PCFormat Forum Archive

Based on string theory and its extra dimensions, Choptuik and Pretorious concluded that high-energy collisions at the LHC could indeed form black holes...

We live in a box, a box called Earth.
A mighty utiopia that has so much Worth.

There once was a collider, that sat in this box.
A few people complained, the rest sat around like rocks.

We all went about our business, making our ways.
A number of scientist at the collider were betting their research pays.

Along came a black hole when the collisions became hot.
A few scientists scratched their heads and said: "Surely not!"

Perhaps our fates are entangled.
As our lives are dangled.

This conundrum? Perhaps, we think in our head.
The question is, are we alive or are we dead?

doo_much wrote:Damn you Lancelot!

Everytime I see this thread I think about your comment about swopping the 'd' and 'r' in Hadron and snort with laughter!

SoulBlade wrote:Calculations Show Black Holes Very Possible at LHC, But Mostly Harmless

The Large Hadron Collider has successfully created a "mini-Big Bang" by smashing together lead ions instead of protons.

The scientists working at the enormous machine on Franco-Swiss border achieved the unique conditions on 7 November.

The experiment created temperatures a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

The experiment created temperatures a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

Scientists working on the big bang machine in Geneva have done the seemingly impossible: create, capture and release antimatter.

The development could help researchers devise laboratory experiments to learn more about this strange substance, which mostly disappeared from the universe shortly after the Big Bang around 14 billion years ago.

Trapping any form of antimatter is difficult, because as soon as it meets normal matter -- the stuff Earth and everything on it is made out of -- the two annihilate each other in powerful explosions.

"Striking" evidence of a quark-gluon plasma has been observed by a team of researchers, including Canadians, at the facility near Geneva, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced Friday

Quarks and gluons are very tiny particles that combine into larger particles called protons. Those in turn combine with electrons to form atoms in the world we know today. However, during the initial moments of the Big Bang, this hadn't yet happened. The temperature was likely 100,000 to a million times what it was at the centre of the sun, and quarks moved freely in a "soup" called a plasma. Physicists hypothesize that as the universe cooled, small groups of quarks separated into individual protons, and as it cooled further, small groups of protons combined with electrons to form individual atoms.

Most cosmologists trace the birth of the universe to the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. But a new analysis of the relic radiation generated by that explosive event suggests the universe got its start eons earlier and has cycled through myriad episodes of birth and death, with the Big Bang merely the most recent in a series of starting guns.

The possible discovery of the Higgs boson at Cern is obviously of tremendous importance to our understanding of the universe – but how does one explain the Higgs boson to a layperson, a child, an idiot? Just use this handy guide to selective explanation:

For people you’re trying to impress: “The Higgs boson is an elementary scalar particle first posited in 1962, as a potential by-product of the mechanism by which a hypothetical, ubiquitous quantum field – the so-called Higgs field – gives mass to elementary particles. More specifically, in the standard model of particle physics, the existence of the Higgs boson explains how spontaneous breaking of electroweak symmetry takes place in nature.”

For harassed, sleep-deprived parents: “If the constituent parts of matter were sticky-faced toddlers, then the Higgs field would be like one of those ball pits they have in children’s play areas. Each coloured plastic ball represents a Higgs boson: collectively they provide the essential drag that stops your toddler or electron falling to the bottom of the universe, where all the snakes and hypodermic needles are.”

For English undergraduates: “The Higgs boson is a type of subatomic punctuation with a weight somewhere between a tiny semicolon and an invisible comma. Without it the universe would be a meaningless cloud of gibberish – a bit like The Da Vinci Code, if you read that.”

For teenagers studying matric physics: “No, I know it’s not an atom. I didn’t say it was. Well, I meant a particle. Yes, I do know what electromagnetism is, thank you very much – unified forces, Einstein, blah blah blah, mass unaccounted for, yadda yadda, quarks, Higgs boson, the end. It was a long time ago, and I’m tired.”

For taxpayers: “Its discovery is a colossal, unprecedented, almost infinite waste of money.”

For a child in the back seat of a car: “It’s a particle that some scientists have been looking for. Because they knew that without it the universe would be impossible. Because without it, the other particles in the universe wouldn’t have mass. Because they would all continue to travel at the speed of light, just like photons do. Because I just said they would, and if you ask ‘Why?’ one more time we’re not stopping at McDonalds.”

For religious fundamentalists: “There is no Higgs boson.”

StarPhoenix wrote:Could you not as easily call That Which Holds It All Together a "Higgs Boson", or has the name been immutably associated with a certain set of properties? ["Oops....I forgot to carry that 0."]