Earth to be consumed by black hole

[crokett]

Stephen Hawking said so. therefore its the law.

He's also the one who said that the collider is gonna be a big flop, at least in that it won't detect the particles it was supposed to. It might detect something else unexpected, although I still don't think it was worth the cost.

[LCHIEN]

for the price, we should be able to turn lead into gold...

[jackellis]

Here's a practical example of why the collider might be worth its fantastic price tag.

The first disk drives were about the size of a clothes washer and could hold a big 5 megabytes. Today they're the size of a sandwich and hold up to 200,000 times as much data (soon to be 300,000 time as much - Seagate has announced a 1.5 terabyte drive). The most recent drives take advantage of something called the giant magnetoresistive (GMR) effect. I have no idea what GMR is but I'm pretty certain it was the result of some quest for the sake of knowledge rather than the result of applied science.

Applied science usually starts with and builds on basic research. I'd rather see $11 billion spent on a collider that may or may not prove a few theories than the $100 billion that's been sunk into the black hole of the International Space Station. Unless, of course, there's LOTS of basic and applied science coming out of the ISS effort.

[sparkeyjames]

Chris,

I feel the same way. There is a lot more that could have been done with that money than attempt to find particles that may or may not exist.

Like say what? Give the money to politicians to spend on graft and corruption? Give it to a charity so that the executives of said charity can get huge salaries and bonus's so that only 5% of that money does any good? I know give it to education oriented endeavors and watch it dissipate before it does a single child any good (see graft and corruption). My favorite would be save the cars fill the potholes.

There are not many items in one's life these days that has not been the result of some money somewhere being spent on basic or applied sciences research.
Not many who read my second post paid attention to the part about "figure out just how matter is put together and how to manipulate it" you seemed to have skipped over that part. This is where the super collider and it's earlier incarnations supply the basic knowledge to go forward.

The internet is an offshoot of what was and still is being done at CERN. It was not directly related to the particle physics experiments being done but was related to the data collected from them. But if CERN did not exist and those experiments where not being done and the data not being collected would there be a person like Tim Berners-Lee somewhere to create the underlying technology to what is now the internet? Would it have been done? Who knows? I think that it probably would not have come to be. At least not in the form it is today. Suffice it to say that as an offshoot of CERN and nuclear particle physics, the data collection and the need for that data to be manipulated, the internet with all it's benefits and warts is now a reality.

[BobSch]

don't make me tell you the one we learned about precipitation reactions in ap chem last year. and people wonder how that class could have possibly been fun....

If your not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate?

[crokett]

Like say what? Give the money to politicians to spend on graft and corruption? Give it to a charity so that the executives of said charity can get huge salaries and bonus's so that only 5% of that money does any good? I know give it to education oriented endeavors and watch it dissipate before it does a single child any good (see graft and corruption). My favorite would be save the cars fill the potholes.

2 that come to mind are endow cancer or AIDs research (or both). An endowment that large should keep several researchers gainfully employed for life with no time wasted looking for additional funding. Either of these would have a much more immediate effect on a lot more lives than the Super Collider.

I'm sure with more thought I could come up with something else.

[cgallery]

If an 1" square IC was moving electrons among 10,000 logic points, then an IC moving quarks between 10,000 logic points would require perhaps 0.1" square (I don't know the real numbers, these are presented for illustration puposes only). It would do this because the width and length of circuits inside the IC would be smaller. It would require less material, operate faster, use less power.

JR

Excuse me for my stupidity (please), but how would we know if quarks are moving around like that? And how would we make them move? I know your answer is hypothetical, but is there something you've read that indicates that this is an area of research for physicists? If this is the next frontier I'd love to read more about it.

[smorris]

Things already coming from this project as they were needed to deal with the volumes of data.

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articl...tal-10-gig.htm

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articl...ins-of-the.htm

[crokett]

Some Haldron Collider web cams.

http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

[jackellis]

The March, 2008 issue of National Geographic had an article on this big particle smasher. One paragraph near the end stands out:

"The cynic might say that there's no practical use for any of this, that there might be other uses for all the money and brainpower going into these particle guns. But we live in a civilization shaped by physics. We know that the forces within the atom are so powerful tht, unleashed and directed against humanity, they can obliterate cities in an instant.The laptop computer on which I'm writing uses microprocessors that would not exist had we not discovered quantum physics and the quirky behavior of electrons. This story will be posted on the World Wide Web - invented, in case you hadn't heard, at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee. Maybe you're reading it while listening to your iPod, which wouldn't exist but for soemthing called "giant magnetoresistance". Two physicists discovered it independently in teh late 1980s with not much thought of how it might eventually be used. It became crucial to making tiny electronics that used magnetized hard disks. The physicists won a Nobel Prize in 2007, and you got a nifty sound system that's smaller than a Hershey bar."

[leehljp]

2 that come to mind are endow cancer or AIDs research (or both). An endowment that large should keep several researchers gainfully employed for life with no time wasted looking for additional funding. Either of these would have a much more immediate effect on a lot more lives than the Super Collider.

I'm sure with more thought I could come up with something else.

David,

In my observation of human nature (in general and in specifics), guaranteed employment decreases productivity. Guaranteed income decreases motivation overall. Those intermittent search for funds is a good motivator for real results, which in turn can be used to enhance fund acquisitions.