Guest Posted September 8, 2008 Share Posted September 8, 2008 Well, What do you think of this idea? End of the world, or start of the future? Scientists will this week 'switch on' the most powerful particle accelerator ever built as they prepare for an epic journey back in time to the birth of the universe. The £5 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will smash protons - one of the building blocks of matter - into each other at energies up to seven times greater than any achieved before. In the flashes from the collisions, scientists expect to reproduce conditions that existed during the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang at the dawn of creation. No-one knows precisely what will come tumbling out of the primordial soup of disintegrating protons. Scientists could find answers to some of the biggest questions in physics, such as why the universe looks the way it does, and how to explain mass, gravity and mysterious 'dark matter'. They could also find the first evidence of extra spatial dimensions, and even create mini-black holes that blink in and out of existence in a fraction of a second. The LHC, a colossal machine housed in a 17 mile tunnel buried under 100 metres of rock, straddles the borders of Switzerland and France between Lake Geneva and the Jura mountains. Beams of protons will be accelerated in opposite directions through the ring-shaped tunnel, which is supercooled to just 1.9 degrees above absolute zero (minus 271C), the lowest temperature allowed by nature. Reaching velocities of 99.99% the speed of light, each beam will pack as much energy as a Eurostar train travelling at 150 kilometres per hour. That is enough to melt 500 kilograms of copper. more... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1053162/Scientists-prepare-switch-time-machine-unlock-mysteries-creation.html SW Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
norman Posted September 8, 2008 Share Posted September 8, 2008 Reaching velocities of 99.99% the speed of light, each beam will pack as much energy as a Eurostar train travelling at 150 kilometres per hour. That is enough to melt 500 kilograms of copper. So that will be with trimmers fully in and max speed bar then.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gallar Posted September 8, 2008 Share Posted September 8, 2008 All been done before, of course. Two 'corn-fed' modern young Leeds women waddle-sprinting from opposite ends of a function room towards the last remaining doughnut on the table in the middle meet with a very similar force... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted September 8, 2008 Share Posted September 8, 2008 Magicians with clipboards. The only certainty that will emerge is we dont know didley. 5 billion eh? well I guess its only the same as a small war. Or the gnp of a small country, or the differnce between life and death for the somalian refugees. Hend now beeefore your verrrrrry eyes, we will sever the health budget and make half of it disappear. Just like that, ah hah. Oooooooooh! Aaaaaaah! And thats magic. IMHO heh heh. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gallar Posted September 8, 2008 Share Posted September 8, 2008 assuming of course that if not spent on CERN the money would be spent instead on a more worthy cause such as temporarily fighting famine etc. in the horn of Africa (or at least further enriching the corrupt scumbags in charge in that part of the world). If not funding the CERN project I suspect the money would simply have been absorbed into other expenditure in the contributing economies and usefully expended there on employing more gay and lesbian outreach workers, equal opportunity co-ordinators, EEC budget corruption denial officials, dustbin police, stuff like that. Cynical, moi? (Incidentally I reckon this whole CERN thing is a fairly good illustration of the posit that any science sufficiently advanced beyond your own in-depth understanding is indistinguishable from magic!) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Malcs Posted September 8, 2008 Share Posted September 8, 2008 Total garbage, total waste. I can just about understand the desire and curiosity of discovering what goes on on other planets but what the hell is the point of this and how can it possibly matter or make any difference to our future, and with a 1 in 25 million chance that it could all go wrong and obliterate the planet, I reckon thats too much of a risk! Hell we could lift the budget for the Olympics to 15bn instead, that would be really worthwhile, no? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dragonphotographic Posted September 8, 2008 Share Posted September 8, 2008 15bn is nowhere near enough for the Olympics, that's not even enough for the executives of the companies who are lining their own pockets at our expense, just like they did with the Millenium Dome. Interestingly enough, a look in the register of members interests at the House of Commons shows how many MP's are these very executives. As for the particle accelerator, what better way of throwing a curved ball and diverting attention away from the above? Corrupt scumbags in Africa? That'll be Shell, DeBeers and BP then. Without them, the politicians in those countries who are content with the lot of their starving peoples would have no power base Cynical? Moi? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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