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Feb 6, 2009 06:10 PM | 11
Here we go again. Giving doomsayers yet more time to predict the end of the Earth, the perpetually delayed restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has once again been pushed back. CERN, the European lab for particle physics that manages the mega particle accelerator, has nudged the start-up from this summer to some point later in the year at the earliest. The lab is still dealing with repercussions from a September electrical malfunction that put the kibosh on the collider's operation shortly after its initial start-up.
According to CERN, some of the magnets in the LHC's 17-mile- (27-kilometer-) long tunnel will not be ready for testing until September; the lab had previously said it planned to have the collider operating by the end of June. CERN's top brass are set to meet Monday to decide on an advisory panel's recommendations for a repair-and-restart timeline that would have the LHC running by the end of the year.*
Assuming the LHC is brought online by the end of the year as proposed, it will not be going full throttle. As previously planned, the collider will ease into operation with a period of reduced-energy running. Under the panel's recommendations, the LHC would run at an energy of five trillion electron-volts (five TeV) per beam, down from its design energy of seven TeV, until fall 2010.
"CERN’s priority for 2009 is to get collision data for the experiments, but with caution as the guiding principle," Steve Myers, the lab's director for accelerators who chaired the advisory workshop, said in a statement. "The recommendations made to the CERN management are cautious, while achieving the goal of running this year."
*UPDATE (2/9/2009): CERN management did approve the recommendations today, stating that the "new schedule foresees first beams in the LHC at the end of September this year, with collisions following in late October.... ensuring that the experiments have adequate data to carry out their first new physics analyses and have results to announce in 2010."
Diagram of LHC: ©CERN
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11 Comments
Add CommentWe all have an interest in scientific study but should not show the complacency shown by the second sentence. A lot of "givens" have been shown to be in error. Most academics prefer paychecks to provocation and are quick to shoot down intriguing concepts that are no more a theory than what they hold on to. There are many assumptions found to have been flawed. Here is one. Remember Maxwell's equations..the ones taught for the last 100+ years are NOT Maxwell's equations. Heavyside and Gibbs severely modified them by removing the scalar components.Were you told?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHope this collider is safe... Looks way too "Grand-i-ose" to be safe.! Are there smaller ones that are working fine? Solar and wind...less huge but safe. The world has enough really "BIG" things going wrong now.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA little less sneering, please, Mr. Matson. Please tell us, sir -- you, who are so sure that we are in suuuuch safe hands! -- have *you* noticed the "off by a factor of 1000" in the Casadio/Harms/Fabi paper? Yes, I'm talking about:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.2948
... the paper we're all supposed to be so re-assured by. The paper with the sentence, "Based on this analysis, we argue against the possibility of catastrophic black hole growth at the LHC."
Kindly go to the very first page, and look at the last line before "II. BLACK HOLE DECAY".
Look at where it equates the energy-equivalent of a TeV to 1.8 * 10^-27 kg.
Bhhhhhnt. 1.8 * 10^-27 kg is the energy-equivalent for a giga-electron-volt. A tera is 1000 giga. It should be 1.8 * 10^-24 .
I think there's enough egg here to go 'round on a lot of faces. The legions of keyboard-pounding pontificators who have been rolling their eyes with disgust at the idea of how anybody, *anybody*, could dare question the wisdom of all these eminent, careful, brilliant scientists, or the glory and beauty of their powerful, wonderful collider!
You know, if there were going to be a disaster, this _is_ how it would look, in the months leading up to some irrevocable occurrence. The complacent majority, sitting around breathing each other's fumes and patting themselves on the back, and (as we see!) all just blithely accepting -- doing no checking themselves -- that it's all gonna be just fine, and having a great time laughing at the people who are trying to advocate caution in the face of such an irreversible unknown.
Just imagine the sneering ... the snickering ... the eye-rolling ... the spitting, the disdain ... that would have greeted someone trying to warn people as they boarded the Titanic.
"The bulkheads are not air-tight - they are open, at the top! If you hit an iceberg and breach more than two of the major compartments, the ship will sink!"
What words would go flying back .... "Shut up, you fool! As if this ship would hit an iceberg! Icebergs drift in the water, essentially stationary compared to a ship! This ship can dodge any iceberg, idiot! And the ship is piloted by eminent, experienced officers! Shut up! You're frightening my wife! You're frightening my children!"
The person who tried to issue the warning would soon be lying on the wharf with two black eyes, two broken arms, and a cracked skull. Which part of his face did you punch, Mr. Matson?
10^-24, sir. Check it out.
I suspect that the error to which you refer is typographical, something which should have been caught in proofreading, but was not. Later in the paper, in the description of Table I in Section IV, Subsection D on page 6, the authors do cite a TeV as being equivalent to 1.8 � 10^24 kg. This is in the area where the actual math is being demonstrated. In addition, the area which you cite refers to the TeV as being in the electro-weak scale. Since a length scale is within +/-1 order of magnitude, and the electro-weak scale is around 246 GeV (within one order of magnitude of 1 TeV), this would further argue for the author hitting the wrong key, perhaps as a result of using the ten-key portion of the keyboard, where the bottom of the 7 may easily be tipped when intending to touch the 4. It's a mistake that is easily made.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn a side note, you ask that Mr. Matson cease what you perceive to be sneering, and then launched into a somewhat vicious attack of your own. Given that he has only two sentences which exhibit some level of sarcasm before turning to factual issues while a significant majority of your post contains sarcasm (and much more caustic sarcasm at that) with only occasional mention of factual points, I think perhaps it is not Mr. Matson that has the most need of taking a step back.
How close will the LHC go to creating a black hole, a 1% chance, 10% or 50%, and if it is say 1% would it vanishes as quick as it was made but how long would it last if it was as high as 50%.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn other words at what point would a black hole continue to grow once created?
How close will the LHC go to creating a black hole, a 1% chance, 10% or 50%, and if it is say 1% would it vanishes as quick as it was made or how long would it last if it was as high as 50%.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn other words at what point would a black hole continue to grow once created?
Well, if the LHC does not kill us, its discoveries will be amazing!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf we create a controllable black hole what a great new weapon physicists have given us!
If it creates a black hole that eats us all--who will care?
So much ego. So much failure.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe comment above by Edward John Smith about a 1000-fold error in the paper by Casadio et al. was correct. The error was fixed in a revised version released 2/17/09 at http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.2948
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnother 1000-fold error appeared in the 2nd paragraph of the Conclusion of the original paper, which stated: "in order for the black holes created at the LHC to grow at all, the critical mass should be Mc >= 10^5 kg." This was changed in the revised version to "10^2 kg" - 1000 times less.
A critique of the paper by Casadio et al. appeared in August 2009 in an appendix to a revised paper by German physicist Rainer Plaga, Ph.D., "On the potential catastrophic risk from metastable quantum-black holes produced at particle colliders." Dr. Plaga concluded, "Casadio et al. correctly and usefully identify the range of a crucial theoretical parameter Mc [critical mass] for which black-hole growth is not catastrophic, but offer no argument of how to exclude that the real Mc lies outside this range."
This important revised paper by Plaga - which was released August 2009 at http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.1415v3 - demolishes the arguments of CERN's safety theorists and shows that "micro black holes produced at a collider can be captured by Earth and accrete... Thereby they might emit Hawking radiation that might be dangerous to Earth as a whole and/or the inhabitants of CERN and its surroundings." The power would be "the energy released in a major thermonuclear explosion per second."
FICTION THOUGHT IN SCIENCE
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a philosopher of science, concerned with the definition of truth and falsity in scientific theories, I have been for quite sometime worried about the growing expansion of fiction thought in science. Fiction thought in science could be defined as the attempt to create a priori a theory, based in wishful thinking and the manipulation of mathematical equations that has nothing to do whatsoever with observed real phenomena. Then once a mathematical fiction is created, in a second phase, fiction thought, acts manipulating experimental evidence to fit the hypothesis established a priori with no real prove whatsoever in nature. That is, fiction thought doesnt explain experimental facts and phenomena observed in nature as the scientific method obliges, but acts with human, anthropomorphic arrogance, trying to bend nature and reality to the mental, linguistic thoughts of the imaginative scientist.
In that regard, we must not forget that science is first a linguistic statement of humanity about the real Universe, and as such it is subject to the rules of truth of any language.
Real science, which tries to explain the Universe with the languages of mathematics and logic tends to be more accurate than philosophy, which uses the language of verbal thought to that purpose; or art, which works with the language of images, because mathematics carries more information, as a synoptic language that words do and art has always accepted its subjective, anthropomorphic nature, and hence it accepts fiction thought from its inception. But in essence, those 3 realms of human knowledge, art, verbal thought and science are linguistic interpretations of the Universe and as such they are subject to the laws of truth and falsity of languages, among which is paramount the existence of fiction thoughts in all languages, which in mathematics was shown to be the case thanks to the work of Mr. Godel. In simple terms, we can say that any language reflects with a series of symbols in a synoptic way the total information of an event or substance of the Universe. And because the language carries by definition far less information than the subject it studies, all languages can, without experimental evidence, create fiction thoughts. That is, a mathematical equation will not be real as long as there is no experimental prove of the phenomenon it describes. For that reason Einstein said to Poncaire, that while I know when mathematics are truth I dont know when they are real. As we do not know if a book of fiction describe real characters unless we identify them in the real world. Thus, to avoid linguistic fictions in science, the experimental method was established, according to which a scientist should only work theories to explain experimental phenomena already observed, by establishing a hypothesis or theory to explain that phenomena. But without prior observation of the phenomena, the scientist should not at all make any research or pretend that his theory is more relevant to truth than Don Quixot, regardless of the beauty of the thoughts of Mr. Cervantes.
Yet in the case he takes the avenue of fiction thought and decides to explore mathematically a certain hypothesis or imaginary equation, he should at least, always respect in his deductions all the proved laws of experimental science, which have been validated by experience. He should avoid any contradiction with those laws or else his theory must be considered false, and no longer belong to the realm of science but of science fiction.
This simple methodology of truth has brought about our present technological civilization and the certainty that the laws of science happen: That when we throw a pen, it will fall down not upwards. Even if a mere change in the negative symbol of a gravitational equation will gives us that fantasy result; that when we heat water, it will boil not freeze even if a mere change of symbol in a thermodynamic equation can give us that result. And for the same two laws, called the law of gravitation and the law of thermodynamics, when a hot, dense black hole appears in our cold surroundings, matter will fall in, not out, and our cold world will evaporate, cooling down the black hole, even if a change of minus symbol in the arrow of time, convinced Mr. Hawking that black holes break the well known laws of gravitation and Thermodynamics. For the same reasons, we dont levitate and we heat water it doesnt freeze.
Mr. Hawking pretends that instead of absorbing matter, black holes will vomit it, which is to say that instead of falling down, a weight will move upwards; that instead of cooling down in our frozen world, they will keep getting hotter&
Why we know this idea is a fiction thought? It is then when the previous explained laws of the scientific method come to our rescue: the idea of a black hole evaporating it is not born from experience but it has been established by theorists a priori, as a mathematical exercise. And it is not a law that follows the known laws of science bt a theory that would break the 4 fundamental laws of science in which reality seats now for quite sometime: Newtons/Einsteins gravitational theory, Boltzmanns Thermodynamics, time causality (movement from past to future) and the Law of conservation of energy and information.
Ad 1+1+1, deduction a priori, lack of experimental evidence and contradiction with known laws of science, and we must deduce evaporating black holes are fiction thought.
And yet this fiction thought is today considered a dogma of modern physics, politically incorrect to discuss, as the fiction thought that Christ was god, the creator of the Universe, is considered a dogma of religion, politically incorrect to discuss, just because a group of 'believers' are extremely active promoting such ideas at any cost...
In the case of Christ, son of God, creator of the Universe, that belief only affects to those Christians, which choose to think so. Thus, in a way, we could even justify respect for such belief, as long as it doesnt impinge with our lives. Otherwise, if we are obliged to believe in the divinity of Christ and someone exercise violence against us to accept that belief, we must rebel and claim our right to reason and think independently, without censorship or imposition.
In the case of black hole evaporation, this was also understood. The belief was hold by a small group of physicists, who worked in the hypothesis, most notable, Bekenstein and Hawking. And such belief was accepted because it was a mere theoretical exercise, as we accept other fiction thoughts, such as multidimensional Universes, parallel worlds, etc. etc. Yet recently it became clear that the Nuclear Company of Europe could make black holes on Earth. And so, the belief in the fiction thought of evaporating black holes is no longer a theme that concerns physicists, but all mankind. As humanity is being submitted to a violent exercise to prove such theory right. Namely, the creation of a black hole that in case of becoming stable might kill mankind& This is a similar case to a fundamentalist believer that imposes his religion with violence. And mankind should not tolerate such imposition. And yet, after 2 years of fighting this company in courts, I have come to realize that this fiction thought is and will be accepted and imposed upon me and all the people of this planet. Why?
Obviously because of the Zeitgeist of this age. We love fiction thought because most outlets of expression are dedicated today to fiction. War has been reconverted into a fiction called sports and we go to the fictional battles of soccer games to shout for victory. Even News are manipulated and Real war is presented as a video-game& Documentaries have disappeared from film making and today only fiction rules in television. Economical statistics are bent to the point that economists say there are truths, half truths, lies and economical statistics. And so, finally, the use of fiction thought has entered the realm of physics, by the hand of quantum theorists that deny the well-proved laws of the experimental method. Yet the Universe is stubborn and Darwinian and it has its own method of proving itself right: Reality exists and happens and fiction thought disappears. In other words, the Universe cares nothing for human imagination but for the laws of proved science. So, despite economical statistics that denied this crisis would happen, and now deny this crisis is still happening, the economy of the world crashed. And despite CERNs wishful thinking, if a black hole appears in its experiments in the next years, it will not obey the fiction thought of Mr. Hawking but the well proved laws of causality in time, thermodynamics, relativity (gravitation) and conservation of energy and information and teach mankind that God are the laws of the Universe, not Christ, not Hawking, not fiction thought, and swallow us all. When this happen we might have time to reflect as we see in our Televisions a hole growing in Geneva, what we have done to ourselves to keep the arrogant fantasy that we could dominate the Tyrannosaurus rex of the galaxy; when this happen we might reflect about the stupidity of giving a corrupted Nuclear Company, employing thousands of physicists that used to make nuclear bombs, 13 billion $, just because its marketing department has been very active promoting a fiction Gods particle; when this happen we will know how dumb we were for believing such absurd fiction thoughts, how little we did to protect our lives; how irrelevant we are compared to the cosmic forces of the Universe& I will just think on the words of Mr. Einstein: 2 things I deem infinite, the Universe and the stupidity of man, and I am not sure of the latter and also Those who impose truth with power, will be the laugh of the gods
Good luck y Buena muerte.
Luis Sancho
Lead Plaintiff in Sancho et al. vs. CERN
www.Lhcdefence.org
DUMB HOLES & DUMB PHYSICISTS
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe experiment should have quenched all fears. It was an experiment that would recreate an inoffensive black hole of sound called a dumb hole. Once it was created, it would be used to prove that the 2 smaller types of holes known till date, (sound holes and primordial black holes), do evaporate by emitting energy particles, called 'phonons' in the case of sound holes and 'photons' for light holes. And so neither of them, in case they were manufactured here on Earth, would pose any risk to our lives.
A year ago alarms sounded around the World because a similar experiment might recreate a black hole of light, the much more powerful version that feeds on stars and galaxies around the Universe. Critics said that if black holes were created and obeyed Mr. Einstein’s Laws, instead of Mr. Hawking’s, they could feed on Earth, causing a Nova explosion that would destroy the planet, leaving behind only an ultra-dense rock of dark matter. They sued the Nuclear Company of Europe that was carrying about the experiment (called CERN) and got enough attention from the press as to cause a global alarm and visions of 'mad scientists' running amok in their secluded labs, as those the Nuclear Industry hadn't suffered since the cold war era. In the end, the experiment did not happen because the machine, the so-called Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, broke down before the making of any black hole could be attempted. And so the experiment was delayed for a year... Enough time for Mr. Stenhauer to make his dumb hole at the Institute of Technology at Israel - an easier, weaker, slower substitute, turning at the speed of sound, which could allow mankind to observe how black holes form in the first place and then how they evaporate harmlessly. It would also dismiss the fears of critics, unfairly characterised as the product of an excessive imagination at best, or a crackpot stunt made in search of celebrity at worst - since it was truth that Hawking’s radiation, a major plank in the case that the LHC was safe, did not have any empirical proof.
To overcome that major problem, physicists have carried out in the past year 2 new experiments, each of which was supposed to end all controversy:
One investigation was carried out by the Fermi satellite, a gamma-ray telescope launched last spring by NASA, containing the most sophisticated burst detection equipment ever devised, able to observe black hole evaporation in the cosmos, if such existed. The idea was simple. If black holes evaporated, as theorized, they would do it fast, provoking a sudden burst of light (the Hawking radiation in which its mass is supposed to convert). The result would be a sudden, minuscule 'Nova' Explosion, even if the black hole is a small one. And the Fermi satellite should have easily detected such 'flares' in the Halo of the galaxy, where black holes are supposed to form a dense cover of dark matter.
'Houston we have a problem' is reported to have said Mr. Tom Hanks, when asked during the shooting of 'Angels and Demons' to come back at CERN and switch on the machine after the repairs were done.
And indeed, Houston had an unexpected problem when Fermi returned all kind of images of gamma-ray bursts, but none had the signature of a black hole evaporating. So not only was the proof of Hawking radiation lacking – a blow to LHC protagonists – but further oxygen was given to the opinion of critics that consider Mr. Hawking’s ideas about black holes outlandish and in open contradiction with Einstein’s well tested work.
Those critics had asked in a 2008 US lawsuit (Sancho et Al vs. Doe & CERN) for a TRO (Temporary Restraining Order) on the LHC, till the results of Fermi came back to Earth. Yet the suit was dismissed by lack of jurisdiction over CERN, a company which has diplomatic immunity, achieved during the height of the cold war era. Still critics affirm Fermi is a clear prove that black holes don't evaporate, claimed a moral victory and have appealed to a Federal Court at San Francisco, which is still arguing the case.
Yet by the time this occurred the world was immerse in an economical crisis, which made the issue of our possible extinction as a species by a rogue black hole, quite irrelevant, compared to the daily fight for survival among foreclosures, loss of jobs and billions of $ in losses perpetrated by 'expert' rogue bankers.
Only Mr. Buchanan in the New Scientist had the courage to compare both crises, insinuating that 'experts' have a clear record of errors they never recognize. Or as the Russian physicist Lev Landau put it: ''Cosmologists are often wrong, but never in doubt.''
For all those reasons, after Fermi’s results, the experiment at Haifa was eagerly awaited by both, supporters and critics, to settle the matter with an experiment that could be controlled.
How did the scientists at Haifa achieve that test-bed? They basically followed Einstein's theory that black holes are 'frozen stars', which therefore should contain an ultra-dense substance that causes their attractive power.
According to Einstein’s realistic vision of the Universe, for Holes to exist beyond its mathematical description, they should be made of an ultra-dense substance, able to act as gravitational vortices that absorb one or other type of fundamental energy, depending on the speed at which they turn. This ultra-dense substance, called an ‘Einstein-Bose Condensate’, found after Einstein’s death, happens only with 2 kinds of atomic masses: lighter atoms, which attract each other with the ‘electro-weak’ force; and heavier quarks, which display a force 100 times stronger than the ‘electro-weak’ force, called ‘strong’ force. For that reason, atomic condensates turn much slower, absorbing only sound. While quark condensates turn, thanks to their strong force, 1003 times faster than sound, at light speed, as a black hole will do. Unfortunately, when the quark factory was designed, physicists didn’t know quarks could form Einstein’s condensates, locking their ‘color’ in triads to become stable, before they formed those superfluid, liquid condensates. They thought quarks were unstable, repulsive ‘fermions’ that would become a ‘gas’ - an explosive, hot, quark gluon-plasma. So when we found they form instead, a cold, attractive superfluid, such discovery was labeled as a ‘perfect surprise’ by all the physicists involved2.
Thus Haifa scientists used the laws of 'Bose-Einstein’ to densely pack atoms into an ‘Einstein condensate', creating a supersonic hole that absorbed sound waves. Then they waited to see the Hawking radiation, expecting that the black hole would emit the sound equivalent of photons - phonons - in a burst of noises that a good microphone could easily pick up. In the process the tiny dumb hole would evaporate… Thus CERN would be declared safe and start producing Quark Holes, under the same laws of Einstein condensates this Christmas.
And so a mike was put to the 'dumb' hole to detect, not a glare of light as the Fermi was supposed to observe in the cosmos, but a symphony of sounds.
Unfortunately the worst possible scenario happened. On one hand sound holes were produced with a Bose-Condensate, which means the LHC will produce black holes with quark condensates without the need for ‘extra-dimensions’ postulated by CERN.
On the other, the dumb hole did not produce any sound at all, any Hawking radiation. So CERN’s superfluid quark holes won’t evaporate, either. Instead they should fall to the center of the planet and accrete the Earth.
Unruh and Hawking, the theorists who expect to win a Nobel Prize if the radiation is found, retorted that Haifa is not relevant because the experimenters might not have ultra-sensitive equipment to detect it. Maybe, but in safety terms, critics assert that what matters is that the possible radiation was so subdued that we couldn’t see it or hear it, neither with Fermi satellite or at the Technion Institute in Haifa; so it will not be able to evaporate the hyper-dense mass of atoms or quarks that form sound/quark holes.
Those critics claim that CERN is not recognizing the two methods of truth in science, experimental evidence and serious, tested theoretical work - in this case Einstein’s Relativity and Einstein’s condensates that deny evaporation and Haifa's condensates, which proves his frozen stars exist and could be produced at the LHC. Those critics further assert that CERN is acting as any 'Rogue Company' would act to hide an environmental crime – denying evidence of any danger, ignoring critics and Courts and going ahead with 'business as usual'. Thus, they conclude the dangers to Earth of the black hole factory are a potential environmental catastrophe, which dwarfs the problems of global warming and Nuclear Terrorism we already face. And for this reason, they ‘should be addressed by politicians, not left alone to physicists’ working in the Nuclear Industry, as Miss Gillmore stated in her judgment of the case (Judge Gillmore in Sancho et Al vs. Doe & CERN).