The end of the World is Nigh?

[Gromit]

Mad Swiss Scientists are about to blow up the world (Wednesday afternoon).

Should we be worried?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?vi ew=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/09/05/scilhc1 05.xml

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/ article1630897.ece

[squarebear]

But how would they get up there?

If no-one experimented or discovered anything, we would still be in caves chipping flint. When the first trains were invented, people were afriad to use them in case they couldn't breathe travelling so fast.

Change always happens, no need to be afraid of it.

[tigerlily11]

yea but come on Square 4.4 billion. Is it really worth that much?
I don't think so. The situations you sited were vastly different to this one. I still think it is a waste of money. And it would cost lest for them to hope one of the shuttles and find a a way to do it up there.

[Octavius]

�The big bang happened I think even the average chav can work that one out. It happened a long time ago. Nothing can be changed by recreating it other than the possibility that we could all go bang again.�

The scientists only think that the big bang happened as we all know it, and these experiments are a way of trying to demonstrate that it did (or didn�t) happen that way, as well as finding out lots of other quirks and nuances about particle acceleration.

This experiment is one of a series of experiments. This time round they will be accelerating faster than they have been able to before. This is still relatively slow in the grand scheme of things and nothing much will happen for �your average chav� or even us to fully understand. There will be no big bang this time round, they simply cannot recreate the levels of energy required.

[eltelioni]

Why the fuss about Wednesday? On Wednesday they will send some particles around the ring for the first time. They will do some low energy collisions at the end of the year, but those have been done many times before. It is going to be a long time before they get to the really high energy stuff. So, for those who want news of the Higg's Boson - you will have to wait. But for those who are afraid the world will be destroyed - you have many months of partying.

[ludwig]

I was hearing about this on the radio this morning, and I'm quite worried. Apparently they want to create the conditions which existed 1 trillionth of a second after the big bang.
This involves creating a fireball one million times hotter than the centre of the sun - hopefully it will be a tiny one.

Even so, we could well get into the situation that happened to Doctor Octopus in Spiderman 2. He wanted to hold the 'power of the sun in the palm of his hand', but started a chain reaction that his octopus arms couldn't control.
Needless to say, it all ended in tears.

[eltelioni]

I read somewhere that the energy dissipated in a proton-proton collision is equivalent to 2 mosquitoes colliding. That is very little energy on the human scale, or even on the mosquito scale. But when it is concentrated on 2 sub-atomic particles it is quite dramatic.