Play the YouTube video below while reading this post...it'll be more entertaining.Scientists are trying to stop the most powerful experiment ever – saying the black holes it will create could destroy the world. Dubbed by some the Doomsday test, it will be carried out next week in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located 300ft underground near the French-Swiss border.
The machine is 17 miles long and cost £4.4billion to create. When its switch is pulled on September 10, this atom-smasher will become a virtual time machine, revealing what happened when the universe came into existence 14 billion years ago. New particles of matter are expected to be discovered, new dimensions found beyond the four known, as scientists re-create conditions in the first BILLIONTHS of a second after the Big Bang.
I'm no physicist but I'm not worrying about this one! Rest assured, we'll still keep forecasting the weather beyond September 10th. What do you think? Please post a comment.
8 comments:
I think this would be bigger news if a lot of people really thought this would happen...
The interesting thing is that some scientists think we *already* have countless tiny black holes all around us. However, they're incredibly brief - they form and evaporate so quickly we don't even know they're there.
I think it's one of the things that goes along with String Theory. Of course, it's essentially impossible for us to wrap our heads around an idea that includes more than four dimensions (length, width, height, and time) because we have zero concept of anything beyond that.
You know, as much as I hated physics class, there are certain facets of physics and its theories that I find very interesting. Go figure.
"The Time Machine" (the original movie...not the recent one) is my favorite movie. Maybe I'll watch that in the next few days. :D
String Theory is quite interesting --is it a science, or not? I've read that there are things about the theory that can not be tested at this point, and that's the difference between science and religion (or philosophy) --can you test it? So, if we can't test the concepts involved in String Theory, can we really call it a scientific theory? :-)
EDIT to add the R.E.M. song. -ERIC
I love science and I'm 100% in favor of science.
Haven't got a clue whether or not we actually are surrounded by millions of micro-black holes, or what conditions might cause these micro-phenomena to transform into the macro-phenomena that suck matter into them (apparently) forever.
Not going to lose any sleep over this, and not going to cancel all my meetings and plans for 9/10 et seq.
That said, I wouldn't be heartbroken if the legal challenges were successful in stopping this from occurring.
Anyone who knows even the slightest bit of the history of science knows that it is well populated with experiments that had unexpected results and/or unanticipated consequences.
We aren't clairvoyant enough to know what the results of an experiment WILL be (else why bother doing the experiment at all). We can hypothesize - but we can't know until after it is performed.
When the potential consequences are catastrophic - even when accompanied by an extremely remote probabily of occurrance - I think we need to re-examine our collective will for COLLECTIVE (not individual) risk-taking in the pursuit of knowledge.
I don't really care if individual scientists take individual risks to pursue knowledge, because any negative consequences would impact the scientist making the decision to take the risk more than they would affect anyone else.
In this case ... ummm ... not so much. I guess I think (putting it in business terms, sorry) there are stakeholders who have not been consulted (e.g., you, me, other present and future Earthlings), and the project should not proceed without obtaining their buy-in first.
Here I thought End of the World was going to have like "Encounters at the End of the World" making it so beautiful and scarey to say the least!
OMG, Yes, I like the song you picked, more the video than anything lol Cute skater!
"The interesting thing is that some scientists think we *already* have countless tiny black holes all around us. However, they're incredibly brief - they form and evaporate so quickly we don't even know they're there."
So that's what happened to the matching sock...
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