What are the actual risks involved with our current science on small particles?

if I'm correct on this Einstein was allready well aware of the potential misusage of his discoveries. And no doubt the same thing goes on in the heads of people who are working on current developments..

There always seem to be 2 sides to discoveries like this.. 1 side is the benifit it might have for mankind, as with the discovery of nuclear power, and the other side being the potential use for destruction.

I guess there will always be the danger of something powerfull ending up in the wrong hands.. since the wrong hands are very much tempted to use these powers, and lack the moral state of mind to choose otherwise.

It wouldn't surprise me if the plans exist already for applying the technology, wich is still under development now, to certain kinds of weaponry. I mean, seriously.. name the one country wich is claiming to have an energy shortage in a short while, and wich is financially entirely running on it's war-machine... what would the real motivation be for developing new ways of harnessing almost unlimited power...

First off... there is NOT a country out there that is running on it's war machine to any extent. The war industry is a net drain on every countrie's economy as wars of territorial gain are now a virtual death sentence because of the UN... If you are going to build an argument never build it on a false and skewed premise.

Corporations are the only entities that win when modern nations beat the war drum.

Secondly as to the actual point of this thread. Yes there are some risks involved in the experiments being currently conducted. But compared to the inevitable failing of our only planet that we inhabit they are worth that risk... If something were to go wrong and a particle accelerator were to mash one subatomic bit into another causing a serious serious reaction at least we'd all die quickly.

As opposed to the death of a thousand cuts our current technological level promises sooner rather than later than any theoretical accidental particle collision.

So in the risk versus gain column of the spreadsheet of life yes we are tempting fate but if we stay static our extinction is assured

I am not sure what any of Einstein's few discoveries could be used for, much less misused. Szilard on the other hand was well aware of the misuses of his ideas.

Military/Defense is one of the oldest businesses in the history of mankind. The Defense bussiness has always demanded a contingency of mathematicians, statiticians, physicist, engineers, chemist of all sorts.

As far as linear accelerators and atom smashers go, I don't think the risk are anything like what you had described. There are countless numbers of collisions between particles everday in space, fusion of nuclie or fission, yet nothing of the elaborate blackhole or wormhole is formed. It is hard enough to detect these anomolies, muchless prove beyond a certain point of their existence, and further muchless to know the mechanism of creating these anomolies.

As mentioned the chances of bad things happening are pretty remote.

I mean, if you create a super-tiny black hole, Hawking Radiation will mean that it will dissipate all mass before the hole can absorb any more mass. Also, the size of the event horizon for this massively tiny hole would be so small that other forces such as electromagnetism would have a totally and completely more important effect on nearby masses rather than just the pathetically weak force of gravity.

As I've also said before, radiation would also be produced in such tiny amounts that even super-deadly radiation would be in such a remote dose that it wouldn't/shouldn't affect anything.

The only thing we would have to worry about would be some way of creating some of these things en-masse or of much greater strength/size that our particle colliders are capable of. Such as anti-matter being produced en-masse into anti-matter bombs, which one the size of your person could destroy a small state.


The only thing we have to worry about is the "possibility" of a certain kind of quark - I can't remember which - that could in theory react with other matter and change it into more quarks like itself that would then essentially destroy the universe.

However, whether this quark can actually exist or not is in question, as is the effect it would have on other matter if it did exist.

In the end, I say go for it. Let's smash things up at ever higher energies and see what comes out!

In the end, I say go for it. Let's smash things up at ever higher energies and see what comes out!

Yes, but when we get beyond a certain energy level, we should start locating these experiments, say, outside our solar system. Just to be on the safe side.

Originally posted by Yarium

In the end, I say go for it. Let's smash things up at ever higher energies and see what comes out!

That really reminds me of Trinity the first Atomic bomb test. Some scientists at Los Alamos thought before hand there was a chance it might ignite the atmosphere or oceans in an unstoppable chain reaction.

But they tested that sucker anyway

arxiv.org...

Just on a side note, saw an article in the recent new scientist claiming to go down with the current model of a black hole, ill see if i can find a link to a related article(probably cant get it from new scientist online since its recently published), but its amount them just being dark stars with a sort of crystal layer on the surface with certain properties which stop the star from collapsing further, and it accounts for the fact that light stops(ie time apparently stops) on the surface of the black hole, which currently violates some part of quantum theory, but this new model resolves all problems AND also accounts for all the dark energy/ matter thought to be in the universe. sounds interesting

www.newscientist.com...

[edit on 27-3-2006 by quiksilver]

EDIT: Disregard this comment. Reacted before reading through, it's late

From the article.
Because information about the matter is lost forever, this conflicts with the laws of quantum mechanics, which state that information can never disappear from the universe.

www.newscientist.com...
www.newscientist.com...

If anyone is interested in the actual Paper, then I'll dig it up.

[edit on 27-3-2006 by sardion2000]

Originally posted by phiniks
well, okay... but many a non-scientiest, like me can see that some technolocal developments from the past are also potentially dangerous things.

Please remember that a lot of the speculation you see around is based on ...err... comic book/movie knowledge of the science and a lot of it is just dead wrong.

HOWEVER... to see what scientists are concerned about (and yes, they get hysterical about some things, including weaponry), check out the Union of Concerned Scientists: www.ucsusa.org...

This is a citizen-scientist cooperative, with lots to read AND programs to participate in.

There are other organizations out there (just google "concerned scientists" and any particular field or issue) where scientists are speaking out against something or for something. Sadly, there are some real whiffy organizations out there, too, with people who got their degrees over the internet and who call themselves scientists.

Look for: large organization, the members having MDs or PhDs and Masters' and for names that you can google (preferably on scholar.google.com). Stay away from organizations where the scientists (or pseudoscientists) are ranting on about something they don't have a degree in (as when people with a religion degree announce they're scientists and start ranting about physics or people with history or journalism degrees start holding forth on statistics. While it's not impossible that they'd know quite a bit about the situation, the organization itself should be full of people with degrees in that particular subject.)


(Yeah, I"m just a TAD biased, there, but I've seen how badly professionals in one discipline can misunderstand another. I had to sit through an uncomfortable lecture this weekend by a writer with many, many wonderful writing credits who was going on about how the Internet is in imminent danger of being taken down by truck bombs. It was very obvious he knew nothing about the structure of the net and knew nothing about computer science.)

Another thing you have to remember is that the Earth is being slammed by highly energetic cosmic rays all the time. These are way more powerful than any Earth-based particle accelerator. So we don;t have to worry about destroying ourselves just yet.