The CERN safety study

Discussion of the end of the world brought about by ultra high energy colliders.
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chelle
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Re: The CERN safety study

Post by chelle » Mon Dec 29, 2014 4:47 pm

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Last edited by chelle on Tue Jan 06, 2015 4:02 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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tlegg
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Re: The CERN safety study

Post by tlegg » Wed Dec 31, 2014 6:40 pm

two things

one what does that mean exactly does it mean the lhc collisions are higher then nature and two hardly anyone can read this bigger font would be appreciated

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chelle
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Re: The CERN safety study

Post by chelle » Sat Apr 04, 2015 10:08 am

Read an interesting statement regarding the difference between the LHC and ultra-high energy cosmic rays:

"You need to be a bit careful when comparing cosmic rays to colliders.

The LHC collides _two_ high energy beams head on; the total energy available in the collision is equal to the sum of the beam energies, because we (the lab) are in the center-of-mass frame of the collision.

An ultra-high energy cosmic ray (UHECR) enters the Earth’s atmosphere and collides with a nucleus essentially at rest (thermal motion is tiny compared to the UHECR’s energy). In that case, the energy available in the collision is the geometric mean of the beam (UHECR) energy and the target mass. Since the atmosphere is basically light nuclei, with a mass of a few GeV, you can estimate the equivalent collider energy as the square root of the UHECR energy, in GeV.

The LHC will have (in a few weeks) a collision energy of 13,000 GeV. That’s equivalent to a cosmic ray of 170 PeV (170,000,000 GeV). Cosmic rays of higher energy than that can produce collisions “more powerful” than what we have in the LHC, with one caveat: the cosmic rays are hitting _nuclei_, not single protons, so the collision energy gets distributed across the nucleus, rather than being concentrated as it is at the LHC."
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Re: The CERN safety study

Post by draph91 » Thu May 07, 2015 6:35 pm

chelle wrote:Read an interesting statement regarding the difference between the LHC and ultra-high energy cosmic rays:

"You need to be a bit careful when comparing cosmic rays to colliders.

The LHC collides _two_ high energy beams head on; the total energy available in the collision is equal to the sum of the beam energies, because we (the lab) are in the center-of-mass frame of the collision.

An ultra-high energy cosmic ray (UHECR) enters the Earth’s atmosphere and collides with a nucleus essentially at rest (thermal motion is tiny compared to the UHECR’s energy). In that case, the energy available in the collision is the geometric mean of the beam (UHECR) energy and the target mass. Since the atmosphere is basically light nuclei, with a mass of a few GeV, you can estimate the equivalent collider energy as the square root of the UHECR energy, in GeV.

The LHC will have (in a few weeks) a collision energy of 13,000 GeV. That’s equivalent to a cosmic ray of 170 PeV (170,000,000 GeV). Cosmic rays of higher energy than that can produce collisions “more powerful” than what we have in the LHC, with one caveat: the cosmic rays are hitting _nuclei_, not single protons, so the collision energy gets distributed across the nucleus, rather than being concentrated as it is at the LHC."
I would like to point out that cosmic rays are hitting earth all the time
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chelle
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Re: The CERN safety study

Post by chelle » Thu May 07, 2015 8:48 pm

draph91 wrote:I would like to point out that cosmic rays are hitting earth all the time
You may, but the frequency & density is 10^9 higher lower than in the LHC.

Check for instance this simulation of a Flowave with a large group of oars:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHTcSKkUU8U

Only one such oar (collision) here and there, and you get nothing special, that's how cosmic rays are. But if you concentrate them together in one area, than the waves could start to superposition and you might get powerful effects ... keeping in mind that the Higgs Field could be like a Superfluid with first and second sounds ...
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Re: The CERN safety study

Post by Tau 2 » Fri May 08, 2015 4:52 am

chelle wrote:In that case, the energy available in the collision is the geometric mean of the beam (UHECR) energy and the target mass.
Geometric mean? :rolleyes: Where does that come from? Sounds really strange to me.
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chelle
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Re: The CERN safety study

Post by chelle » Fri May 08, 2015 7:25 am

Tau 2 wrote:
chelle wrote:In that case, the energy available in the collision is the geometric mean of the beam (UHECR) energy and the target mass.
Geometric mean? :rolleyes: Where does that come from? Sounds really strange to me.
It's because UHECR's are measured by an array of telescopes on the ground.

FYI http://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.6079.pdf
(The Energy Spectrum of Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays Measured by the Telescope Array FADC Fluorescence Detectors in Monocular Mode)
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Kasuha
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Re: The CERN safety study

Post by Kasuha » Tue May 12, 2015 8:21 am

draph91 wrote:I would like to point out that cosmic rays are hitting earth all the time
I think we should all realize that cosmic rays are hitting everything in the universe all the time, including Moon, Jupiter, our Sun, supernovas, neutron stars, or black hole accretion disks. Plus they're certainly occasionally hitting each other - there's plenty of them flying in all directions and the universe is big. So big that it's beyond imagination of most people. If such collision could cause collapse of vacuum, it would have collapsed ages ago.

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chelle
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Re: The CERN safety study

Post by chelle » Tue May 12, 2015 6:18 pm

Kasuha wrote:
draph91 wrote:I would like to point out that cosmic rays are hitting earth all the time
I think we should all realize that cosmic rays are hitting everything in the universe all the time, including Moon, Jupiter, our Sun, supernovas, neutron stars, or black hole accretion disks. Plus they're certainly occasionally hitting each other - there's plenty of them flying in all directions and the universe is big. So big that it's beyond imagination of most people. If such collision could cause collapse of vacuum, it would have collapsed ages ago.
Well a couple of things to consider.

Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (5×10^19 eV) are very rare, only 27 events where detected at the Pierre Auger Observatory over a 3 year period, and the energy released during these events is only 50 times higher than the collisions at the LHC.

While the density and frequency at the LHC is 10.000.000.000 times higher, with its 600 millions collision per second.

Now lets say that there are 'second sounds' in the Higgs Field Superfluid, and superposition of those waves, than you could have energy vibrations in the vacuum that are more intense than the energy release during UHECR's with protons at rest.

My question has always been if these collisions could spark off a chain reaction, like how heat vibrations can set of a forest fire ... enough intense vibrations in the Higgs Field Superfluid and surrounding matter might also start to cook and combust.

Sure high-energetic cosmic rays could be hitting each other, but not at the same frequency and not being surrounded by as much 'combustable' matter as here on earth.
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chelle
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Re: The CERN safety study

Post by chelle » Thu May 14, 2015 11:45 am

Some other interesting stuff regarding those Ultra-high energy cosmic rays that should be so much more powerful than the collisions at the LHC.

As mentioned in my previous post the energy released during UHECR-collisions is only 50 times higher than the LHC because of so called 'effective energy':

"The energy of this particle (UHECR) is some 40 million times that of the highest energy protons that have been produced in any terrestrial particle accelerator. However, only a small fraction of this energy would be available for an interaction with a proton or neutron on Earth, with most of the energy remaining in the form of kinetic energy of the products of the interaction.

The effective energy available for such a collision is the square root of double the product of the particle's energy and the mass energy of the proton, which for this particle gives 7.5×1014 eV, roughly 50 times the collision energy of the Large Hadron Collider."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high ... cosmic_ray

--

But it turns out that if you would have a Cosmic ray that is an iron nucleus (atomic number 23) traveling at the same velocity as the particles of the LHC, colliding with an other iron nucleus, that you would get an energy release that is ~56 times higher than the proton on proton collisions at the LHC.

--

Now every day about 100 tons of meteoroids -- fragments of dust and gravel and sometimes even big rocks – enter the Earth's atmosphere. (http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sc ... ornetwork/)

--

An other interesting thing is this thesis 'The Propagation of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays' (pdf - 983 Kb):

"The question of the composition of ultra high energy cosmic rays remains unresolved, with the range of possibilities leading to quite different results in both the secondary fluxes of particles produced through cosmic ray energy loss interactions en route, and the arriving cosmic ray spectra at Earth. A large range of nuclear species are considered in this work, spanning the range of physically motivated nuclear types ejected from the cosmic ray source."

and

"... the variation in the models of the CIB considered lead to a few % difference in the CR spectrum observed at Earth for the case of CR Iron nuclei."

--

As a conclusion one might pose that those unique UHECR's are perhaps just rare collisions of iron nuclei hitting each other, one fast one static, with locally just the same energy release / interaction as proton collisions at the LHC.

And that would somehow be a slightly different situation than what is suggested in the CERN Safety Study. Yes the whole energy output is much larger but individually they could be just the same.
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