Thanks to Jeremy for pointing out to me a photo feature on the LHC at CERN. Some really brilliant pictures of truly Big Science getting built.
View of the CMS detector at the end of 2007 (Maximillien Brice, (c) CERN)
Of course, if you’re worried about this causing the world to end it’s probably worth reading the info they put out in 2003, which simply points out that the Earth will have seen this (and much more) before:
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can achieve an energy that no other particle accelerators have reached before, but Nature routinely produces higher energies in cosmic-ray collisions. […] Whatever the LHC will do, Nature has already done many times over during the lifetime of the Earth and other astronomical bodies.
To put things into proportion:
Speculations about microscopic black holes at the LHC refer to particles produced in the collisions of pairs of protons, each of which has an energy comparable to that of a mosquito in flight.
So you can put your brown paper bags away now.. 🙂
It is very important to inform the public, because there are still many, who have not even heard about the CERN LHC programs as yet! The public debate is a healthy social mechanism, when held in rational constraint!
http://thefifthknight.blogspot.com/
Remember: Follow the ‘White Rabbit’!
Actually the 2003 RHIC Safety Report concluded that micro black hole creation was not possible. That is all the report said about micro black holes.
Today micro black hole creation is predicted as possible at one per second and cosmic ray safety arguments are disputed and unverified.
Professor Rossler theorizes that Hawking Radiation is not possible (other peer reviewed papers call Hawking Radiation an open question or non-existent). Dr. Rossler also calculates that micro black holes would grow exponentially destroying Earth in 50 months to 50 years. Dr. Rossler also refutes the unverified cosmic ray arguments. (Cosmic rays hitting Earth travel too fast to be captured, unlike man made micro black holes created from head-on collider collisions. White Dwarf and Neutron star arguments are also refuted).
http://www.wissensnavigator.com/documents/spiritualottoeroessler.pdf
Excuse my poor english, please.
The last safety report of CERN estimates the possibilitie of formation of micro black holes as an unlikely, but real possibilitie.
They still consider that the hawking radiation, and the logicall decay of a micro black hole, as a fact. Anywhay they said that in the case of a stable micro black hole trapped by earth gravity (something very unlikely according to the report), this MBH would grow at a very low rate, something about millions of years.
The cosmic ray argument is postulated not only to our planet but to another, more dense, extraterrestrial bodies who could capture this hipotetical stable MBH, and who, according to the same theories of Mr. Rossler would be destroyed by now.
This report has been aproved by scientist around the world.