End of the World in 4 Days (?)
Posted on: September 8, 2008 - 11:21pm
Offline
End of the World in 4 Days (?)
I'm extremely skeptical of the world ending soon, but my roommate read it, it freaked her out and she sent it to me. Has anyone heard about this?
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/article1630897.ece
*Our world is far more complex than the rigid structure we want to assign to it, and we will probably never fully understand it.*
"Those believers who are sophisticated enough to understand the paradox have found exciting ways to bend logic into pretzel shapes in order to defend the indefensible." - Hamby
- Login to post comments
The Sun. I mean, c'mon. It's The Sun.
Prof. Brian Cox of CERN (and the fellow running the LHC) says the following:
“Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat.”
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
...and here I was glad that I wouldn't have to worry about a McCain/Palin administration. Damn.
Conor
I remember reading a news story about that machine over a year ago was excited to see it work, I cant wait to hear what they end up finding.
I wonder if we can get them to ship one or two to the White House and a whole pot load to the Congress?
"Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state,' therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society." Thomas Jefferson
www.myspace.com/kenhill5150
"It's a fun ride, George. Stop complaining and crawl inside the damn tube."
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
That's a good idea, maybe we can use king george's rendition program. Convince the feebs he's a terrorist doppleganger, and the LHC is a new torture device.
With the amount of imbeciles in gov't and the feebs shouldn't be too hard to convince them.
"Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state,' therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society." Thomas Jefferson
www.myspace.com/kenhill5150
LHC @ CERN, Switzerland: The biggest scientific experiment to create black holes, recreate the conditions of the Big Bang, find higher spatial dimentions, dark matter, explain gravity, etc...
). With giant detectors they will look at new particles that will emerge in hope of finding the "Higgs boson", a particle that would explain why other particles (and almost everything around us) have mass.
).
Tomorrow, on 10th September 2008 at 9:00 CEST, after long delays, the Large Hadron Collider will become operational.
The largest, most complicated, most technologically advanced and most expensive science experiment ever (6.000.000.000 euro) is located 100m under ground near Geneva, Switzerland and is 27km in circumference (you could fit Manhattan inside of it).
By smashing beams of protons at 99,99% the speed of light they will recreate the conditions present just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang (you could call it "The Genesis machine"
The Large Hadron Collider's (LHC) CMS detectors being installed
By looking at the trails of new particles created at impact of two protons it is possible to make amazing new discoveries about the subatomic world.
Modern physics theories (Superstring Theory) predict the existance of so-called "sparticles" (super particles), the existance of 10 or 11 spatial dimentions (we are aware of only 3)... If we find them, that would be a huge discovery and it would tell us whether the Superstring Theory is correct or not. The string theory is a unifying theory of Einstein's relativity and Quantum Mechanics and it says that every particle that exists is like a string of energy, like a rubber band and all of the particle's propreties are just manifestations of the way that string vibrates. Like vibration of violin strings produces different tones when it vibrates in different ways, the vibration of these superstrings would give particles their mass, spin, electrical charge, etc...
We also know that our universe is filled with some strange matter that we cannot see directly - we can only see its gravitational effect on galaxies - it's called "Dark Matter"... The LHC might finally shed some light on it and tell us what this dark matter really is.
Three-dimensional map of the large-scale distribution of dark matter in the observable universe, from Hubble Space Telescope data (NASA, Jan 7, 2007). The map, determined by analysis of gravitational distortions of light coming from distant galaxies, reveals a network of filaments intersecting at the locations of normal matter in galaxy clusters. Clumping of dark matter appears more pronounced from right (distant regions in space and time) to left (nearest and recent regions)
The collisions of particles in the LHC will probably create mini black-holes every now and then, but don't worry, they will not eat up the Earth, these black holes wil evaporate as soon as they are created (let's hope Stephen Hawking is right about Hawking's radiation
(click on the the photo to read more)
World Wide Web (the internet) was born right here in CERN 20 years ago for the purpose of exchanging information about the experiments between scientists and then in spread all around the world. Now, for the purpose of these new experiments they will need huge processing power to process all the data created at the LHC (thousands of GIGAbytes of data per second), so they invented "The Grid", a network of processors, which will surely spread all over the world just like the internet did and so our planet will become a giant supercomputer for everyone to use.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZDSLzU9pZ4 - A video about The Grid by CERN
This is all very exciting for me, I've been reading books on modern physics (Brian Greene: The Elegant Universe & The Fabric of the Cosmos; Stephen Hawking: The Universe in a Nutshell, etc...) and watching many interesting documentaries on the internet about the String Theory, LHC, black holes, dark matter, possibilites of space-time travel, etc.
Are we on the verge of amazing new scientific discoveries, like Quantum Mechanics and Einstein's relativity 100 years ago? Physicists at CERN are betting on it.
MORE PHOTOS OF THE LHC:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.html
MORE INFO AND VIDEOS:
Brian Cox: An inside tour of the world's biggest supercollider
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/brian_cox_on_cern_s_supercollider.html
LHC accelerator at CERN:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgLdIly2Xtw
The Elegant Universe (documentary on superstring theory - very interesting, easy to understand)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/
BBC-Horizon-The Six Billion Dollar Experiment (trailer):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvEK5uZXpZU
CERN: 50 years of Science:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SARgkwczvAE
Michio Kaku: Mini Black Holes and the Large Hadron Collider:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk8Vr00EBHA
LHC The Time Machine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AlS01L5xmM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwZ6cS3A3KY
CERN LHC Black Holes and Strangelets - May Appear Years Later and Destroy World:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZAQn-KxW_k (DO NOT take too seriously, mini black holes can NOT destroy our planet)
Fourth Dimension 101
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDaKzQNlMFw
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LHC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole
I
This whole kerfuffle started when the sales pitch for the LHC was describing all the things they could discover with it. Some idiots decided that when a physicist said he was going to "make a black hole", he meant those scary things in space movies. These people obviously just want to protect themselves against CGI.
I'll let you guess what kind of madness resulted from the religious morons hearing about it. (Hint: there was much prayer.)
I think thingy did a bit on this a while ago.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
I'm not too worried about the mini black holes, but if it turns out that they re-create the conditions of the early universe and find a guy saying "let there be light" then I think it would be time to worry.
In God I trust, all others bring data
BTW God, I think your excemption expired
Sweet! The world is coming to an end! That just means I don't have to worry about anything I had planned next week. I was just gonna go to work anyway so fuck it!
Oh, and the best part is the little advertisement on the right of that page:
That's just magical.
See this post by Deludedgod: http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/15302
No the world will not end tomorrow.
Vote for Democrats to save us all from the anti-American Republican party!
Please become a Patron of Brian Sapient
My roommate is still freaking out, saying that black holes can suck the Earth in. I'm not even going to try anymore...
*Our world is far more complex than the rigid structure we want to assign to it, and we will probably never fully understand it.*
"Those believers who are sophisticated enough to understand the paradox have found exciting ways to bend logic into pretzel shapes in order to defend the indefensible." - Hamby
Make sure you gloat and make fun of her mercilessly tomorrow.
These black holes.....are not the ones that are shown in movies, these black holes will have the gravitational pull of particles...which is to say negligible...which isn't the same thing as to say ooooh the gravitational pull of a collapsed star, which is what most people think of when black holes are mentioned....but hey ignorance is what these people thrive on sometimes.
If it works, we get to know a lot more about the nature of matter.
If it explodes, it will rain Swiss chocolate over the face of the earth for weeks.
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
She might want to keep checking this link:
http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
BTW, today (4h 30min to go) they will only send a beam of protons in ONE direction around the LHC to test and tune everything. The first collisions will take place on 21st October! So no hungry black holes till then...
But you don't want to tell her that, or she will be freaking out for another month or two.
Instead, give her this link: http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR07.08E.html
...*do* tell her about the later date. *Do* let her freak out for a month, and hopefully, get a lot of her friends to follow suit.
Then, when the end of the world does *not* occur, all of us can...very publicly...laugh our collective arses off as the doomsayers give the wrong date for the Apocalypse...
...yet *again.*
Conor
That's entertainment that you just can't buy in stores. It's like watching a cat freak out as it chases imaginary bugs.. hours of entertainment.
You MUST find a way to increase her anxiety about it. Then video tape the meltdown. Then post if for us.
... much laughter and mockery will ensue.
To be completely honest, I'd feel more secure if the project were located on the moon or Mars. However, I can't say I'm going to lose any sleep over it either. Frankly, we're far more likely to be pummelled into oblivion by an asteroid or comet within the next month than by a human generated black hole.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
Google seems to be taking their impending doom lightly....
Well, considering that particles with energies greater than what the LHC can produce slam into the Earth's atmosphere every day (frequency depends on just how high energies you are considering, but in order of magnitude) and have been doing so for billions of years, I'd say that the fear of black holes is very disproportionate to the actual danger. We're still here.
True that.
*Our world is far more complex than the rigid structure we want to assign to it, and we will probably never fully understand it.*
"Those believers who are sophisticated enough to understand the paradox have found exciting ways to bend logic into pretzel shapes in order to defend the indefensible." - Hamby
Yeah. Thanks.
This proves that most of my posts and the wonderful responses they elicit go unread despite having catchy titles.
Here's the thread from March mentioning Wagner and Sancho's attempt with some direction to sites offering reassurance to you and yours:
http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/13264
Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server, which houses Celebrity Atheists.
Marcusfish is right. Sometimes we take the wrong things way too seriously.
[sarcasm]Perhaps the roommate is just looking for a reason to do something wild during her last few minutes as a sentient piece of matter?
We could be talking about the next great pick-up line:
"Hey, baby. Wanna knock boots before CERN destroys the solar system?"
Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server, which houses Celebrity Atheists.
Who the hell cares about microscopic black holes? They're microscopic, aren't they? So they have microscopic gravity and lasts for a microscopic moment. No big deal.
Btw, this stuff about superstrings is fascinating... I never understood the concept, until now.
Esoteric writings says, that everything is a vibration. By expressing a correct vibration, the matter itself may be brought to existence. Not only basic particles, but also molecules and living cells.
In old Hinduistic holy texts the God is called the "Great singer", because it literally sang the universe into existence, sang it's frequencies as one song, like a song has it's sound frequency.
So this is what the superstrings are. I thought they're supposed to connect something, but now that I understood that they vibrate as a strings, it gives a lot more sense. This is another example of science, making the ancient knowledge accessible to contemporary people. Is that a coincidence?
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
What the fuck are you talking about?
You haven't an iota what superstrings are. Have you ever even heard of perturbation theory, let alone comprehend it?
Give us a source for your claim about Hindu creation myths.
Or better yet - just shut up and go away.
I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Ouch. Very basic physics error. Talk about an embarassingly rapid demonstration of ignorance! Black holes, no matter how tiny, have infinite gravitational field strength and hence by the fundamental theorem of line integrals, infinite negative potential gradient. The only difference is, from a large black hole, because these ones are so small, the Schwarzchild radius will be extremely small.
The purpose of the LHC is not to investigate superstrings. It's to fill in the gaps in the standard model. Theoretical superstrings are far too small to be detected.
This would not fit with superstring theory at all. According to SST, strings are governed by basic principles of tension. According to the scale, the oscillations of strings are quantizable. It is true the oscillation of strings are the determining factor for the elementary particles being in question, put past that scale it is no longer relevant, insofar as strings are approximately Planck length. Different oscillations can only produce different elementary particles, not different living cells. You're making the greedy reductionist fallacy. It would be like trying to describe economics in terms of particle physics.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
Well, I meant it like that, I guess. A black hole with a low gravity wouldn't exist. Is the Schwarzchild radius big enough to gather any matter around? (a neighbouring atoms, let's say) Does the gathered matter increase it enough to attract even more matter, and then more?
A vacuum, which I hope is present in LHC, would be sufficient to isolate such a black hole, but would it be so, if it would suddenly appear within a normal object, where's a plenty of matter around to feed on?
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
No. Wait.
Yes, Luminon. I see. Perhaps you should send CERN all of your money so that they can do even more research and possibly find the song of Brahma.
Or give all of your money to medicine to regather Shiva's tear from the Earth.
But one question... How did all of those gods fit into a 2.5 cm diameter tube 100m below ground? Lol.
Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server, which houses Celebrity Atheists.
You may as well have quoted Scooby Doo, Series 3, Episode 4 as your source.
Alice Bailey's "treatise" is split into rules, not chapters. In Rule 4, where much gibberish is written about sound - none of it rational - the reader is told that these conditions must be accepted by him or her before he or she can appreciate the rest of what follows:
Bullshit, in other words.
Go away, Luminon. There are other forums here where your type are welcome. Get the fuck away from rational peoples' conversations - it's just plain rudeness interrupting them all the time with crap.
Trolldom, in fact.
I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
As I've understood black holes, they are objects with a sufficient mass per radius to pull in even light.
@Hmac, that comic isn't very scientific. 10000 V wouldn't be enough to arch very far.
As for the LHC, it isn't doing anything but recreating a natural phenomenon in a predictible place so the scientist know where to target their sensors. Particles with higher energy than the LHC can churn out collides with the earths atmosphere on a daily basis.
No, not necessarily. Remember that field strength is negative potential gradient. In Relativistic terms, you can think of the field strength (although gravity isn't technically a force) as the "steepness" of the curvature. This is obvious when we think about it even without using line integrals. Since we know that F=GMm/r2, hence E=GM/r2, hence potential (which will be equal to the integral of field strength with respect to dr) is -GM/r. The field strength gives the gradient of potential, in other words. In a black hole this gradient will be vertical. This is called a gravitational singularity, which the black hole should have inside the event horizon. Remember that infinity is not a number. You can't talk about multiplication by infinity. It is not a quantity. In mathematics, we would consider this as a point in space where E is not defined. For example, if we treat the mass as a point mass at the origin, then E is undefined at (0,0), but in physics, there is no such thing as a point mass, and in the center of a real spherical object, net E will be equal to 0 (every vector will be cancelled by an equal and opposing vector). But in a black hole, E should be infinite at the event horizon.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
Don't tire out too quickly, deludedgod.
I'm saving the rest of my patience for when there are actually collisions at the LHC and the nutcases REALLY come out of the woodwork.
Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server, which houses Celebrity Atheists.
It wasn't lunacy. He was making a perfectly reasonable definitional qualm. Black holes are defined as those points with sufficient field strength to capture light. However, it is also true according to the general theory of Relativity that at the event horizon, the curvature is infinite, that is, there should be a gravitational singularity.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
Nah. I was referring to the 'sucking the whole Earth in' thinkers not this part of the discussion.
Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server, which houses Celebrity Atheists.
Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server, which houses Celebrity Atheists.
Live webcams at the LHC.
Hey, Peppermint? How's the roomie doing now that the initialization is over?
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
Geesh.
Good graphics. Bad message, but good graphics.
Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server, which houses Celebrity Atheists.
Haha, take that Frenchies, damn you and your forward pass in the world cup!
Rofl. The irony is that the film doesn't actually show what would happen if a black hole did form. For one thing, it would have to swallow the entire solar system to grow that fast(maybe more). And time gets all fucked up too. Different cameras at different positions would show different stages even though they were running at real time.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
OK. As irritating as that shit is...
That one is still funny.
Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server, which houses Celebrity Atheists.
well! someone's wearing their ovaries on the outside!
"I have never felt comfortable around people who talk about their feelings for Jesus, or any other deity for that matter, because they are usually none too bright. . . . Or maybe 'stupid' is a better way of saying it; but I have never seen much point in getting heavy with either stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don't bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I. . . . And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there's a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots."
--Hunter S. Thompson
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
"I have never felt comfortable around people who talk about their feelings for Jesus, or any other deity for that matter, because they are usually none too bright. . . . Or maybe 'stupid' is a better way of saying it; but I have never seen much point in getting heavy with either stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don't bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I. . . . And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there's a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots."
--Hunter S. Thompson