Stephen Hawking Bets Against Large Hadron Collider’s Success
We know the LHC won’t end the world, but in an amusing note before its big switch-on tomorrow Stephen Hawking (he of the physics brain the size of a planet) has admitted he’s got a US$100 bet that the machine won’t succeed in one of its big goals: finding the very mysterious Higgs boson.
In a BBC radio interview he joked “I think it will be much more exciting if we don’t find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again” before admitting to his bet. If found, the Higgs particle, also dubbed the “God particle” would be crucial evidence supporting the standard model of particle physics, but it’s managed to remain elusive to date.
Hawking does think the LHC might find superpartner particles though (”supersymmetric partners” to particles we already know about) and that might be a key to string theory. Will he lose his cash? Only time will tell. Just remember, time is relative. [Physorg]
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
They haven’t actually started high energy collision tests yet, so… the black hole possibility is still there.
The guys behind LHC say nothing like that will happen and suggest that nature conducts similar experiments in the Earth’s atmosphere every day. However Dr Wagner is pretty sure that nature does not collide
two highly focused beams of particles with the energies seen only when the universe was born. See his web site here:
http://lhcdefense.org/
The second argument of CERN is that even if a microscopic black hole appears, it will quickly evaporate due to hawking radiation. However, hawking radiation is just a theory. Hawking changed his mind about
black holes once, and there’s not reason to think he’d get it right this time. There’s not reason to bet your life, the life of your children and the future of the planet based on a word of one quantum
physicist.
Even though the odds of the black hole appearing are not that high, did anyone ask you if you’re willing to trust a bunch of scientists with your life just so that they can test their theories?
I sure hope that the next time $6 bln dollars are spent by scientists it will be on finding cure for cancer and not the hypothetical higgs particle. Last time quantum physicists produced something useful
resulted in millions of people dead in Hirohima, Nagasaki and Chernobyl.
The first high power experiments will be conducted end of 2008 or early 2009, so there’s still time to stop this doomsday device.
I hope that anyone who cares about the future will take an action. Please suggest your ideas on how to do this (no violence, please). Will injunction help? For example:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080123210737AAn0nZV
I hope that if enough of us do that, we will be able to save our planet.
Keep drinking the kool aid Robbie….
really, robbie? i just spent all of 2 minutes online and in that time alone i give you a more accurate number for the “millions” killed by atomic technology at those three places – let’s go with closer to 300,000. you might have some found arguments, but don’t muddy them with faked numbers.
and are you seriously implying that we never should have meddled with nuclear science? if you think it gives us nothing but atomic bombs then PLEASE research a little, for your own sake.