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I always thought that the LHC "nightmare scenario" referred to accidential creation of a black hole... Well, looks like different people have different ideas of
by tomp 10y ago
I always thought that the LHC "nightmare scenario" referred to accidential creation of a black hole... Well, looks like different people have different ideas of what a "catastrophe" means :)
- ansible 10y agoYah, that's what I thought when I saw the title. It was quite an interesting article. There is so much distaste for the standard model out there (from me too, I suppose). There's got to be a better explanation... but maybe there isn't.
- superswordfish 10y agoClickbait is clickbait.
- archgoon 10y agoThis isn't clickbait. Do you see any ads on this page? This is an accurate characterization of the worst outcome (that doesn't involve space aliens) that scientists were worried about when the LHC launched.
- Johnny555 10y agoI do - that "Support my writing" box in the corner with a Paypal link.
- csydas 10y agoWell, more so, they have a pretty clear definition of what they mean by "nightmare scenario"; it would have nice to have their claim much earlier in the article followed by the rest of the history, but I really wouldn't call it clickbait. But I can really see why it's considered a "nightmare" given what the article is suggesting. Like, clickbait is shitty, but this case really isn't. It is eyecatching though.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mcbits 10y agoI'd say "see what happens next!" is clickbait even if the page has no ads and actually does show what happens next. When "nightmare scenario" turns out to mean "not much has happened", that's at least borderline clickbait. But at least the article was substantive. I don't think people would hate sensational headlines so much if the content lived up to expectations.
- csydas 10y agoI do understand what you're saying, in that overt eye-catching and curiosity tweaking headlines that are intentionally misleading are bad and certainly clickbait. In this instance, however, I think it's more of a question of there being a big question as to "what is the nightmare scenario"; each part of the article is relevant to this question, explaining the state of the particle physics and the build up towards the apparent disappointment with the results from the LHC research. Nightmare scenario is being fairly specific here; it's not really in the same field as "See what happens next" or "You won't believe what happens" in my mind since those have no substance or real connection to their content. This article headline is very attention grabbing, since we're not sure what the LHC Nightmare Scenario is. However, the article substantiates the title. It provides the author's reasons specifically why the current status of LHC research is in a nightmare scenario. The title is provocative, yes, but I feel that conflating provocative with "Clickbait" is disingenuous. Some of the most famous headlines in history have arguably been clickbait by that metric, yet they're not held to the same scrutiny.
- mynewtb 10y agoClickbait does have to have ads, it's the sensationalism as incentive to click.
- beezle 10y agoBee's blog is about as far from clickbait as you can get,
- TeMPOraL 10y agoIt isn't really clickbait, though it sure feels like one. There's a clear definition of LHC "nightmare scenario" in the article, and it apparently wasn't made up for the article itself. I agree with 'csydas though, it would be better if the meaning of that term was explained earlier in the text - but maybe the regular audience of this blog already know what it means.
- whamlastxmas 10y agoI personally sort of assumed it wasn't a black hole since I was still alive and existing to read the headline.
- Ma8ee 10y agoI think most people that has followed particle physics for the last few years had a quite good idea already from the headline what the post would be about.
- fsloth 10y agoNo, it's not clicbait. This is an accurate description of the current scenario from the point of view of her discipline. Although, I suppose it's not that obvious if one is not familiar with physics.
- mmmBacon 10y agoIn the context of physics this is not clickbait. It is an actual nightmare for physics because they have spent years and billions building this extremely complex machine. The fact that they are not seeing new physics means that they did all this work to verify the existence of a single particle. Beyond that they are not discovering anything new. It's a nightmare because it tells you that even if you build a bigger more powerful machine you may not see anything new. If you aren't going to see anything new, you can't justify building it. Also the machine required to see new physics might have to be so large that it's not practical to build. It means the end of the road for this kind of particle physics. It also means that theoretically we've been at a dead end for a long time.
- zackya89 10y agowhat is clickbait, is the comment section where people only read the headline, and think of black hole as the nightmare scenario. Just read through the blogpost, must be one of the rare ones, as the commenter above me as well explained so eloquently this is nightmare scenario, there is no new guidance and particle physicists are not going in other directions they still waiting to see some sort of super symmetry or some kind of evidence of string theory, the field is lacking new ideas.
- tlrobinson 10y agoI was going to write this exact comment, but then I realized if that "nightmare scenario" came true I probably wouldn't be here to write the comment...
- adrianN 10y agoIt would take a long time for a tiny black hole to feed enough to be a problem.
- dlss 10y agoI looked this up, and according to the most entertaining source I found (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nHBGFKLHZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nHBGFKLHZQ) the result of a tiny blackhole would basically be a gigantic nuclear explosion (it would evaporate rather than continue forming) -- so a big problem immediately, but not one that would prevent me from reading about it here in the US.
- aardvark179 10y agoYes, if physics behave accordingly the way we expect it would evaporate almost immediately, but it would be a tiny explosion because they'd only be a tiny amount of energy there in the first place. The more fun version would be where black holes do not evaporate, at which point it will still be a very long time before it's a problem, we need to worry about Andromeda crashing into our galaxy and the sun becoming a red giant first.
- foobarian 10y agoThat kind of timescale often makes me wonder, how do we know there aren't millions of tiny black holes all throughout the planet slowly growing?
- ferrari8608 10y agoWe don't, but I haven't seen any around.
- protomyth 10y agoI would imagine that some people believe being "lost" is a greater catastrophe than being dead. Personally, I'm in the it's all good unless you create a black hole, explosion, or gateway to someplace we don't want to visit or want visitors from.
- manarth 10y agoAs long as we've got Gordon Freeman and a crowbar, we're all good.
- protomyth 10y agoI sometimes wonder if modern SciFi and games have actually kept up with the lessons they have already added to the collective culture over the years. If CERN suddenly had velociraptors pouring out of some gate they created, what would the real world reaction be? I'm betting it wouldn't be blind panic. I get the feeling the Swiss could handle it themselves.
- mcguire 10y ago"Oh, lord, not Scenario 12c(a)! And on the Friday before a 3-day weekend!"
- afarrell 10y agoa black hole created from component of the LHC wreak all the of the havoc caused by the gravitational force of something with the mass of of....a rather large piece of lab equipment.
- Dylan16807 10y agoThe scenario at hand is the particles colliding into a black hole, not spontaneous conversion of the equipment. A black hole with the mass of a big chunk of equipment would be enormously deadly. Ten megatons per pound, assuming it evaporates. Most of the planet collapsing into it if it doesn't.
- Dylan16807 10y agoThere are more energetic particles hitting the atmosphere, so that's not a nightmare that ever really made sense.
- danielmorozoff 10y agoI think this was meant to be ironic.
- dhimes 10y agoI always considered it to be if the LHC made a new super-stable state of matter and everything falls into a new ground state. Yikes!
- yk 10y agoNo one in the physics community did take the creation of a black hole serious not even as a nightmare scenario. (First you have to create it, which requires large extra dimensions or a similar deformation of gravity at short scales, then it should not just evaporate immediately, which appears^1 to involve a breakdown of quantum field theories close to a black hole. Then there are additional arguments, but we already assumed that we do neither understand gravity nor quantum theory at the TeV scale, so all bets are off. We may as well assume that the LHC wakes Cthulhu.) By contrast, the nightmare scenario here is really the worst kind scenario under the assumption that we have a good idea about physics at the TeV scale. We do not learn anything, and even worse the LHC is the wrong machine. With a light Higgs and no additional particles, a slight upgrade to the LEP, the predecessor of the LHC, would have found the Higgs in 2005 and would be a much better machine to study it in detail. ^1 Hawking radiation (and its close relative Unruh radiation) are basically the only two effects which involve both gravity and quantum field theory anybody has any kind of believe in.
- zymhan 10y agoSo does this mean that maybe we made the right call not building the Super Conducting Super Collider? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
- T-A 10y agoNot necessarily. The (design) collision energy of the SSC was 40 TeV, about 3x the LHC's. So it is still conceivable that it could have found something genuinely new which is out of the LHC's reach. I guess Lisa Randall is getting really worried now [1]. [1] https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23840 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23840
- talideon 10y agoGood and useful work has come out of the LHC, enough to make it more than worthwhile. It's just that some of the big hopes don't seem to have panned out.