Welcome to the latest edition of replying to search queries – a special edition about yesterday’s launch of the LHC.

For those who don’t know yet: These search phrases, highlighted in grey, led people here, and I neither shortened nor extended them nor made them up, I just translated the German ones.

LHC function
Check the Wikipedia link above or the link tips at the end, you should find enough information and further links there.

lhc conspiracy theories
Don’t need them, there’s already much nonsense published and searched without them, see the next queries…

lhc end of the world
No. No matter how hard you might wish for it. On the other hand, given these hundreds of comments that piled up at the Astrodicticum Simplex (German) – the large number only caused by unnecessarily scared people, scared by the panic mongers among the media, who’d rather post the same questions over and over again and mostly refuse to read the article itself and/or think a little for themselves – that idea might actually be not that bad at all.

Nostradamus particle accelerator
Get real, Nostradamus, living in the 16th century, couldn’t know what that is. A lot of things can be (and unfortunately is being) interpreted into his gibberish, of course, but, first off, it’s sensible to assume such predictions of the future are impossible anyway – until it can be proven otherwise, but that never worked yet –, and secndly, such interpretations surprisingly only fit well in hindsight…

LHC what energies
Alright, a serious question in between: Each colliding proton has an energy of 7⋅10¹² eV (7 TeV), which means the total collision energy is 14 TeV – compared to the 10²⁰ eV during collisions of natural cosmic rays just a little fart. Written out:

         14,000,000,000,000 LHC
100,000,000,000,000,000,000 nature

However, these are just 2.24⋅10^–6 Joule (2.24 µJ) in the LHC. Clapping your hands probably releases more energy, just not in such a small space. (The energy needed to power the entire LHC is of course much higher – about 120 MW, estimated 800,000 MWh for 2009 –, since the colliding hadrons have to be accelerated and kept on their circular path in extremely cooled tubes, and this cooling costs a lot too.)

So why all that fear if the LHC experiments are just a weak and small copy – just under controlled conditions with collisions at known places with huge detectors built around them – of what is happening for billions of years everywhere in space, including that li’l solar system of ours?

lhc jesus christ
No, he certainly said nothing about the LHC, he even lived way before Nostradamus. But he’d probably say something like this:
(1) If someone collides one of your hadrons, throw to him the other also. (2) Those however who take great pains replying to all of your questions, honor them by actually reading what they are writing (3) and have written before, (4) for the irrational insistence on your preconceived opiníon long after its falsification is (5) not worthy of human intelligence.

anthroposophy lhc
The combinations these people come up with – this religious-occult mysticism system really got no place here. Or do you want to take a few Higgs particles – probably no scientists will like the lurid, absurd designation “god particle” – and mix them into the anthroposopers’ homeopathic “medicine”?

Hmm… now how would that be if all this anthroposophy stuff including the advert for a medicine against cold that can currently be found on the schedule booklet of some(?) trains of the Deutsche Bahn1 disappeared in a black hole?

Now that would be something, an “intelligent” black hole that only swallowed that nonsense produced by those panic-mongering, conspiracy-theorizing, mystic dumbers of the masses!

(Yeah, just dreaming…)

Link tip:

• LHC info pages at the CERN, including a 60-page PDF brochure with lots of information and FAQs.

LHC photy by poluz (flickr)

1. found in EC 194 and 195 [↩]