Creating "Sparks"

Discussion of the end of the world brought about by ultra high energy colliders.
Kasuha
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Re: Creating "Sparks"

Post by Kasuha » Fri Mar 19, 2010 6:23 pm

Whatever it is, if it's so fragile what makes you think it could be dangerous?

Anyway ... cosmic ray particles don't just collide with earth or celestial bodies, they also collide with each other at any angles. If anything fragile, stable and dangerous could be created that way, it would have been created already by cosmic rays countless times, including in close enough proximity to earth or any other planet/body in our system.

Hot neutrons can be captured by Uranium nuclei too, just with smaller chance (because there is higher chance they'll just 'bounce off' or 'pass through' the nucleus). Otherwise there wouldn't be fast neutron reactors. Moderator is used just to increase effectivity and decrease radiation.

And particles don't collide the same way 'real world' objects do. They act more like when galaxies collide - they rather simply pass through each other, pulling strings of unbalanced forces on which new particles materialize because of quantum effects. Whatever materializes there has pretty good chance to not be exactly in the middle of the string and therefore speeding out of the collision place at almost speed of light.

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chelle
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Re: Creating "Sparks"

Post by chelle » Fri Mar 19, 2010 6:48 pm

chriwi wrote:my Idea is that the debree of the first collission may contain something watever it is what will only grow in case other particles will interact with it with a rather small momentum, which would be the case fore the headoncollissions of the LHC, but on the other hand is so unstabele that it would be destroyed easyly by any forther high momentum impact like all the other particles of athmosphere or the solid earth would be for a debree moving still with half of the energy of a cosmic ray.
In this idea I am not very specific what this dangerous growing object might be like or how it is produced, important is only the Idea that there might be anything like that and that it has the property of growing only by mild impact but being destroyed by high momentum impact.
That is a bit in line with strangelets:
This is not a concern for strangelets in cosmic rays because they are produced far from Earth and have had time to decay to their ground state, which is predicted by most models to be positively charged, so they are electrostatically repelled by nuclei, and would rarely merge with them. But high-energy collisions could produce negatively charged strangelet states which live long enough to interact with the nuclei of ordinary matter. source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet
The LSAG-Report replies to such an event on p.11 with:
The energy needed to break up a strangelet is similar to that needed to break up a normal nucleus, which is of the order of one to a few million electron volts. Similar energies would be reached in a heat bath with a temperature of ten to several tens of billions of degrees Celsius. However, heavy-ion collisions are known to produce heat baths that are far hotter, reaching temperatures exceeding 1 trillion degrees Celsius. Basic thermodynamics would require most strangelets to melt in such a heat bath, i.e., dissociate into the known strange particles that decay within a nanosecond. For this reason, the likelihood of strangelet production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions can be compared to the likelihood of producing an icecube in a furnace.
Edit - you could also check this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangenes ... bservation
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chriwi
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Re: Creating "Sparks"

Post by chriwi » Fri Mar 19, 2010 8:13 pm

that is a good excuse for astrangelet in a heavy ion colission, but not if a stranglet happent to form in a proton proton collission an maybe there are also other dangerous objets not jet postulated besides stranglets, thats why I didn,t specify.
We have to keeep in mind that the LHC is also looking for new particles not yet postulates, that means thing totaly above our imagination.
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Kasuha
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Re: Creating "Sparks"

Post by Kasuha » Fri Mar 19, 2010 8:28 pm

In fact, physicists are all eagerly waiting if LHC will find either something expected (Higgs) or something totally unexpected (new physics).

But I really don't see a reason to fear that it might be dangerous. Between nothing and a Monstrous-Earth-Eating-Superparticle-Which-Nobody-Has-Ever-Seen-Before is a myriad of way more probable and way less dangerous 'new physics' things that can be discovered.

Titan also doesn't seem to be full of hungry man-eating aliens which only waited to be disturbed by Huygens to start a mission to attack Earth. Surprisingly, nobody was even suggesting that it may happen...

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chriwi
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Re: Creating "Sparks"

Post by chriwi » Fri Mar 19, 2010 8:57 pm

I am not really affraid that it will happen, not because I am fearless but because I regard the worst as highly improbable, but I only fighting the people who say that it is impossible that something bad will happen.
And belive me, I am still sleeping well and I also have no plans to stop or destroy LHC.
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Stephen
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Re: Creating "Sparks"

Post by Stephen » Fri Mar 19, 2010 10:49 pm

You make good points, so I'm not sure why physicists claim there is zero risk of the world being destroyed. It seems to me that if there are legitimate concerns, this experiment is too risk to go through.

Basically, are you saying that the whole argument of the LHC being less likely to create strangelets than the RHIC is worthless?

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Re: Creating "Sparks"

Post by chriwi » Sat Mar 20, 2010 6:08 am

I am not so much an physics expert to claim to say that they are wrong with any of the examples stated in the saftyreport, so I also belive them when they say stranglets are less likely in RHIC than in LHC.
I only say that there are examples that the are not expicitly considered starting from low momentum debree reactions ending with unthought particles they are looking for but not yet know. They just cover theese unthought particles or objects with the argument that any undiscovered objects must have a high mass ant that all of them canot have a long livetime here on earth. I only wonder how they can be sure of that for objects they not yet can think of.
But since what I say is highly speculative (very many ifs) I don't belive it is so likely that one can say it is too risky. Polititians make many other decissions which are much more likely to distroy humanity than the LHC is.
Same as we cannot say that the LHC is 100% safe any other experiment never made before could be dangerous according to this argumentation, even much smaller and less visible ones than the LHC.
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Kasuha
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Re: Creating "Sparks"

Post by Kasuha » Sat Mar 20, 2010 6:55 am

If somebody who doesn't even understand physics is claiming that LHC is dangerous, these are not legitimate claims and these are not legitimate reasons to shut LHC down.
The less the person understands what's going on the more is he 100% sure LHC is dangerous.

Yes, if you asked a statics expert whether WTC will collapse, he'd tell you that there is no legal concern for it. And I'm pretty sure there was a lunatic somewhere saying that building is unstable and will collapse sooner or later. The fact is, it collapsed. Now tell me, does it make the lunatic right?

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Re: Creating "Sparks"

Post by chriwi » Sat Mar 20, 2010 7:19 am

I only said that I am not enough expert in physics to proof the other experts wrong, nevertheless I studdied physics including parts of quantumphysics for more years than most here in the forum (together about 7 years).
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chelle
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Re: Creating "Sparks"

Post by chelle » Sat Mar 20, 2010 7:28 am

Kasuha wrote:Yes, if you asked a statics expert whether WTC will collapse, he'd tell you that there is no legal concern for it. And I'm pretty sure there was a lunatic somewhere saying that building is unstable and will collapse sooner or later. The fact is, it collapsed. Now tell me, does it make the lunatic right?
I think the WTC is an interesting case as it didn't collapse from the impact of the airplanes hitting the building, but the heat of the kerosene making the structure melt down. Not just a few floors but everything got trashed to pieces, and in both cases. No serious architect considered such a scenario, but I guess the luny architects of BinLadin's plan might have. The same here for collisions at the lhc, temperatures will rise "to several tens of billions of degrees Celsius", and nobody is worried that matter may start to collapse.
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Kasuha
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Re: Creating "Sparks"

Post by Kasuha » Sat Mar 20, 2010 9:55 am

Chelle wrote:it didn't collapse from the impact of the airplanes hitting the building
If the last domino in the row falls down, was it because you pushed the first one or not?

In WTC collapse there is nothing that is not understood and there was nothing new discovered by the accident, maybe except that there really exist people who are stupid enough to invest lots of money to training and then fly airplanes into buildings. If you presented the scenario to an engineer before the WTC accident and he made all necessary calculations, he'd predict the result pretty much exactly how it happened. He'd only wonder why would anyone do that.

There's also whole lot of buildings that have collapsed in the past for many reasons. On the other hand, there is no evidence and even no valid theory supporting that anything may happen from LHC experiments (even for all consistent extensions of standard model all calculations were done to rule it out). The only thing is, real scientist will not tell you he is 100% sure nothing will happen because he knows there is 'unknown'. But a lunatic that does not even understand physics can be 100% sure LHC is deadly - he does not need any proofs or theory that corresponds to reality.

Nobody has ever tried to accelerate a dead fish to 10 kilometers per second and then collide it with a brick wall. Does it mean if I try to do that, it will create a giant whale that will devour the earth? Or are you going to accept much more prozaic explanation that the fish will splat and maybe create a big hole in the wall?

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chelle
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Re: Creating "Sparks"

Post by chelle » Sat Mar 20, 2010 11:15 am

Kasuha wrote:
Chelle wrote:it didn't collapse from the impact of the airplanes hitting the building
If the last domino in the row falls down, was it because you pushed the first one or not?
I think if this would have happened on the moon, these buildings would still be standing because the circumstances are different.
Kasuha wrote:In WTC collapse there is nothing that is not understood and there was nothing new discovered by the accident, ...
Exactly after the accident we can all say what happened, if you check http://www.mech.kuleuven.be/safety/ you'll see that there are a lot of things you can't calculate unless you have done a test.
"Many chemical processes use combustible gases and vapours at elevated pressures and temperatures. In order to ensure the safe and optimal operation of these processes, it is important to know the lowest possible temperature at which spontaneous ignition of these gases and vapours takes place."

Same thing for the report of the fire I posted earlier http://www.dgmr.nl/uploads/media/dehemel.pdf
"... it can be noticed that relatively small details have enormous consequences."

And if we are talking about lunatics there is a rare event on the moon: "Transient Lunar Phenomenon" where a serious light flash is produced (see pic.).

Image
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_lunar_phenomenon
http://www.astro.columbia.edu/~arlin/TLP/

"The physical mechanism responsible for creating a TLP is not well understood. Of the many theories proposed, ..."
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Kasuha
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Re: Creating "Sparks"

Post by Kasuha » Sat Mar 20, 2010 12:13 pm

Chelle wrote:And if we are talking about lunatics there is a rare event on the moon: "Transient Lunar Phenomenon" where a serious light flash is produced (see pic.).

"The physical mechanism responsible for creating a TLP is not well understood. Of the many theories proposed, ..."
It's exactly what's written there - something we don't know because we didn't have enough chances to study it. UFOs are unknown (unidentified) flying objects, not spaceships with aliens onboard. The same applies to this. There are many perfectly reasonable possible causes for TLPs, just because we don't know what exactly is it doesn't mean they are aliens sending us signals or strangelets eating part of moon surface. Maybe they are dead fishes striking moon at high speed?

There's a good scientific tool called occam's razor. It generally says that out of all possible explanations of an unknown phenomenon, the simplest one is most probably closest to truth.

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chelle
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Re: Creating "Sparks"

Post by chelle » Sat Mar 20, 2010 12:24 pm

Kasuha wrote:
Chelle wrote:And if we are talking about lunatics there is a rare event on the moon: "Transient Lunar Phenomenon" where a serious light flash is produced (see pic.).

"The physical mechanism responsible for creating a TLP is not well understood. Of the many theories proposed, ..."
It's exactly what's written there - something we don't know because we didn't have enough chances to study it. UFOs are unknown (unidentified) flying objects, not spaceships with aliens onboard. The same applies to this. There are many perfectly reasonable possible causes for TLPs, just because we don't know what exactly is it doesn't mean they are aliens sending us signals or strangelets eating part of moon surface. Maybe they are dead fishes striking moon at high speed?

There's a good scientific tool called occam's razor. It generally says that out of all possible explanations of an unknown phenomenon, the simplest one is most probably closest to truth.
This is not something to joke away.
Hundreds of amateur and professional astronomers have documented their observations of TLPs since the invention of the telescope. A number have been confirmed by multiple observers or even photographed. A few TLPs were even reported by Apollo astronauts as they orbited the Moon.
I don't have heard any astronaut talk about UFO's flying around the moon.

Of course it are gasses, but there is also a lot of light popping up and something must trigger these events. If it would be like geysers they would always be at the same places, if it was like a volcano there would be craters ...
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Stephen
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Re: Creating "Sparks"

Post by Stephen » Sat Mar 20, 2010 1:42 pm

Do you suggest that this phenomenon might be caused by cosmic rays and therefore invalid the astrophysical argument regarding strangelets production?

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