Barb wrote:Gunbot wrote:If all goes well, we won't even know about it. We'll all be millions of pieces of star stuff again.
That's a comforting thought. Thanks.
Some of the opponents of this project say that it will take four years for us to notice problems created by this experiment. So how do they know it will take four years?
We have one of these colliders at Stanford University. I've talked with many scientists at Stanford about it. It's a very interesting thing, though I still do not fully understand the importance of conducting such experiments and what we will benefit from it. Like finding water on Mars, who the fuck cares, like it's not going to lower gas prices or reverse the aging process or anything.
But what they do in the colliders is, nothing can go the speed of light, cause as it approaches that speed, the friction of the object moving through space, causes it to heat up and then it expands in size. When that happens, the objects weight increases and more drag is placed on the larger object. The power source that is moving the object then can't keep the objects speed so the object slows back down. Once it slows down to a specific speed, it cools back down and returns to it's original size and weight.
So what they do at Stanford is they send two sets of particles down parallel tunnels and then at the end, the tunnels turn into one another and the combined speed of the particles colliding into one another is that of the speed of light. That's why they call it a collider. The one in the news now is different then the one at Stanford in the way that it's round, so they will send a set of particles in one direction and a separate set of particles in the opposite direction. Somewhere along the line, these two sets of particles will collide into one another, which the combined speed will be light speed or slightly above that.
It's all interesting to me, but again, I don't see what we will benefit from it. They say with the new information, new technology follows. We will see.
Posted: Wed Sep 10, 2008 11:46 pm