The end of the world...IS TOMORROW?!

Okay, so I’ve heard things on the radio, on youtube, and from my friends that the world is going to end on September 10, 2008 (tomorrow). From what I’ve been told is that a bunch of scientists in Europe are doing some type of experiment that COULD create a black hole, causing everybody will die.
Scientist group A: Yea, this experiment will probably work
Scientist group B: IT WILL KILL US ALL!?!?

Can somebody tell me what’s going on?

The chances of us dying are around 1 in 100000…

So, really, I highly doubt we will.

Basically, there’s this machine been made, called the Large Hadron Collider. It’s basically going to fire particles or something, and reenact the big bang or something. I don’t know exactly, since I haven’t worked on it.

Anyway, it’s due to be switched on tomorrow at 8:30am British time. And the odds are in the world’s favour, at 99999 out of 100000 that the experiment will work without a hitch.

Although it could potentially create a black hole and destroy the world.

ok. I don’t know that much about the physics involved, but from what my dad says (a physics nerd) the black holes will probably be created in a particle accelerator. They will fire two particles together at high speeds. Do you think this doesn’t happen in nature? I would imagine rapid moving particles from space collide in our atmosphere all the time, and that hasn’t killed us yet. After some research I found that scientists believe this happens on our own planet in nature quite often, and that the black holes will have an even horizon smaller than an atom, so it shouldn’t be able to even pull in a single atom. It will also give off radiation (in the form of heat?) and dissipate rather quickly. Scientists could be wrong however, but I am not worried at all. My information could be wrong, as my memory isn’t perfect, but I think everything I said here is correct.

I can’t wait!
We either A. Get to live through a scientific breakthrough or B. Die because of a scientific breakthrough
:happy:

I’ll talk to my biology teacher about this…he’s a genius. He should know about this kinda stuff.

Sounds interesting. I knew the British would kill us all eventually.

My science teacher talked some about it today. She said that the people who think that it would create a black hole are idiots and that it won’t make a black hole.

well i don’t know all the physics involved but I’d say the physicists and engineers know more than your science teacher :razz:

You never know… Some teachers are really smart. There’s an expression, those who can’t do, teach. So teachers couldn’t go on creating new stuff, but they know a huuge amount of information on the subject, obviously, because they teach it :razz:

teachers don’t need to know vasts amounts of information on the subject. And it said kTFox’s age was 14, so he would be in middle school. Middle school teachers don’t need to know much at all :razz:. In fact, everything middle school science teachers really need to know is in their teachers editions of the text books :happy:.

Yeah my dad told me that he read about that. I laughed at him, thinking he was joking, then I found the article. The thing is, I don’t think that they would actually do that if it had a high chance of killing us all, lol. I just can’t see them gainning clearence to perform the experiment. What is the world commin’ to? Answer? A black hole. :tongue:

Can’t wait for the results though! Well, as long as we don’t die…I’m too young!! :wink:

mildly amusing, isn’t it. fun ensues when you take in consideration the fact that, if the said black hole incident does happen, it will raise considerably the odds of the theory put to test being right. i can actually picture an alien form of intelligent life, picking up radio signals from a weird civilisation which, faced with the choice between “possible black hole” and “possibly not being able to test a theory”, considered the later fate to be more dreadful.

with Yank money, i knew it!

Black hole sun, won’t you come?
And wash away the rain
Black hole sun, won’t you come?
Won’t you come?

just thought id point out that the machine starts in 1 hour and 20 min as of now. It will be midnight where I am when it starts.

Umm, actually … no. I’m 15 and a Sophomore in high school. Just to clarify things. And yeah the machine is coming on soon. The experiment begins on September 10 soon after 9 a.m. (0700 GMT).

I think many people don’t understand the PURPOSE of the machine (and if you are reading this post, more than likely we are all still alive, unless you are some razy time demon.)

The purpose of the machine is to create a mini black hole by launching particles art each other at the speed close to light.

The black hole is so tiny, it dissipates within a millisecond.

this more than likely happens around us all the time and we don’t notice it, because obviously we don’t notice when particles collide.

it also happens in the earth’s atmosphere, which we do know. guess what? we’re still here!

So when they say ‘black hole’ they DONT mean mega huge planet-sucking thing. They mean tiny, atom sized black hole that we can record. which is good. we may be able to study material that hasn’t been around since the big bang!

woohoo!

Sorry to dissapoint… but the machine is underneath Cern in Geneva… :tongue:

We’ll try to destroy the world some other time then eh?

no it’s not. it’s just to make particles clash at a preposterous velocity to see what happens when you force quarks away from their triplets.

there is a little less than a chance in five hundred that a singularity will show up. it’s likely that it’ll dissipate. however, given the heat and the weird situation in which timespace will be at inside that big collider, it might just be that the odds of the singularity stabilising and becoming a baby black hole. (the odds were calculated at a little less than 1 in 10 000). in that case, there’s a chance a little over 10% (making the whole shebang 1 in 100 000) that the black hole itself will not poof away. in which case we get doomsday before christmas.

yes, but in a normal condition, timespace borrows energy from the future in the form of a particle-antiparticle pair which undergoes anihilation and releases a lot of energy — at which point the baby black hole goes. what we don’t know is whether or not in weird simulated conditions this will hold, as the whole “borrowing energy from the future” thing is about as complicated as quantum goes.

now you’re just skimming through the wikipedia. what arguably happens at the atmosphere is the formation of strange matter, and that’s only provided a massive ammount of energy, like a solar storm. nothing to do with black holes. as for strage matter, it might be more risky in a lab than in the skies because there’s a lot more energy going on in the LHC, and the two mainstream physics standard models of now are particularly contradictory when it comes to strage matter: one says it will dissipate under lots of energy, the other predicts that if you give it matter and heat it will subverting the whole matter around it into strangelets.

at any rate, what you’re dismissing here, Ryan, is that there is a chance a weird thing comes up from this test. the chance is very small — but it’s not a pointing at others and saying “ha, told ya” matter. no matter how small our calculated risk is, we shouldn’t treat “oh, and there’s a risk we’ll anihilate the world in the process” as someone else’s problem! there still is a chance. a small chance is nice that way: it’s not like saying it won’t happen. it just might happen.

also, we work with given figures here, but math in quantum physics is nowhere near trivial. it might just be that we’re playing the figures down compared to what they really are — and vice versa. this machine brings particle colliding to such a new level that we don’t really know what to expect. as particles approach the speed of light, they gain mass (Einstein’s equation) and lose space (Lorentz contraction) approaching ever more state necessary to form a stable singularity. and hey, the LHC is still a human-made machine — the collider itself is subject to math errors and engineering flaws.

helium leaks, that kind of thing: we simply cannot predict what will happen. the tiniest helium leak would set up a self-sustained fusion process, and what you would have is basically the world’s largest fusion reactor. presto: “large hadron collider” becomes “massive H bomb” and you can say goodbye to your european friends.

I’m no scientist, but I am guessing that is why they decided to build it deep into the ground and not on the surface?!

we can’t even tell what exactly would happen if helium leaked, Carnun, whether it would be an explosion, a fireball, a nuclear explosion or plasma erupting. if its done just the right way, it doesn’t matter that the whole shebang is underground, it would wipe a considerable part of Europe from the face of Earth, and most of the human population would (face extinction yadda yadda) be under the risk of having kids with tails. during the construction of the LHC, they already managed to have a helium leak.

(at any rate, i’m not particularly concerned with any of this, but that’s because of what i believe in and stuff — what i don’t get is, given there is indeed a real chance things go really wrong, how come everyone else isn’t worried).

also: this is most instructive (no doomsday predictions, just a somewhat amusing piece of nerd rap).