"The energy level of 7 TeV is about comparable to an average car that is travelling at 1000 mph, or 2.3 trillion 3 volt batteries chained together (for a total length of about 4.3 million miles.)"

What a bullshit.
1 eV ~= 1.602 x 10^-19 Joule,
7 TeV ~= 1.1 x 10^-6 J,
which is about hundred million times smaller than power comsumed by a light bulb in your room within just one second. Does kinetic energy of your flying car is so much less? ;-)

As for "trillions of batteries" - have you already claimed Nobel prize for a way to compare units of energy and voltage?

Pathetic. This amount of energy is huge for an elementary particle, but not for "macroworld" with insane amount of such particles.

"Use the force luke."
"Which one?"
"The strong one not the weak one."
:P

bet they were string theorists


I find it stupid that people still think this will create a black hole or such, it's not the first particle accelerator ever built you know.
it is the first on such a large scale but it gives people no reason to panic.

don't this bit remind you of the part in terminator when the boy and girl run and the she terminator is magnetized against those pipes (almost melting her)

I asked numerous scientific journals if these colliders are really finding / creating new particles or if they're just making smaller and smaller chips or existing matter. Kind of like what happens when you a rock with a sledge. So far, none have responded, neither the popular nor the academic. Kinda makes me wonder..

Yeah Luke, don't be a WIMP, eh? Take off, eh?

It appears that there is a significant difference between a volt and an electron volt. Void is right in saying that an electron volt is a really puny amount of energy (1 eV = 1.602 X 10^−19 J). This is the energy an electron gains when it is put though a 1 volt potential. I think that the cause and effect relationship needs a little clarification...

When this really reveals the "world" we are living in, those who believe in any kind of "god(s)" will be thrown out from power. :P

Maybe they can use some of the exotic interactions to generate their own power and pay nothing on their electric bill. Heh, well short of destroying the rest of the planet while doing it. Geesh, some people are still stuck in bad hollywood movies.

Perhaps they haven't responded to your inquiry because it sounds like don't have the first clue about particle physics? Why would they respond to a question that sounds like a three year old asking about where babies come from?

The goal is simple, crash two particles together at near light speed, monitor the resulting spray of particles of the crash and compare them to known particles, try to spot any results that don't conform to known particles, then work the math to describe the 'new' particles they see in the collisions, and try to figure out how the 'new' particles interact with other matter in quantum physics. The 'new' particles are not new at all, they exist in nature already, the scientist are just trying to discover them. Kind of like Columbus 'discovering' the new world, it was already there, and people speculated about its existence, but until Europeans actually saw it with their own eyes, it didn't exist for them. The particles being 'created' are not technically 'new', they are as old as the universe, its just that in normal day to day science, we can't observe them, nor even speculate on their existence until we observe them.

I think the argument here is that the power of the LHC crosses a particular theoretical limit never crossed before. Scientists are worried because they speculate the possibility of creating micro blackholes that do no evaporate and feed at an exponential rate. The scary part is, the other scientists that deny that possibility are ALSO speculating...

hello, everyone

look forward to colliding with you as a hydrogen atom on the other side...
and when i grow up, i'd like to be a photon

Isnt this one of the many reason why the world is gonna end on 2012?

"I find it stupid that people still think this will create a black hole or such, it's not the first particle accelerator ever built you know.
it is the first on such a large scale but it gives people no reason to panic."

You don't know what you're talking about. This is the end of the WORLD!!! EVERYONE TAKE COVER!!!

Man's technology has exceeded his grasp. - 'The World is not Enough'
Zealous Nobel Prize hungry Physicists are racing each other and stopping at nothing to try to find the supposed 'Higgs Boson'(aka God) Particle, among others, and are risking nothing less than the annihilation of the Earth and all Life in endless experiments hoping to prove a theory when urgent tangible problems face the planet. The European Organization for Nuclear Research(CERN) new Large Hadron Collider(LHC) is the world's most powerful atom smasher that will soon be firing subatomic particles at each other at nearly the speed of light to create Miniature Big Bangs producing Micro Black Holes, Strangelets and other potentially cataclysmic phenomena.
Particle physicists have run out of ideas and are at a dead end forcing them to take reckless chances with more and more powerful and costly machines to create new and never-seen-before, unstable and unknown matter while Astrophysicists, on the other hand, are advancing science and knowledge on a daily basis making new discoveries in these same areas by observing the universe, not experimenting with it and with your life.
The LHC is a dangerous gamble as CERN physicist Alvaro De Rújula in the BBC LHC documentary, 'The Six Billion Dollar Experiment', incredibly admits quote, "Will we find the Higgs particle at the LHC? That, of course, is the question. And the answer is, science is what we do when we don't know what we're doing." And CERN spokesmodel Brian Cox follows with this stunning quote, "the LHC is certainly, by far, the biggest jump into the unknown."
The CERN-LHC website Mainpage itself states: "There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions,..." Again, this is because they truly don't know what's going to happen. They are experimenting with forces they don't understand to obtain results they can't comprehend. If you think like most people do that 'They must know what they're doing' you could not be more wrong. Some people think similarly about medical Dr.s but consider this by way of comparison and example from JAMA: "A recent Institute of Medicine report quoted rates estimating that medical errors kill between 44,000 and 98,000 people a year in US hospitals." The second part of the CERN quote reads "...but what's for sure is that a brave new world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator,..." A molecularly changed or Black Hole consumed Lifeless World? The end of the quote reads "...as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of the Universe." These experiments to date have so far produced infinitely more questions than answers but there isn't a particle physicist alive who wouldn't gladly trade his life to glimpse the "God particle", and sacrifice the rest of us with him. Reason and common sense will tell you that the risks far outweigh any potential(as CERN physicists themselves say) benefits.
This quote from National Geographic exactly sums this "science" up: "That's the essence of experimental particle physics: You smash stuff together and see what other stuff comes out."
Find out more about that "stuff" below;
http://www.SaneScience.org/
http://www.LHCFacts.org
http://www.risk-evaluation-forum.org/anon1.htm
http://www.lhcdefense.org/
http://www.lhcconcerns.com
Popular Mechanics - "World's Biggest Science Project Aims to Unlock 'God Particle'" - http://www.popularmechanics.co...16588.html"

Finally I am curious enough about the results of this experiment. But I wish they just launched it a few weeks later on, so as to allow the latest Woody Allen's to show in my city ..

Fall must be here, the nuts are falling out of the trees already.

LHC is a weapon...to us its just and experiment to those that truly know it purpose its weapon for shooting at UFOs...its part of Earth Defense Force. the technology is outside of what familiar so it goes unsuspected. I this will sound total insane but its true. do you own research the truth is out there in plane site.

if people like you were in charge of this world we'd have never left the trees(caves for you creationists)


darn numbskulls who don't know the first thing about science always coming to intervene in stuff they can't grasp with their inferior knowledge.

As has been pointed out in the scientific press, the LHC collisions are far from unprecedented. A few times a year protons with over 1J of energy smash into the upper atmosphere. That is about 1 million times more energy than the LHC particles, and the earth hasn't been consumed by a black hole yet.

Sam would always warn us though.

Particles are hit our atmosphere en masse every day at such extreme energy levels that sometimes we see arauras in the sky. The accelleration is of course done by our own planet's magnetic field. I'm not sure, but I can almost imagine that some of this radiation would far outstrip whatever the LHC is producing as far as particle energy levels are concerned. That has been going on for billions of years... No train smashes there yet.

I just want to know exactly when its going to happen. Because I know this really hot girl, who said she would sleep with me if the world was going to implode .... so I may have a chance :)

So you think they just spent billions of dollars to make a gigantic machine that creates forces of 1.1 x 10^-6 joules? I think they could pick up the particles and throw them will more force than that.

Anyone here know a guy named Einstein? Well there's this theory of relativity, that basically says as things approach the speed of light, classical physics break down and that new physics are required. The speed at which these particles are going to be moving will, yes if fact, have the same energy as a car moving as fast as stated in the article.

So pick up a Modern Physics text book "void" and learn about relativity theory.

Ok ... yes, this is going to create a black hole and destroy the earth. Quick, go ahead and off yourselves now instead of waiting around for this embarrassing event. No ... seriously!

Look at the bright side of the "destruction of Earth" at least for those of us in the states. It would be a merciful end to the onslaught of election coverage and talking mouths!

I thought Marvin the Martian was going to destroy Earth!

I would like to point out that:
QUOTE:
What a bullshit.
1 eV ~= 1.602 x 10^-19 Joule,
7 TeV ~= 1.1 x 10^-6 J,
which is about hundred million times smaller than power comsumed by a light bulb in your room within just one second. Does kinetic energy of your flying car is so much less? ;-)'
END QUOTE:
It seems that you sir and, not the writers of this article, need to study physics more.

Since you say that 7TeV is the power that a lightbulb consumes every second... then how come 200MeV is how much energy is released during the nuclear fission of U-235. Learn your Magnitude scale.

Tera = 10^12

Meaning that 7TeV is 7,000,000,000,000 eV

And be aware that volts are completely different to electron volts...Electron volts are Volts (1 Joule per Coulomb) multiplied by the charge on the electron.... the charge on the ELECTRON being 1.602 x 10^-19

here have I got a message for the fools who don't even know the first thing about black holes: go hang yourselves, you'll miss the agony of "being ripped apart" by a black hole.
This way,if there didn't happen anything your stupidity will have been removed from the gene pool

a black hole isn't a real hole in space.
it's an object of near-infinite mass and density that it produces its own gravity field so powerful it actually bends light and even time itself.
it's impossible to create this with the energy the LHC will use or create.


but of course, it's typical on the internet there's always at least 1 person who doesn't know the first thing about a certain subject yet comes to spread his gibberish.

In our scientific investigations my colleagues an I utilized portable nuclear accelerators. The energy levels of the beams produced by our accelerators were nowhere near the levels of the LHC, yet we were always aware of the dangerously awesome potential for destruction that these tools could yield.

In the mid 1980's, this potential was explored when we encountered an unusually large paranormal event. We focused multiple beams on a single point. The result of crossing our beams was catastrophic, resulting in the creation minor rift fortunately the enormous amount PKE that was present at the time was able to close rift almost as soon as the rift was created. Had this rift not been sealed by the Gozerian PKE, I estimate that the entire island of Manhattan, sections of New Jersey and Long Island would not be here today.

sorry for sounding stupid. Does it help in inter-stellar travel?

Contrary to a number of the posts below him, void was correct in his analysis of the unit eV. While a TeV may be 10^12 eV and eV is 1.602*10^-19 J to begin with.

As Void mentioned a 100W lightbulb running in your house for 1 hour will use astronomically more energy than any single particle in the LHC contains. A 100W lightbulb running for an hour uses ~2.2*10^24 eV or 2.2 Trillion TeV.

However, this massive amount of energy is spread among a massive amount of particles such that each electron only carries ~120eV (for a standard US household wiring).

If each beam has 200 billion particles as the article suggests then they will contain about 1/10th the energy required to run a 100W bulb for an hour, but each particle will have 5.83*10^10 times more energy than those in the lightbulb and that is why they need such a big expensive machine for that little amount of energy.

And I do. 7 TeV isn't all that much. If people do their research then they should know that 1 TeV is equivalent of the amount of force generated by a flying mosquito. So really when you think about it 7 TeV is like a bunch of mosquitoes wrestling.

Everything bad that has come about from the media about the LHC is totally wrong. Everything they say that might happen is entirely theoretical. The likelyness of anything bad happening is SO SLIM it's not even worth thinking about.

It's been blown way out of proportion by the media who obviously don't do their research and take the warblings of an Ex-Nuclear Power Station technician and a Sci-Fi writer to heart. These guys are probably just sore about not being invited to have a part with the project.