Mockery, I hardly knew ya

[LordSappington]

24 hours left....
http://www.lhcountdown.com/
Prepare for unforeseen consequences...
That, or nothing will happen except for SCIENCE, and then all the /x/enophiles will look like douches.

[pac-man]

The link was disabled.

[LordSappington]

Really? It works for me.....
http://www.lhcountdown.com/
Fix'd

[darkvare]

whats lhc

[Esuohlim]

Is this some 4chan shit

Someone let me know so I can punch his one-way ticket to Infraction City

[Tadao]

Here you go Darkvare, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider

I almost forgot about this.

[Tadao]

Is this some 4chan shit

Someone let me know so I can punch his one-way ticket to Infraction City

It's actually pretty important.

[pac-man]

Let's not go punching any tickets just yet. Apparently there's this big supercollider in Europe, and it's on switch is getting flipped in 23 hours. If it works, hooray for science. If it doesn't, well who knows. I love countdowns!

EDIT: Wasn't there a thread about this a couple months ago? I remember reading an AP story about it, at least. Hold on to your butts (but on the bright side, milhousE, 4chan will be gone).

[Esuohlim]

Oh wait no I know about this.

Except I thought this already happened in June. :\

[Sethomas]

I was typing out an open letter to CERN about how they should focus a steady stream of mass-laden particles onto the event horizon trajectory so that Hawking Radiation would be negated and humanity would end in a femtosecond. My argument is based on the idea that the ultimate purpose of any ethical system is to alleviate suffering, and this would actually therefore be the most altruistic event in history.

I haven't finished it yet, though.

[pac-man]

You've doomed us all!

[Esuohlim]

If you don't finish it by tomorrow JonathanClement will.

[LordSappington]

I'm still pissed I can't find my crowbar.
Also, if you're not dead by Saturday, put a stereo r something in your yard and blast out Still Alive; that's what I'm doing. I'll try and get a recording of people's reactions.

[liquidstatik]

NAH ITS COOL DUDE

[liquidstatik]

I hope we don't die, so I can hear what happens :eek

[Esuohlim]

If something happens you won't even understand it anyway, best to just toke up son 8]

[liquidstatik]

tbh me and my friends are gonna toke up 'til the countdown hits zero 8]

[Tadao]

Maybe you'll find that elusive particle first.

[liquidstatik]

:lol

[liquidstatik]

FUCK YOU GUYS >:

[LordSappington]

With as high as you say you're going to get, you're probably going to fuck SOME guys

[pac-man]

Jesus... they need to hurry up and start this fucking thing.

[LordSappington]

I REALLY want to beat down some headcrabs.

[executioneer]

thumbs down @ this thread

[Girl Drink Drunk]

Concerns have been raised regarding the safety of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the grounds that high-energy particle collisions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_accelerator) performed in the LHC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LHC) might produce dangerous phenomena, including micro black holes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_black_holes), strangelets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelets), vacuum bubbles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_bubble) and magnetic monopoles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_monopole).[16] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#cite_note-NYT_080621-15)[17] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#cite_note-SNBC2008.2F03.2F27-16)[18] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#cite_note-17) In response to these concerns, the LHC Safety Study Group, a group of independent scientists, performed a safety analysis of the LHC and concluded in a report published in 2003 that there is "no basis for any conceivable threat".[19] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#cite_note-2003SafetyReport-18) In 2008, drawing from new experimental data and theoretical understanding, the LHC Safety Assessment Group (LSAG) published a report updating the 2003 safety review, in which they reaffirmed and extended its conclusions that LHC particle collisions present no danger.[20] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#cite_note-SummarySafety-19)[21] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#cite_note-LSAGreport-20)[22] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#cite_note-LSAGreportStrangelets-21)[23] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#cite_note-GMreport-22) The LSAG report was reviewed and endorsed by CERN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN)’s Scientific Policy Committee (SPC),[24] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#cite_note-SPCreport2008-23) a group of external scientists that advises CERN’s governing body, its Council.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider

[Tadao]

Yes indeed, nothing could possibly go wrong if we collide particles together.

[MetalMilitia]

Particles naturally collide hundreds of millions of times a day in our atmosphere and with energies that dwarf the LHC by comparison. So unless the world has already ended and I didn't get the memo, I'd say we're going to be just fine.

[Tadao]

I have already stated that nothing could possibly go wrong. Take me off ignore.

[Cedar]

it's happening until october

[pac-man]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4f/Egon_GB1.jpg/250px-Egon_GB1.jpg
Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.

[Guitar Woman]

MORE LIKE LARGE HARDON COLLIDER

[Guitar Woman]

Also, CERTAIN PEOPLE claim that this is a scientist working on the project currently.

I have a hard time believing this but what an uncanny resemblance!
http://img115.imageshack.us/img115/7549/1196972172603wq6.jpg

[LordSappington]

Particles naturally collide hundreds of millions of times a day in our atmosphere and with energies that dwarf the LHC by comparison. So unless the world has already ended and I didn't get the memo, I'd say we're going to be just fine.
THe difference is that those collisions happen after a huge amount of distance, plus passing through the atmosphere, which weakens the reaction a huge amount. We're making this reaction where little to no energy will be lost since it will have a relatively short distance to travel.

[Colonel Flagg]

Personally, I want them to create "strange matter" which is a theoretical particle with one "strange" quark as part of its makeup. Theorists suggest that matter of this ilk could potentially absorb other particles while not changing its "singular" nature. The more matter it absorbs in this fashion, the more stable it could become. It could be a major source of "free energy" or could potentially destroy the planet.

Carpe Diem!

[pac-man]

They need to hurry up and flip the switch on this thing. If there's a grizzly apocalypse around the corner, I'd like to know so I can get a head start on building a thunderdome.

[10,000 Volt Ghost]

They're doing this on a wednesday...in Europe. So it's a Tuesday for me. I don't even get to enjoy my day off if they blow the world up. :(

Going to have some fun on sunday then.

[Tadao]

It should be in 5 hours if that clock thing was correct last night.

[Babs]

so how much longer til the LHC is turned on? Website has been down for awhile.

[liquidstatik]

UH

[Tadao]

I KNOW

[executioneer]

they're only gonna start testing one section of it on the 9th they're not gonna even gonna do collisions until probably oct-nov :rolleyes YALL GOT SOME TIME I THINK

[pac-man]

Aw, hell naw, willie! I didn't buy a crowbar, a crate of canned beans, 40 gallons of water, and some road flares just to have 'em sit around till October.

[executioneer]

i think you should quit with the half-life references and start making out of this world/another world references since that game actually starts with an accident w/ a particle accelerator rather than some nebulous scanning device

[Guitar Woman]

Guys, if the world ends because of this you won't even feel it, stop being faggots.

[executioneer]

idk if they made a stable micro black hole the earth would prob. take a while to collapse into it

and that whole strangelet conversion thing might take a while too idk i'll leave that to the science dudes

[MarioRPG]

so how much longer til the LHC is turned on? Website has been down for awhile.

http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/Welcome.html

[Tadao]

Guys, if the world ends because of this you won't even feel it, stop being faggots.

ignorance is gay

[Guitar Woman]

I think the vacuum bubble one is my favorite.

The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has been considered. If a bubble of lower energy vacuum were nucleated, it would approach at nearly the speed of light and destroy the Earth instantaneously, without any forewarning. Thus, this vacuum metastability event is a theoretical doomsday event.

[pac-man]

i think you should quit with the half-life references and start making out of this world/another world references since that game actually starts with an accident w/ a particle accelerator rather than some nebulous scanning device

I bought the crowbar to open the beans :(

[Kitsa]

I wish someone would grow the balls to say they haven't the foggiest understanding of what those scientists are really doing, instead of playing armchair physicist. :/

[LordSappington]

Go play more Half Life. :pac

[Kitsa]

I don't need to, I was in enough butt-numbing lecture halls but you don't see me yapping my theories about the end of existence.

[LordSappington]

I mean, Half Life is a great game. Seriously.

[Kitsa]

I had to watch my ex play it for hours on end, I know.

[LordSappington]

Your ex sounds like a dick

[Kitsa]

He is. After the divorce about five different people sent me emails called "your wedding picture" and when I opened it, it was jabba and princess leia.

[MetalMilitia]

Jabba the hutt isn't actually male (or female) so they might've been insulting you not him. Did he look like Carrie Fisher at all?:/

[Kitsa]

If you saw an actual photo of him, you'd see where they were coming from. I won't post it here because the end of the relationship was ugly and involved much litigation and I don't feel like giving my lawyer more money right now.

[Guitar Woman]

The only thing I don't hate about the Half Life universe is Episode 2, and that's 5 minutes long.

Portal, too, if that counts, but same problem.

[Guitar Woman]

Also, I understand that they're hitting two things together really, really fast so they can see what happens, and there's a chance it'll blow up the entire universe. That's about it.

[Tadao]

I wish someone would grow the balls to say they haven't the foggiest understanding of what those scientists are really doing, instead of playing armchair physicist. :/

What will I do with my Recliner Degree then?

[Kitsa]

I was waiting for a Hawking joke, someone having him in a recliner with wheels,and no one did :(

[Colonel Flagg]

I wish someone would grow the balls to say they haven't the foggiest understanding of what those scientists are really doing, instead of playing armchair physicist. :/

I read your followup, and know you were speaking somewhat tongue in cheek, but will take the statement seriously for my response. :\

I majored in Physics in College, and one of my favorite subjects was Quantum Theory and subatomic physics. Sadly, I've forgotten much of what I once knew (early onset Alzheimer's) and I don't claim to be able to hold a night-light to Mr. Pace, let alone Professor Hawking. This being said, I will say that I'm enjoying the hysteria surrounding the great "on-turning" of the LHC. Truthfully, anything created within the huge torus will most likely have a maximum lifetime measured in microseconds, if not nanoseconds. This, by the way, is an eternity for a physicist, but is a pretty short timespan for the rest of us.

In any event, the particle physicists and theoreticians running experiments at the LHC will be learning a great deal about things that I used to understand, but now only am dimly aware. :(

[Kitsa]

Col. Flagg: you're exempt on the grounds of medical professionalism because I've been through the same curriculium, except mine was zoology.

[Tadao]

I haven't been following any of the hysteria, am I correct in assuming that the scientific community has no worries about this?

[pac-man]

I hold a degree and armchair physics, am a licensed backseat driver, and also play Monday morning quarterback.

[Colonel Flagg]

I haven't been following any of the hysteria, am I correct in assuming that the scientific community has no worries about this?

Yep.

[Colonel Flagg]

Col. Flagg: you're exempt on the grounds of medical professionalism because I've been through the same curriculium, except mine was zoology.

:lol

[Girl Drink Drunk]

I hold a degree and armchair physics, am a licensed backseat driver, and also play Monday morning quarterback.
:notfunny

[pac-man]

:notfunny

A man goes to the doctor and says, "Doc, I feel depressed. Life seems harsh and cruel." The doctor replies, "The treatment is simple. The great clown, Pagliacci, is in town tonight. You should go see him. It will pick you up." The man bursts into tears and tells the doctor, "But doctor, I am Pagliacci..."

[Kitsa]

If Pagliacci had been properly medicated, much savagery could have been avoided.

[Sethomas]

So a doctor tells his patient, "I have good news and bad news for you. I will give you the bad news first: you're going to die very slowly over the next two months before you meet a miserable and painful end." Totally aghast, the patient weakly mumbles out in a flicker of hope, "what GOOD news could there possibly be?" To that, the doctor pointed you a voluptuous young woman and said, "see that intern over there? We fuck twice a week."

Anyways, I've been talking A LOT about this subject with people in recent months because the LHC is something I've been excited about (in non-eschatalogical lights, honestly) since 2001 or so. I used to read Brian Greene-type lay introductions to HIGH PHYSICS, but I readily admit that I don't have the requisite PhD(s) to have a legitimate voice except in certain areas where I can take an aesthetic preference to something. For instance, I concede that most people with a better understanding of the material opt for the Copenhagen or Many-Worlds interpretations, but I still prefer to go more along the lines of any of the hidden variable theories.

To be honest, coming to a CLASSROOM understanding of Relativity Theory and brief academic forays into particle physics gives me a way to easily imagine a black hole being formed in a particle accelerator... but it's not really the same way that I tend to hear others talk about it. In short, I take the subject to reduce to the fact that any object accelerated to ultra-high speeds would eventually acquire such a density that its gravitational escape velocity would equal c, and technically from there it could be manipulated to act as a conventional black hole. What i see in the news talks more about black holes being formed from anomaly events resulting from specific collisions between separate particles.

In any case, the physics community at large is of the opinion that Hawking Radiation would thoroughly absolve any man-made black hole from the possibility of destroying the earth. I've honestly never liked the actual approach with which Hawking Radiation takes its foundation, but people more educated than I am are very convinced that it happens. Hence, the hilarious thing is that this puts the physics community in the awkward position of telling the world, "According to these equations, the odds of a black hole created in an accelerator destroying the Earth are on the scale of one in a billion trillion. Right now we're fairly sure that these equations are accurate."

[Colonel Flagg]

[...] this puts the physics community in the awkward position of telling the world, "According to these equations, the odds of a black hole created in an accelerator destroying the Earth are on the scale of one in a billion trillion. Right now we're fairly sure that these equations are accurate."

In my junior year of college, I attended a lecture given by Velojia Tokarevsky (sp?), who later went on to become the head of Nuclear Power Oversight in the (then) Soviet Union. This lecture, incidentally, occurred about 6 months after the accident at Three Mile Island. In it, he presented some factual data and some questionable assumptions (estimating the chance of a catastrophic nuclear accident to be equivalent to the earth being struck by a meteorite causing similar catastrophic damage), culminating in his final pronouncement that nuclear power was safe.

Of course, on his watch in the USSR, a little thing called Chernobyl happened.

The problem in making ridiculous estimates like "one in a billion trillion" is that no one thinks about what happens if that "one" actually hits - Poof. The gun goes off, and the cat is dead. Or in this case, the earth.

[LordSappington]

Admittedly HL2 EP2 and portal needed to be longer, but EP2 was easily my favorite. Except those damn hunters always made me their bitches. If you didn't kill them fast enough, about five MORE always showed up for me. :P

[Colonel Flagg]

Admittedly HL2 EP2 and portal needed to be longer, but EP2 was easily my favorite. Except those damn hunters always made me their bitches. If you didn't kill them fast enough, about five MORE always showed up for me. :P

:gaming perhaps?

[MetalMilitia]

Of course, on his watch in the USSR, a little thing called Chernobyl happened.

The problem in making ridiculous estimates like "one in a billion trillion" is that no one thinks about what happens if that "one" actually hits - Poof. The gun goes off, and the cat is dead. Or in this case, the earth.

Its' not really the same thing though as Chernobyl was a poorly built first generation nuclear power plant maintained by Ukrainian farm workers with no training.
His predictions may wall have been based on second generation power plants which were being built at the time of the Chernobyl disaster. These reactors are unable to sustain a reaction if problems occur and as such do have an extremely low possibility of failure.
The predictions being made about the LHC are being made by real scientists about a specific installation, and there is every reason to believe they're right.

[Colonel Flagg]

MM - Actually, he was interviewed about 10 years after Chernobyl, and was reminded about that very statement he made at the lecture. He responded that he was foolish and naive, and that if he knew then what he knows now he would not have given nuclear power justification. Apparently, he was not as impressed with the second generation design reactors.

And, by the way, he is a real scientist - a PhD in Nuclear Physics.

Medical doctors, Physicists, Chemists and Biologists are all scientists of one ilk or another, but many of them are regrettably lacking in the ability to correctly interpret statistics. It's a common problem in the sciences, and incidentally, one of my pet peeves.

[DevilWearsPrada]

Also, CERTAIN PEOPLE claim that this is a scientist working on the project currently.

I have a hard time believing this but what an uncanny resemblance!
http://img115.imageshack.us/img115/7549/1196972172603wq6.jpg

Push the sample into the resonance core.

[LordSappington]

Shutting down... attempting shutdown... it's not... it's not shutting down!

[10,000 Volt Ghost]

To put it into lehman's terms, a rap about the LHC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM

[Guitar Woman]

I hope he doesn't accept cheese on shopping carts from this man.
http://rockpapershotgun.com/images/sept07/gmanlovespegglelarge.jpg

[Guitar Woman]

http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/839/256fu4gbm2.jpg


FUCK

[DevilWearsPrada]

He's what you call an interdimensional contracter

[DuFresne]

Shit, maybe I should buy a crowbar :chatter

[Dixie]

I wish Gabby GaGa was here to tell us what she thinks.

[Tadao]

What? About how hot hell is?