You are currently browsing comments. If you would like to return to the full story, you can read the full entry here: “Ask an Amateur Scientist – The Large Hadron Collider”.
Article by Brian Thompson
Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university and a regular blogger at CHUD. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years. 2 Comments
Leave a Reply
Additional comments powered byBackType
You can, however, spot the man on the moon flinching from time to time and asking the universe to “cut it out.”
Amateur Scientist, I love you. I just thought you should know that. Not sure how I feel about this whole thing (and I read a New York Times article about it the other day, too…). While I’m certainly not an alarmist by any stretch, I have to say that “destruction of the planet” counts as one of those things where I’m all if there’s a CHANCE of it happening, even if it’s a teeeeny one, we should probably take precautions.
I can see it now:
Scientific Community: We’re about to figure out how the universe works! YAY!
*flip switch*
*Earth goes WHOOSH into a black hole*
Me, as my atoms try to hold themselves together: Way to go, Science!
Thanks for the love, Teresa. I understand not wanting to even chance the complete destruction of the Earth. I’ve met people stuck by their own dried saliva to the slots at the Gold Spike in Vegas who wouldn’t want to take that bet. But even though there is a mathematical possibility that we’ll all turn into spaghetti as we’re circling an event horizon, that chance is about as infinitesimal as any other random quantum apocalypse. Very few things are statistically impossible, but there’s kind of a threshold of likelihood we must adhere to for the sake of our own sanity. And anyway, there will be a split second before the bitter end when we’re falling into the black hole and experience the past and future all at once. (Seriously.) That’s a pretty awesome way to go.