I Love CERN!
Irradiated by Stingray
A few years ago when CERN was coming online, they announced that some of the experiments would attempt to create black holes to study them in controlled and verifiable conditions (as opposed to the “Is that…y’think it’ll… huh, go figure…” method required by the distances involved in astronomy). Hell, some might even be created by accident. A great many people unfamiliar with the separation between reality and Disney naturally began to panic.
“Ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod! They will make a black hole and it will eat the planet and then there will be some confusing scene with a giant firey ball rolling around* and I think Slim Pickin’s is involved somehow! WHY IS SLIM PICKENS IN SWITZERLAND?!”
After some rather frustrating attempts to explain Hawking Radiation and Schwarzchild geometry to people who struggled through elementary school arithemetic, it looked like we had things squared away and were ready to proced with tests involving forces not hospitable to life as we know it. I for one support any operation that boils down to “Hey, what happens if we concentrate the power consumption of the eastern seaboard of the US into a space roughly the size of Barack Obama’s integrity?” You just know something cool is gonna happen.
Well, some time later we grew us a new crop of whackjobs. New fears included strange quarks turning the earth into a hyper-dense burrito, and perhaps more amusingly, that CERN was going to break causality. Russian scientists, well known for their top-notch vodka think tanks figured the planned tests would just rip a big ‘ol tear in the fabric of time and let cylons rape dinosaurs and have soulless robots running for President in the US….
Dammit, someone better check on the dinosaurs.
Anyway, moving on, we find that everything old becomes new again. Now a pair of luddite jackasses with no scientific knowledge more practical than “fire burns” concerned citizens in Hawaii are suing CERN to block the experiments (I’m so sorry that link goes to the NY Times. I’ll have a better link in a few sentences). For one of them, it isn’t the first time around trying to block experiements he has no understanding of, as Mr. (not Dr.) Wagner sued Brookhaven National Labs in 1999 and 2000 to stop them from operating the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which has since spectacularly failed to destroy the world. A separate and shorter article cuts the sensationalism we must endure from the irrelevant Grey Lady, and wins the Title Of the Day prize for accurate reporting.
The best part of this, though, is that the folks at CERN seem to be getting a trifle fed up with having to appease folks with all the scientific grounding of Punxsutawney Phill. Responding to the allegations of the lawsuit in Hawaii:
“Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.””
You hear that people? DRAGONS. CERN is going to make FUCKING DRAGONS! Everybody better use that economic stimulus check to get an elephant gun because DRAGONS! Sagan didn’t know how right he was about a demon-haunted world, and I for one couldn’t be happier. All I need to do now is figure out how to type “iddqd” into real life and I’ll be set.
*I last saw the movie when I was about six. Cut me some slack.
May 6th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
ROFLMAO. I heard about these guys a month or so ago. What a bunch of whackjobs.
Also, after I LOL’ed at one of your paragraphs, I had to explain to my twin brother what I was reading about. Right after I explained that they were attempting to create miniature blackholes, but before I could explain why these people were morons for trying to sue to stop them, he declared that making said black holes was “dumb” because they might “eat up the earth.”
*FACEPALM*
Sometimes I question if it is actually possible that I shared a womb with him, or if perhaps there was some tragic mistake at the hospital…
May 6th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Reminds me of a Greg Bear book…
Anyway, a black hole eats stuff simply because its gravity is so strong… because it weighs so much. A miniature black hole might be heavy, but it’s not going to have much noticable gravity, hence won’t be eating things.
May 6th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Not just any dragons, but dragons with TWO heads. They can breathe both fire and ice.
Me, I’m all for destroying Hawaii. We should perform some other interesting experiments there, such as accelerating Michael Jackson past the speed of light.
May 6th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
I’m not up on dragon factoids. Is there a minimum caliber and type of ammunition for killing them?
I’m thinking that if in Ye Days of Olde, that they killed dragons with swords and spears, a .30-06 might could do the job.
What say you?
May 6th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Lemme get this straight, you DON’T already have an elephant rifle?!
May 6th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
So, these dragons from the black hole…Do they come with missing scales like Smaug?
I’m thinking a good crossbow should take care of that problem.
It’s the tran-dimensional zombies that have me worried.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
I hope CERN gives us the precise date and time they plan to fire that baby up.
Not because I really care, just because I want to see which of my friends start stocking up on canned foods and space blankets.
May 7th, 2008 at 1:24 am
LHCConcerns.com will pay $500.00 US to the best proposal that can reasonably prove 5% or less Risk of Planetary destruction from Micro Black Holes.
The contest will conclude in a vote by site visitors on all reasonable proofs received, all proofs will be published and the contest will end not sooner than May 20th. (LHCConcerns will make the final call on best proposal that reasonably proves 5% or lower risk from micro black holes being created by the Large Hadron Collider).
You may prove that ANY ONE of the following or provide any other reasonable Proof or method to prevent Micro Black Holes from being created by the Large Hadron Collider or prove that they are harmless!
1. The Large Hadron Collider will not make micro black holes.
2. Micro black holes created will be sent safely into space.
3. Micro black holes will evaporate.
4. Micro black holes will take more than 2 billion years to accrete the Earth. (If you can only prove a lesser time frame, then the prize will be reduced proportionately…)
5. Any form of cosmic ray argument that proves 5% risk or lower.
6. Find a way to make the Large Hadron Collider safe from creating micro black holes (we already requested different speed collissions or different mass collisions, LSAG told us it was not possible, they already thought of it).
It is harder than it looks, the LHC Safety Assessment Group (LSAG) could not produce a safety report… (CERN and LSAG are still using the 1999 RHIC safety report that does not even address what might happen if micro black holes were created, because they did not know that it was possible at that time. We are also being generous on the 2 billion years, we want to be reasonable)
JTankers
LHCConcerns.com
May 7th, 2008 at 5:02 am
This is a joke, right? I’m on Candid Camera, right? Please tell me this last comment was biting irony.
There’s no shame in scientific illiteracy, JTankers. I don’t know that I’d make a great effort to advertise the fact, though.
Stop the planet…I want to get off. When did aggressive ignorance ever become an acceptable position?
May 7th, 2008 at 7:44 am
“When did aggressive ignorance ever become an acceptable position?”
Not sure, but I can safely say that its acceptance in many fields has accelerated over the last dozen years or so.
I mean, look at Al Gore.
May 7th, 2008 at 8:38 am
Causality has already been broken.
Too late, nutters!
Toshiba was able to, last year, use some dark fibre optic cabling to send signals via spooky quantum entanglement 700 meters.
People at one end of the cable were getting signals from outside of their light cone.
Our current consensus on exactly what IS causality is quite simply wrong.
May 7th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Its so nice to deal with people who don’t think that a tachyon is a gluon that isn’t dry yet.
May 7th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Hey, they be keeping the black hole down.
May 7th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Dragons? And here I’ve spent all my free time and money on Zombie Apocalypse preparation. Crap.
May 7th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
iddqd?
dncornholio! IIRC
And yes, dragons would be cool!
May 7th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Okay, I chuckled over the dragons, but Vinnie, you owe me a new keyboard! Sprayed it right and proper with that comment.
I’m at Rutherford-Appleton tomorrow, I’m going to use that….
May 7th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Mr. Labrat said elephant GUN, not rifle. Since a good large bore express rifle does a better job on heavy game, the old giants are not often met with in batteries now. Perhaps he is seduced by mere bore size.
I believe that might be a mistaken decision. True, one’s four or eight bore throws a larger and heavier bullet than the .577.
But experience on large, thickly scaled reptiles has shown that a great deal of penetration is more necessary than bullet mass. The brain is quite small,well armoured, and profoundly difficult to hit.
Grandfather once shot a rather large one while birding on the Nile. His boatman fell out of the dhow and naturally his struggles attracted a crocodile. He snatched up his twelve bore and shot the creature in the eyes with duck shot. It stopped, and shortly after the Native struggled back aboard it came back to life, the shot had stunned it only.
One is not aware of what an “economic stimulus check” might be, but I suppose Holland’s would accept it- these new gunmakers cater to modern fads.
May 7th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
Wow. I thought these sentences were teh awesome! of the day: I for one support any operation that boils down to “Hey, what happens if we concentrate the power consumption of the eastern seaboard of the US into a space roughly the size of Barack Obama’s integrity?” You just know something cool is gonna happen. I do have to say that Dr. Arkani-Hamed may have gone one better with the voracious dragons, though.
May 7th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
…Hey, if causality ever will be broken, wouldn’t we already not exist?
May 8th, 2008 at 2:47 am
Who said that?
May 8th, 2008 at 5:20 am
[...] LabRat, in a must read post on the crazies who are suing to stop science: I for one support any operation that boils down to Hey, what happens if we concentrate the power consumption of the eastern seaboard of the US into a space roughly the size of Barack Obamas integrity? You just know something cool is gonna happen. [...]
May 9th, 2008 at 3:06 am
Surely will be a spectacular sight in the night skies on 4th of July, Then Dragons (2 headed)come down freezing and charring the terestrials. Obama sure has a task to rig the onslaught.
In the meanwhile, until CERN comes up with a flaw in the Bekenstein-Hawking radiation theory, it wont able to sustain the microscopic black holes long enough with a view to vaporize earth.
Research fanatics at toshiba deserve a raise!!!