OK weve all heard the scare stories about LHC setting off a black hole yadda yadda, but this time its serious!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8326666.stm

theyre going to cross the streams.

*Tries to imagine all life as I know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in my body exploding at the speed of light*

ever tried  crossing streams at the urinal?

err, no. Sounds like something that gays would do though.

All is lost, prepare for the invasion of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Men!  

I wouldnt think you could serious, youre probably a sitting down only fella

"Theres something very important I forgot to tell you. Dont cross the streams... It would be bad... Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light."
—Egon Spengler on crossing proton streams

If Dr Spengler says its a bad idea, then it muct be.

I dont know that much about the LHC... and good info is hard to find...

I know there main aim is (basically) to collide particles into each other and see what happens, hoping to re-create the big bang and see how all matter was formed, and I realise that kind of info can eventually lead to some really interesting stuff, and would let us look at things very differently...

but what else does it do ?   its a hell of a lot of money/work/effort just for that.... I must have missed something ?

its trying to prove the existence of the higgs boson, a particle which supposedly gives every particle in the universe mass.

edit:   I spent ages typing..

Theyre trying to find out what gives stuff mass and what makes gravity work afaik. Theres a standard model of physics laying out all the building blocks of everything but one building block (the higgs boson which gives stuff mass) has never been observed before - its only predicted. Someone call SteveF tbh. I did read the other day some scientists were suggesting that the LHC would never work in our universe -

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html?_r=1

- I think theyre on about quantum suicide the gist of it being that we cant exist in a Universe in which the LHC works as predicted to produce higgs thingys.

Quote from: wikipediaOne example of the thought experiment is: a man sits down before a gun, which is pointed at his head. The gun is rigged to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle. Each time the trigger is pulled, the spin of the quantum particle is measured. Depending on the measurement, the gun will either fire, or it wont. If the quantum particle is measured as spinning in a clockwise motion, the gun will fire. If the particle is spinning counterclockwise, the gun wont discharge; there will only be a click.

The man now pulls the trigger. The gun clicks. He pulls the trigger again, with the same result. And again; the gun does not fire. The man will continue to pull the trigger again and again with the same result: The gun wont fire. Although its functioning properly and loaded with bullets, no matter how many times he pulls the trigger, the gun will never seem to fire.

Go back in time to the beginning of the experiment. The man pulls the trigger for the very first time, and the particle is now measured as spinning clockwise. The gun fires. The man is dead.

But the problem arises; the man already pulled the trigger the first time — and an infinite amount of times following that — and we already know the gun didnt fire. How can the man be dead? The man is unaware, but hes both alive and dead. Each time he pulls the trigger, the universe is split in two. It will continue to split, again and again, each time the trigger is pulled. ­ This thought experiment is called quantum suicide. It was first posed by theorist Max Tegmark in 1997. However, science fiction author Larry Niven originally proposed a fictional variant of quantum suicide in his short story All the Myriad Ways in which the protagonists final action in the story kills/fails to kill him in myriad alternate realities.

With each run of the experiment there is a 50-50 chance that the gun will be triggered and the experimenter will die. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, the gun will (in all likelihood) eventually be triggered and the experimenter will die (assuming the experimenter allows the wavefunction/spinor of the particle to evolve back to its original state after each attempt). If the many-worlds interpretation is correct then at each run of the experiment, the experimenter will be split into one world in which he survives and another world in which he dies. After many runs of the experiment, there will be many worlds. In the worlds where the experimenter dies, he will cease to be a conscious entity.

However, from the point of view of the non-dead copies of the experimenter, the experiment will continue running without his ceasing to exist, because at each branch, he will only be able to observe the result in the world in which he survives, and if many-worlds is correct, the surviving copies of the experimenter will notice that he never seems to die, therefore "proving" himself to be invulnerable to the gun mechanism in question, from his own point of view.

If the many-worlds interpretation is true, the measure (given in M.W.I. by the squared norm of the wavefunction) of the surviving copies of the experimenter will decrease by 50% with each run of the experiment, but will remain non-zero. So, if the surviving copies become experimenters, those copies will either die in the first shot, or survive creating duplicates of themselves (copies of copies, that will survive finitely or die).

The LHC is looking at other stuff too but its over my head tbh

Very interesting.

So there is, strictly speaking theoretically, a universe where knighty is in fact not gorgeous ?

Nah, Knighty is the constant

Actually Sam, current theory is that its Knightys charisma which slowed the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang. While in theory a universe could exist where Knighty isnt gorgeous, in practice that Universe would be totally empty as all matter would have dispersed within microseconds.

It could explain where all the gravity is, its been consumed by the Knighty Gorgeous Condensate.

lmao

Anyone noticed how any hardcore physics/science questions here always end up being explained by "The Knighty Effect"?

Tbh its a bit like a lot of religious explanations for the unexplainable...so much so...I wonder...are we creating...The Church of Knighty? (I think "The Church of Alan" sounds much better).