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

[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.