3 ms·
I don't think that follows. The LHC is many, MANY orders of magnitude too weak to produce this kind of thing, but it can produce beams of many protons or, alter
by brazzy 13y ago
I don't think that follows. The LHC is many, MANY orders of magnitude too weak to produce this kind of thing, but it can produce beams of many protons or, alternatively lead nuclei. Thus, it could conceivably create entirely different effects.
- mattheww 13y agoActually, it does follow. If there are particles of the energy described in the original link, there are many more particles of lower energies also hitting the Earth's atmosphere, including energies accessible at the LHC. And none of these resulted in the Earth's destruction. The same logic applies to the argument that any black-holes or otherwise dangerous particles would simply zip by the Earth (stated in a sibling comment to yours). Particles of slightly lower momenta come in higher numbers, so these would produce the dangerous particle, but not retain enough momentum to escape. Since the Earth has not been destroyed, there are no particles produced at low enough energies for us to destroy ourselves.
- brazzy 13y agoIf I understand you correctly, your argument is based on the assumption that particle energies have some sort of continuous distribution. That's not necessarily true.
- mattheww 13y agoIt's based on the fact that particle energies follow a continuous distribution. See, for example: http://www2.astro.psu.edu/users/nnp/cr.html http://www2.astro.psu.edu/users/nnp/cr.html.