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Originally Posted by jewels
There are some that believe this particle accelerator will cause black holes that will cause the Earth to self-destruct by next week. Yes, it's a small percentage, but they're physicists, too.
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Your article does not support your assumptions. It says:
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But there are a small but significant group of naysayers who worry that the LHC is not 100% safe. Opponents say it is possible the collider could produce micro black holes and dangerous "strangelets", and that catastrophic effects from these cannot be ruled out.
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It doesn't say anything about the naysayers being physicists. What it DOES say, shortly after that, is:
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However, the consensus of physicists is that the collider is perfectly harmless.
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Originally Posted by jewels
Personally, I'll trust in the larger consensus of physicists. I'm not sure why, but I'd love to understand what the risks are and what they could possibly fear. Any explanation would help satisfy curiosity of us laypersons.
For those that understand the technicalities of this process, do you have any concerns at all? Or are the physicists that fear the end of the world simply falling back on a subliminal religious or cultural belief?
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Any article that basically reads "Physicists say operation X will not end the world," in three paragraphs and then spends twenty on "but look at all these religious beliefs about the end of the world!" smacks of sensationalism, and I find it claiming that:
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[...]when you see a headline in a newspaper that says "Are we all going to die next Wednesday?"
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is cause to question the end of the world to be ironically self-referential circular logic: The potential end of the world due to LHC is newsworthy because newspapers are reporting the potential end of the world.
Here, read this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai.../scilhc105.xml
In the words of Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University: "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat."
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The report, 'Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions', published in the Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, proves that if particle collisions at the LHC had the power to destroy the Earth, we would never have been given the chance to worry about the LHC, because regular interactions with more energetic cosmic rays would already have destroyed the Earth.
The Safety Assessment Group writes, "Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth - and the planet still exists."
The Group compares the rates of cosmic rays that bombard Earth to show that hypothetical black holes or strangelets, that have raised fears in some, will pose no threat.
As the Group writes, "Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes, so any black hole produced would be much smaller than those known to astrophysicists
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