CERN

[spuzi14]

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/fe ... 630897.ece

Now I rarely take end of the world threats seriously. I am taking this one seriously.

I am only in high school phyics this year and we're only doing the basic stuff. I'm just making my opinions out of what I already know. I know black holes suck stuff up so if a black hole is produced, won't it suck stuff up and grow and then that's it? If not, is it because in space there is no gravity like here on earth?

Basically I'm a bit concerned about my future. It's hard for me not to be. I friggin passed three years of spanish and has a Nazi math teacher, all my hard work better not go to getting sucked up faster than I can watch!

Then again, should this crazy contraption work and we all don't freaking die...the gain could be enormous!

So what are your opinions? Are we going to die in a black hole(s) or will we be ok? Or will somebody similar to The Mist (that movie from the Stephen King book) happen? If mods see this as totally not fitting, fair enough...I'm just looking for somebody above my intelligence to tell me we aren't going to flipping die


EDIT: And I seriously don't see anybody stopping scientists from doing this. There's too much time and money in it.

I do see the ridiculous stuff on the sides, it still makes me tense though.

[brogdenlaxmiddie]

What exactly would be benefited from having a black hole?

[spuzi14]

Not sure. They actually are looking for the Higgs Boson which apparently would make everything we know about physics come full circle.

Apparently this could even lead to anti-matter and a whole pantload of other crazy stuff. I still kind of think it is not worth risking the planet and life as we know it, but I am just some kid in their eyes.

[Maniac]

Ahh there is an article about cern i one of the WEEKS weekly papers. It was a very informative article the thing there trying to find is something called the higgs boson Aka: the god particle. Its not all to dangerous I think there's probably a thousand other cosmic related catastrophes that are more likely to happen in the next few days than this.

[clide]

Holy sensationalist article Batman.

Their goal is to smash atoms to bits to hopefully get a better idea/verifications of how exactly they work. The possibilities of black holes is just a side effect. We already have machines that do this, and this one is just doing it on a bigger scale.

I wouldn't worry about it.

[mister pointy]

I've heard of particle accelerators before, Japan collaborated with the U.S. to make one of these if i remember correctly.

The black holes have been mentioned before, but nothing ever came of it.
The particle accelerator mentioned in the article seems to be enormous though, so I don't know if we should take it seriously or not.

[spuzi14]

Yeah, I read the article on the side and it says we get hit by high speed particles a lot. I sorta feel like an idiot now but man, it's just so big and fast...it's like when you think about the universe. It's an angry suspenseful feeling that you can't comprehend it.

It does make a great subject to get the physics teacher not to teach us anything

[FishBoy]

I am somewhat comfortable in that whatever these guys are doing, they have been studying for a looong time, and they wouldn't do it if they thought it would destroy the world.

[DYI]

The kind of black holes they're talking about don't last long enough to do any real damage. Those things are already all over the place in the upper atmosphere, they just disappear in a tiny burst of radiation a small fraction of a second after they were created. Fact is, there's not enough matter on earth to form a big, scary, dangerous black hole without a HUGE amount of energy input.

As Maniac said, you have a lot more to worry about than a particle collider ending life on earth in the most sci-fi way possible.

[starman]

You and the rest of us on the earth are going to be just fine. Some fringe kooks are asking a US judge, who has no jurisdiction in Switzerland, to halt the CERN collider from firing up soon.

What they are missing here is basically mass, mass and more mass. Black holes are collapsed stars and are massively massious...so massious that their gravitational pull doesn't allow light to escape. The term "tiny black hole" therefore is a contradictory term...at least one that could overwhelm a relatively massious earth.

[Eddbot]

this might be a little off topic, but how do we know black holes exist?

if they are so massive that the gravitational pull sucks in light...i mean, how?

gravity is the attraction between massive objects...
light is energy...it can't have mass...so how does it get sucked in?

now that i think about it...this isn't very off topic...

[starman]

Here's a little Q & A re. black holes. It should answer your questions about how black holes affect light...at least in laymans terms.

The math behind this stuff is other-worldly.

[BC Pneumatics]

I think the 'scary part' (IE, the reason people are freaking out) of black holes is that they can continue to grow as long as they are absorbing more mass than they are giving off.

The lucky thing is, the mass they give off is inversely proportional to their size. This means that a small black hole gives off a lot of mass, and takes in relatively little. The point at which a black hole will sustain itself out in space with nothing else to eat but those yummy black and white dots you see on TV is 332,950 times the mass of earth.

The cool thing is, you can orbit a black hole. They only 'eat' whatever travels inside their event horizon. I am going to trust that the nice people in the white coats that built this thing have figured out if there is enough stuff around feed a run-away black hole, and found it safe.

Starman, there is one thing I wanted to comment on. Black holes do not gobble up photons simply because they are very, very massive, but because they are so damn small compared to that mass. Black holes are actually the smallest thing we know of, relative to mass. IE, the most dense things around.

I wonder how many people posted while I typed this... Edit: Two. Not bad.

[hi]

i dont wanna die because some "scientist" wanted to make a black hole. honestly i think its stupid, why would you want to make one anyway? i have heard of this before, but i thought it was just a thought, i didnt think they actually built it. now i am only a sophomore in high school, but it seems like a waste to me.

i pray it does absolutely nothing when they flick the power switch and is a waste of 4.4 billion dollars.

[BC Pneumatics]

hi- I don't want to waste my time posting because you didn't want to read something. Black hole's are not the ultimate goal of this devise. They don't particularly 'want' them, any more than you want ascorbate acid when you think "Mmm, yummy orange juice!"

Sure you think this is a waste, but like you said, you are only a sophmore in high school.