lawyers representing the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation filed a motion to dismiss the case.

The two agencies have contributed $531 million to building the collider, and the NSF has agreed to pay $87 million of its annual operating costs. Hundreds of American scientists will participate in the research.

The lawyers called the plaintiffs' allegations "extraordinarily speculative," and said "there is no basis for any conceivable threat" from black holes or other objects the LHC might produce. A hearing on the motion is expected in late July or August.

In rebutting doomsday scenarios, CERN scientists point out that cosmic rays have been bombarding the earth, and triggering collisions similar to those planned for the collider, since the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago.

And so far, Earth has survived.

"The LHC is only going to reproduce what nature does every second, what it has been doing for billions of years," said John Ellis, a British theoretical physicist at CERN.

Critics like Wagner have said the collisions caused by accelerators could be more hazardous than those of cosmic rays.

Both may produce micro black holes, subatomic versions of cosmic black holes — collapsed stars whose gravity fields are so powerful that they can suck in planets and other stars.

But micro black holes produced by cosmic ray collisions would likely be traveling so fast they would pass harmlessly through the earth.

Micro black holes produced by a collider, the skeptics theorize, would move more slowly and might be trapped inside the earth's gravitational field — and eventually threaten the planet.

Ellis said doomsayers assume that the collider will create micro black holes in the first place, which he called unlikely. And even if they appeared, he said, they would instantly evaporate, as predicted by the British physicist Stephen Hawking.

As for strangelets, CERN scientists point out that they have never been proven to exist. They said that even if these particles formed inside the Collider they would quickly break down.

When the LHC is finally at full power, two beams of protons will race around the huge ring 11,000 times a second in opposite directions. They will travel in two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder and emptier than outer space.

Their trajectory will be curved by supercooled magnets — to guide the beams around the rings and prevent the packets of protons from cutting through the surrounding magnets like a blowtorch.

The paths of these beams will cross, and a few of the protons in them will collide, at a series of cylindrical detectors along the ring. The two largest detectors are essentially huge digital cameras, each weighing thousands of tons, capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.

Each year the detectors will generate 15 petabytes of data, the equivalent of a stack of CDs 12 miles tall. The data will require a high speed global network of computers for analysis.

Wagner and others filed a lawsuit to halt operation of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state in 1999. The courts dismissed the suit.

The leafy campus of CERN, a short drive from the shores of Lake Geneva, hardly seems like ground zero for doomsday. And locals don't seem overly concerned. Thousands attended an open house here this spring.

"There is a huge army of scientists who know what they are talking about and are sleeping quite soundly as far as concerns the LHC," said project leader Evans.

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9 ANSWERS


  1. No it definitely will not. Because of science, we have civilisation.

    Rather than end the world, this might help us save it instead.

    Don't forget tt recently we have just found soil, just like the ones in our back yard, on Mars. Science is making progress and will definitely save the human race from extinction.

    Have faith. We are humans and are very capable.


  2. Y THE h**l WOULD THEY BE DOING THIS IF THERE WAS ANY CHANCE AT ALL?? I DONT UNDERSTAND. I HAVE BEEN READING ON IT ALL NIGHT. IF NETHING DOES GO WRONG WERE ALL DEAD. WAT IS THE POINT OF DOING THIS? TO FIND OUT STUFF? WE ARE ALREADY FINE HOW WE ARE. THERE IS NEVER ANY NEED TO PUT THE EARTH IN DANGER AND I LOVE HOW NO ONE HAS HEARD OF THIS UNTIL RECENTLY WHEN APPARENTLY THIS HAS BEEN GOING ON AND BEING BUILT FOR A GENERATION NOW. IM SORRY BUT IF PPL KNEW ABOUT THIS THEY WOULD PROTEST. THATS WHY THEY HAVE KEPT IT HIDDEN AND ARE JUST GOING AHEAD AND SWITCHING IT ON.I HONESTLY DO NOT WANT THE WORLD TO END OK STUPID SCIENTIST Y ARE WE LEAVING THE CHANCES OF THE WORLD ENDING TO PPL LIKE STEPHEN HAWKINS? HE IS LIKE MENTALLY RETARDED LOOKING AND HANDICAPPED. NO OFFENSE... BUT YA KNO? this should have been left to the public, evn tho i am sure they would have done it anyways... im so scared to think of wat might happen. we have enough natural disasters we dont need to b creating anymore wth.... and it sucks bcuz there is nothing we can do. only wait.

  3. I don't believe this will end the world.  If anything, the scientists will get a whole new perspective on physics and chemistry.  Maybe even find a cure for the common cold or a new mode of transportation that won't use up our resources and pollute our atmosphere.

  4. there are so many variables with the unknown, based on the facts though it does seem like allot could go wrong. i have been watching their development and it does not make sense that such a huge & important project could have been implemented without some sort of global agreement. in the past when the u.s. goverment was experimenting with nuclear & hydrogen bombs it was feared that the intensity of these explosions would cause the oxygen in our atmosphere to ignite. the u.s. goverment has also been scrutenized with the H.A.R.P. military project wich uses high amounts of energy that has been said can change/harness weather. the use of H.A.R.P. has been blamed for our strange weather patterns. humans are developing these powerfull technologies with out really knowing what they are doing, these experiments threaten all of us.-blurey

  5. i dont want the world to end! i dont care how small the risk is, if theres a chance it could happen we should shut the experiment down.

  6. nope---people are overacting to this

  7. Listen, Like They Said Here, It Isn't Going To Happen!! They Are Going To Make It Online On August 2008, But It Won't Do Anything! It's The Same Thing As Y2K, Or 2012 (Which By The Way, Won't Happen Either!) Scientists Have Already Done The Work, They Have Studied It....It Won't Happen!!

    Although, Like You, I Have Been Also Worried...But Not Anymore!!

  8. Source please, this looks very interesting...

  9. Look Like they say in the article its not going to happen!

    If so many sceintist (people who actually know this) say it will not happen, then why should we believe the media or people grappling at strange new theories while they know nothing.

    Even if that little black hole may appear , even if the chances are that small the black hole will last no more then a millisecond before collapsing into nothing as it is too unstable to carry on. We ave very warped views about black holes that we get from tv.

    To get a nice stable black hole a huge star has to collapse, wich i do not believe will happen at cern.

    Like they say the only accelarate particles and collides them, EXACTLY like it happens over the hole world now for centuries! Think about it if millions of particles hit each other all over this world for such a long time and nothing happens, why should we be scared of them doing it in a lab?

    They have been doing it for a very long time anyway in smaller colliders. Just because this one is biggger you know about it, all the small ones could have done it too.

    And one thing, Stephen Hawking.is not stupid. and if this world ends it will only be a diffrent way for us to die.

    Forget about 1 in 50000000 what about your chances of cancer and car crash death

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