Particle Beam Accelerator

[Sarah90]

...And, so far, we haven't all been sucked into a Black Hole...  

See the first images of proton collisions from the Large Hadron Collider and read our physics editor's report from CERN:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14699

And watch our whistlestop video tour of the LHC here:
http://www.newscientist.com/video.ns?bctid=1785292087&DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=specrt10_head_Inside%20the%20LHC

[Orstio]

Yeah, there's all sorts of crazy assumptions going on about the LHC.  High energy particle scollide all the time naturally.  All the LHC does is provides a controlled environment so scientists can observe collisions and their results.

[Astronuc]

The LHC will produce collisions in the TeV range, perhaps 10-20 TeV, where 1 TeV = 1000 GeV or 10¹² eV. 
 
There are cosmic rays of several more orders of magnitude of energy - up to 10²⁰ eV.  And still no black holes.
 
See - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_high_energy_cosmic_ray
 
 
The objective of the LHC is to achieve energies that might shed light on the Higgs boson and the phenomenon that causes mass.  It will provided additional evidence to test the Standard Model in high energy physics.
 
New Scientist is not a good source for rigorous scientific information.   They tend to sensationalize somewhat.

[Orstio]

There are cosmic rays of several more orders of magnitude of energy - up to 10²⁰ eV.  And still no black holes.

It's really quite simple -- It has already been determined that our sun/solar system does not have enough mass/energy to form a black hole.  How the heck do people think we are going to create one with a little machine on this little rock?   

[Astronuc]

It has to do with the energy density, the Higgs boson, and the theoretical understandings underlying the Standard Model.
 
There's a lot of discussion of mini-black holes, or micro black holes.
 
Anyway, there are a lot of folks who have little understanding of physics, but they pick up bits and pieces and speculate about the end of the earth as we know it if the LHC starts colliding particles in the 10 TeV range.

[Orstio]

Even a micro-black hole needs to have enough mass/energy to bend the surrounding space-time more than perpendicular from its relative state.  Without the sustainable mass of stellar magnitude, it becomes a temporary (time measured in quanta) situation at best.

[Astronuc]

Yeah - apparently small/mini/micro- blackholes evaporate.

[Sarah90]

New Scientist is not a good source for rigorous scientific information.   They tend to sensationalize somewhat.

Yes, miss the 'Good 'ole Days' with 'Sci Am' (not that I understood that much, but at least was able to plough through the rigourous text with some trust, and glean the essence - with some confidence.)
 
So...(and probably a silly question, but too much 'hype' to go through now on I/Net, and the gumbled and over-simplified News announcements  ) could you perhaps elucidate on some of what is hoped to be found as a result of this (magnificent and utterly exciting ) experiment? And/or perhaps some web addresses?  Ta everso. 

[Astronuc]

Here is a site for CERN's LHC
 
http://lhc2008.web.cern.ch/lhc2008/index.html
 
Some expectations from some Nobel laureates -
http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/35456
 
 
The LHC and what it is -
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/LHC-en.html

[Sarah90]

Thankyou Astronuc!  Excellent.

[Running With Scissors]

Did they start colliding the particals yet? I know its has been up and running for a while but I heard they didn't start colliding until later.

[Dingo1]

RWS,  The scientists ran into a glitch with one of the magnets.  It will be several months before they will be able to start the research