CX wrote:I'm a little anxious.
It's only gonna be a problem if 1. the Strangelet Hypothesis is true and 2. if the surface tension of strange matter is above the critical value. Neither of which do they know for a fact are true.
In fact, I read an interesting article at Nature awhile back about how the argument is made that these two conditions cannot be true based on the fact that we observe the existence of neutron stars. The argument is that if strangelets existed, and could be created by particle collisions, then they'd have been floating around since the beginning of time, 1. because of the quark-gluon plasma stage of the big bang and 2. because of the collisions of cosmic rays near neutron stars. Part of the Strangelet Hypothesis is that if a strangelet comes into contact with nuclear matter, like neutrons, it'll convert them into more strangelets). The surface tension thing is because if it IS above this critical value, then heavier strangelets are even more stable than lighter strangelets, so it would sort of "spread", one strangelet in a neutron star would spread until the entire neutron star was a quark star. The argument somewhat in dispute is that "by now", 13.7 billion years later, every neutron star would be a quark star, and NONE would still be neutron stars. Fact is, not only have we seen neutron stars, but we
haven't seen quark stars. That may not mean they're not out there, but it makes it extremely unlikely that the two conditions which would lead to catastropic strangelet conversion due to collisions of sufficiently high energy at the LHC are true.
The micro-blackhole thing doesn't worry me. They're certain that any microscopic blackholes created would evaporate very quickly. Btw, you may have concerns of your own but
do not listen to "gorilla199" on youtube. Guy's a wackjob and an extremist luddite.
Here we go:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk8Vr00E ... re=relatedReally neat Michio Kaku video giving a very brief and easy to understand video on the LHC. I hadn't even heard that they hoped it would create sparticles. Sweet. I had
also never heard about this "signals from the 11th dimension" thing. Is that the sweet beeping of our subspace radio I hear?
Can you imagine switching this thing on and catching the last few innings of alien baseball on Zeta Reticuli?
. Mulder said "the truth is out there" but I say "you can't handle the truth" (most people on our planet can't even begin to comprehend the universe).