hi, i'm twelve

[rmd]

so, as you may know, the large hadron collider is due to go online soon.

you may have noticed that "hadron" is one letter transposition away from "hardon".

someone certainly did. behold, the (nsfw if they object to large cartoon phalluses) large hardon collider

Comments

[srakkt.livejournal.com]

This is the Big Mistake. It'll take several decades for the quantum black hole they create do devour the Earth, so let's hope we can get offworld fast enough.







(I am kidding.)

[rmd.livejournal.com]

if you're interested in OMG THERE ARE BLACK HOLES DESTROYING THE EARTH FROM WITHIN, claudia's listening to some podcast novel based on the idea that the tunguska blast was a tiny black hole hitting the earth and that it's still there.

[klingonlandlady.livejournal.com]

I just read an sf novel about this... looking it up now :)

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

I've read things from people who seriously believe that that's what happened.

[clauclauclaudia]

Apparently the physics works out that if it had, and it *was* a primordial black hole, which is really small, it would take a crazy number of years for it to eat up enough of the earth for us to know and care. Like, I forget how many 0s in the number of years but it was more than a dozen.

The book is titled, naturally, Singularity, by Bill DeSmedt. It's a decent free (or pay-what-you-like) podcast, or printed book.

[srakkt.livejournal.com]

Oscillating inside, orbiting Earth's core, dense enough to pass through solid rock like a penny through air after being dropped off the Empire State.

[spazzkat.livejournal.com]

huh huh huh huh huh huh

hardon

huh huh huh huh huh huh huh

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

I am trying very hard not to set that as my desktop background image.

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

No lie, there was an article with "long-lived hardons" *in the title* in one of the major physics journals 20-odd years ago (my mom worked here (http://pdg.lbl.gov/) for 35 years and as a teen I occasionally did odd jobs like photocopying and organizing articles for their database).

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

I think we may all be twelve in this particular instance... :)

[cz_unit]

From a CZ standpoint, I'm really not worried about mini black holes, what concerns me is that by melting the quarks in search of the higgs bosson, they might melt a hole in the underlying vacuum.

If we live in a false vacuum zero state (and we probably do), this would be like drilling a hole in a swimming pool on the top of a hotel. The "water" is reality, which would drain through the hole as the vacuum melted.

This would be bad.

[space-parasite.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, natural events many orders of magnitude more energetic than anything the LHC will achieve happen all the time, so we can be pretty sure that if that were enough to destroy the universe, we wouldn't be here to worry about it.

[cz_unit]

Perhaps, however this is happening in a pretty small space. I am happy that we're not there yet, but we're boosting the power pretty quickly. I think within 100 years we'll be exceeding anything we see in nature.

Regardless, melting the vacuum would be bad. Really bad.

CZ

[smcmullan.livejournal.com]

you said crossing the streams would be bad...

[space-parasite.livejournal.com]

No, I mean events on that scale. There are astronomical phenomena that amount to particle accelerators light-years across, and every so often one of those particles hits something else, like our atmosphere.

Breaking the false vacuum would definitely be exciting, but we're still quite a few funding cycles away from having to worry about doing it ourselves.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Just *falls over giggling*

[evwhore.livejournal.com]

also this t-shirt (http://entrager.livejournal.com/112736.html)