• Question: What are your veiws on the Collider? Do you think that it will cause a Black Hole or is it all fiction?

    Asked by winchester to Andrew, Emma, Marianne on 15 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by imnotsureaboutbeardedhedgehogs.
    • Photo: Andrew Maynard

      Andrew Maynard answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Hi winchester,

      It’s a great physics experiment that will hopefully help us understand the universe better, it’s a stonkingly expensive experiment (which raises all sorts of interesting questions about whether we should be doing this, or something else with the money), and no, it’s not likely to produce a black hole in the sense of something that will suck us all into oblivion!

    • Photo: Marianne Baker

      Marianne Baker answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      I actually chatted with Prof. Brian Cox in a bar for a bit (yeah I’m name-dropping!) – he works on the LHC and gets *very* angry about people suggesting it’ll cause a black hole.

      Very basically (because I’m not a physicist and don’t understand the theory behind it well), the machine doesn’t use enough energy to cause a black hole. Any that did form would be so teeny, they’d disappear in a tiny fraction of a second.

      There’s nothing to worry about as far as I can see.

      I did write up one of his lectures that I went to here ( http://noodlemaz.wordpress.com/2010/04/07/science-only-adds/ ) if you’re interested in a bit more detail!

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      i know a chap who’s working on it (so must a lot of people. It’s a massive venture) and he’s a sensible physics-loving individual. Never say never but my instinct is to trust the physicists. Have you read much about what they aim to do with the Large Hadron Collider?

      Like the name-dropping….

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