Hank Roth, on the InterNUT since 1982 Past (post) Commander Jewish War Veterans * Cryptologist and Voice Security in the White House and in the War Room for JCS at the Pentagon BIO [with pics] http://inyourface.info/bio/
-------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------- (Addendum to "Doomsday or Bust" from TheCrypt - http://inyourface.info/crypt/) What is the Matter with Strange Matter? Michio Kaku who is at City College of New York and has a podcast and radio program called Explorations on WBAI is a theoretical physicist who says there is nothing to worry about when the LHC is turned back on. As a qualification of that statement, I wish to remind everyone that opposing views also exist. "...the real headline-grabber is the claim that the world's most powerful particle-smasher could create microscopic black holes that some fear would gobble up the planet..." (Discovery Website) The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) the SUPER atom-smasher located at the CERN research center in France and Switzerland will continue the scientific quest already underway at Fermilab (Illinois) and elsewhere to discover and identify the Higgs boson (the so-called "god-particle") and search for supersymmetry (supersymmetric particles) and for proof; that is, evidence for all those extra dimensions. The debate continues. And to reiterate my own view as someone who is definitely interested in science but only has an amateur knowledge of science; personally I don't care if this thing does "gobble up the planet" because I don't believe in an anthropic specialness as a great many others do. As a human I think whether we survive or not is not so important and the only significance for me is the fact that I am an animal sharing this planet with other animals and I feel some sadness for other animals who may cease to exist because of us - (and have already). Michio Kaku argues that the creation of a black hole which would swallow the planet is science fiction. Others, including at least one Nobel prize winner argues otherwise. Michio Kaku (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24556999/) says: "About those black holes ... The black holes that may (or may not) be generated by the Large Hadron Collider would have theoretical rather than practical applications." (Kaku-MSNBC) "If the colliders detectors turn up evidence of black holes, that would suggest that gravity is stronger on a subatomic scale than it is on the distance scales scientists have been able to measure so far. That, in turn, would support the weird idea that we live in a 10- or 11-dimensional universe, with some of the dimensions rolled up so tightly that they can't be perceived." (Kaku-MSNBC) "It will be extremely exciting if the LHC did produce black holes," CERN theoretical physicist John Ellis said. "OK, so some people are going to say, 'Black holes? Those big things eating up stars?' No. These are microscopic, tiny little black holes. And they're extremely unstable. They would disappear almost as soon as they were produced." (MSNBC - see above link) "Not everyone is convinced that the black holes would disappear. "It doesn't have to be that way," said Walter Wagner, a former radiation safety officer with a law degree who is one of the plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit. Despite a series of reassuring scientific studies, Wagner and others insist that the black holes might not fizzle out, and they fear that the mini-singularities produced by the Large Hadron Collider will fall to the center of the earth, grow larger and swallow more and more of Earth's matter." (MSNBC) "Ellis, Kaku and a host of other physicists point out that cosmic rays in space are far more energetic than the collisions produced in the Large Hadron Collider, and do not produce the kinds of persistent black holes claimed by the critics. In the most recent report, CERN scientists rule out the globe-gobbling black holes and the other nightmares enumerated in the lawsuit, even under the most outlandish scenarios. Wagner remains unconvinced, however." (MSNBC) "I don't think the knowledge we are going to acquire by doing such an experiment outweighs the risk that we are taking, if we can't quantify that risk. ... We need to obtain other evidence," he said. (ibid-MSNBC) --- SEE Boon or doom? Collider stirs debate - LHC- msnbc.com URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24556999/ How About Strangelets? The Blogger-Commander-In-Chief at thebiglife.wordpress.com writes: (http://thebiglife.wordpress.com/2008/05/14/3-doomsday-scenarios -involving-the-large-hadron-collider/) "Gobbled by Strangelets. Strangelet, such a happy term, right? It's short for "strange nugget," and, well, there's nothing happy about it. A strangelet is a bit of strange matter, (yes, I'm still not making that up!) that, upon contact with normal earth matter, turns the earth matter into strange matter itself. Imagine if this strangelet was stabilized, and, well, started turning the nuclei of nearby earth matter into strange matter -- imagine this going on a thousand times over, at a speed that can only match the number of earth matter that comes into contact with the strangelet that's growing. Bam! Instantly the earth will become nothing more than a huge ball of strange matter. Or, alternate scenario, since strangelets are anti-matter candidates, they may just blow up upon contact with Earth." (thebiglife) "Devoured by a microscopic black hole. They say that a black hole evaporates in time because of Hawking radiation -- and, well, say, for your normal average sized-black hole, it will take lifetimes before you ever see it happen. But a small, teensy, tiny microscopic black hole? If, say, they do make a black hole in the facility -- it might not disappear -- and since black holes are of such high density, placed on the earth's surface, it'll slice it's way to the earth's core like a hot knife through butter, after which, it'll oscillate back, over and over, until it has consumed enough matter to slow down. By that time, the earth might be gone, by the way." (ibid-thebiglife) Science writer Alan Boyle (winner of the AAAS Science Journalism Award, the NASW Science-in-Society Award and other honors; a contributor to "A Field Guide for Science Writers"; and a member of the board of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing is the science editor for MSNBC where he writes the COSMIC LOG. Alan writes about the fears of doomsday and the LHC (March 17, 2008): "...Could the collider create mini-black holes that last long enough and get big enough to turn into a matter-sucking maelstrom? Could exotic particles known as magnetic monopoles throw atomic nuclei out of whack? Could quarks recombine into "strangelets" that would turn the whole Earth into one big lump of exotic matter? (Cosmic Log) A former nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner along with Luis Sancho filed a lawsuit against CERN to shut down the collider. He raises some interesting issues and scenarios as iterated in the lawsuit and herein described by Alan Boyle in Cosmic Log: (QUOTE) * Runaway black holes: Some physicists say the LHC could create microscopic black holes that would hang around for just a tiny fraction of a second and then decay. Sancho and Wagner worry that millions of black holes might somehow persist and coalesce into a compact gravitational mass that would draw in other matter and grow bigger. That's pure science fiction, said Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at the City College of New York. "These black holes don't live very long, and they have microscopic energy, and so they are harmless," he told me. * Strangelets: Smashing protons together at high enough energies could create new combinations of quarks, the particles that protons are made of. Sancho and Wagner worry that a nasty combination known as a stable, negatively charged strangelet could theoretically turn everything it touches into strangelets as well. Kaku compared this to the ancient myth of the Midas touch. "We see no evidence of this bizarre theory," he said. "Once in a while, we trot it out to scare the pants off people. But it's not serious." * Magnetic monopoles: One theory suggests that high-energy particle collisions might give rise to massive particles that have only one magnetic pole - only north, or only south, but not the north-south magnetism that dominates nature. Sancho and Wagner worry that such particles could be created in the LHC and start a runaway reaction that converts atoms into other forms of matter. But physicists have seen no evidence of such reactions, which should have occurred already as the result of more energetic cosmic-ray collisions in Earth's upper atmosphere. (END QUOTE) My additional thoughts about this is to suggest - if it matters at all - that we might be more prudent to try to figure out the cosmos and how the universe really works before we open up this Pandora's Box. No one is absolutely sure what will happen and everyone here knows what is not expected to happen very often does. I forgot the general rule for that, but doesn't Murphys Law also suggest if something bad is going to happen it very often does happen. I never had a slice of bread, Particularly large and wide, That did not fall upon the floor, And always on the buttered side. Hank Roth Links: (1) http://www.lhcountdown.com/ (2) http://inyourface.info/ArT/Sci/EnD.shtml (3) http://inyourface.info/ArT/Sci/Doomsday.shtml (4) http://inyourface.info/crypt/ (5) http://thebiglife.wordpress.com/ (6) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/ =============================================== * To subscribe to wormhole, send mail to ecar...@inyourface.info and on the subject line (without quotes) write: "subscribe wormhole" - To unsubscribe, do the same in reverse; send "unsubscribe wormhole" on the subject line to ecar...@inyourface.info -- Hank Roth http://inyourface.info/ - http://pnews.org/ ================================================
