can someone please explain to me the LHC

[smenkhare]

and exactly how it is supposed to end the world? All it does is smash particles together, haven't we been doing that for decades?

[g__day (Matthew)]

It creates a microscopic, non-degenerative black hole (shades of the TV series four LEX season 3 here) that grows to eat the Earth.

Guess folk worrying about that don't realise black holes form and evapourate around them trillions of time a second at a quantum level. You need serious amount of compressed matter to create a non degenerative black hole! I'd posit that 5 TeV won't quite get you there, high energy gamma and cosmic rays hit the Earth a few times every year from gamma ray bursters...

[smenkhare]

I understand WHAT people think will happen. black holes, strangelets, vacuums etc. but HOW? The thing is a particle accelerator. My TV is a particle accelerator and i haven't destroyed the planet.

[tornado33]

The energies the LHC will impart are many times greater than a TV tube. They are worried the incredibly high energies may create these exotic things People argue that cosmic ray collisions impart even higher energies and if something nasty was going to happen it would have by now, but theres so much we dont know about the Universe. The chances of anything going wrong may be billions to 1 against, but not absolutely impossible.

[g__day (Matthew)]

The how - simple - they accelerate things with mass near light speed, so a proton will gain tremendous mass - maybe so much that if it collides with another tremendously massive proton - as a point source spacetime will fold into a singularity and that fold will expand to consume the planet.

So think a black hole can be started by something atomically small that is really heavy and dense, then realised that a super accelerated therefore relativistically super heavy proton fits the bill in their minds.

They worry the energies imparted to protons will push them into being seed black holes.

[avandonk]

This should make it clearer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3iryBLZCOQ

Bert