Please give a good reason for your choice.


In order to insure the legitimacy of the answers, I will refrain from discussing my opinion on this matter.

"Do you think we the Lard Hardon Collider should be allowed to remain operational?"

Please ignore the "we", it was accidentally typed.

Mods as well, or even Njag, please feel free to voice your opinions on this matter.
I am curious of what your stance is on this, and this is a important subject imho.

This post was edited by Bear_Grylls on Mar 24 2010 11:38am

We should probably also ignore the "Large Hardon Collider" Freudian slip, no? It's Hadron by the way.

What possible reason could there be for turning it off? That black hole nonsense?

I would not by any means call it nonsense, but as I said, I would like to remain out of this discussion.
And by all means, please feel free to leave the reasons why you think it should be continued.


And yes the r was just a typo, no pun intended.

This post was edited by Bear_Grylls on Mar 24 2010 11:49am

Lard Hardon Collider ... what would that be?
Sounds like some weird form of gay porn

But seriously, why would someone want to stop it? I guess if you are politically opposed to government funding basic research you might want it shut down, but heck they already sunk the money into it, why stop now?

The black hole business is complete nonsense. Anyone who thinks the LHC is going to consume the world in a black holes knows nothing about black holes or high energy particles.

The LHC is basically a crappy cosmic ray generator (what makes it special is that it creates them on command, and directs them to detectors, instead of just spraying them randomly, making studying their effects much easier). We are bathed in cosmic rays that have 10,000 times the energy of anything the LHC can produce. So instead of aruging if we should turn off the LHC maybe we should be lobbying to have the sun or galactic core turned off!

This post was edited by Azrad on Mar 24 2010 12:17pm

If it was possible for a stable black hole to form on earth at these energy levels, then surely black holes would form on neutron stars, where fuel is both more abundant and more concentrated and where high energy waves are produced in higher quantities and greater concentrations. The existence of high mass objects that can produce high energy waves pretty much rules out the possibility that a black hole will form here.

you brought it up, you just voiced your opinion so here goes: there is absolutely no danger of a micro black hole swallowing the earth. if they do exist then they occur on earth regularly. if one were to be created in the LHC we would not know until long after it happens (we would detect it long after it evaporates by effect onother particles).

yes we should keep it running as it will rewrite physics books.

1. it will prove/disprove the existence of parallel universes. (by detecting energy that will theoretically disappear at micro levels)
2. it will discover new particles as we have never been able to perform controlled experiments on such high energy collisions i.e. the higgs bosun and counterpart particles to gluons, neutrons, photons etc... these "supersymmetric" particles in theory will have a spin -1/2 of regular particles, will most likely be relatively huge.

either of these would help explain why we can only see a small fraction of the universe.

Do you think It will also be the end of many beliefs and religions?

i dont see how. even christianity cannot be disproven with science. there will be those who disregard these findings claiming it is the devils work. these are the type of people that give religion a bad name. if there is a god, god intended for us to explore, to use our minds and to challenge knowledge taken for granted. this shouldnt be considered "lack of faith". think of the dark ages, spanish inquisition or the numerous other times people were killed for disproving the church (when will they learn that science cannot be shrugged off?). in the past new beliefs have always been incorporated into religion by the majority, i believe this will happen on and on forever. -"If i have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" -sir isaac newton.

this is one of the most exciting times to be conscious. our generations will be remembered for all of history. the effort and discovery in the science field has takes exponential leaps in a matter of decades. in terms of exploration we will soon attempt to land a crew on mars (the last unexplored place humans will set foot on for a long long long time). history books for hundreds of years will refer to our time as being the golden age of technology.

the only real frontier left is the great unknown oceans of earth. we know less about what is at the bottom of them than we do about the surface of the moon or the surface of mars.

This post was edited by juliusjuice on Mar 27 2010 05:27pm