Large Hadron Collider restart, end of the world pushed back to mid-November
By Donald Melanson 
posted Jul 22nd 2009 4:14AM
posted Jul 22nd 2009 4:14AM
Still undecided about what to do with those precious few months before the biggest doomsday since Y2K? Then you're in luck, 'cause the much anticipated / feared restart of the Large Hadron Collider has now been delayed yet again, almost exactly a month after the last delay. This time it looks like a couple of vacuum leaks are the culprit, and CERN says that the collider is now unlikely to restart before mid-November, which just so happens to coincide with the peak of the Leonids meteor shower. Coincidence? Yes, yes it is.
i for one welcome our new meteor-caused black hole demon robot overlords... when they arive in november
I think it will be more like the cube from transformers
* puts on a tinfoil hat *
While large, detached hardons flow though 26 kilometers of underground tubing colliding with each other.
particle physics gives me a hadron...
I'm sure nothing bad will happen....
http://bayimg.com/image/gachiaacm.jpg
Has this thing actually ever been turned on? Or has it sat there getting delayed for the past two years?
@Makarian: Delayed, I think. After all, you can't have hadrons unless they're turned on.
@Argot
That picture is awesome!
yay...i have another few months to live..what shall i do......o..i know...ill be like the other perv and make another peephole video of erin andrews naked in her hotel room
*Tunes to coast to coast AM and waits for doomsayers to start ranting*
Something is so going to go wrong. A lot of problems were found even before the startup of that thing. What more during collision?
Art Bell, is that you?
i bet its gonna be pushed till December 21; 2012 ....
Matt,
those were my exact same thoughts.. they'll push it to 21-12-2012..
indeed
I am very sure ... that if it's ever pushed till December 2012, they can wait one more day and start on December 22. this way ... if anything happen on 21, no one can blame them.
I already mark my calender , and i will come back to this post on December 22, 2012.
"if anything happen on 21, no one can blame them."
If anything happens on the 21, there will be no one left to blame them.
why even start this thing if it has the potential to start a black hole and tear everyone and everything to pieces,fuck learning anything about the universe i like my life
the first nuclear tests had the same chance... let it go
The first nukes could'a blown up the whole world's atmosphere if i remember correctly...
For a laugh.
Because there are thousands of naturally-occurring reactions of the exact same sort going on around us all the time. The problem is that we can't predict where and when, so we can't observe them. The LHC isn't doing something new, it's simply doing something in a controlled environment so that the event can be observed.
Because it won't make a black hole and it wont rip apart the universe any moreso than the other hadrons colliding in the earth's atmosphere as we speak.
We should be worried about the french.. they are the ones with the anti matter.
I'd say 'because it will teach us a lot and we might understand the universe and matter and time', but that's old thinking from when science was science and that's no longer a motivator, it's all about what you want to believe now in 'science', and you can twist reality and add imaginary stuff to it for convenience, truthiness not truth.
I've seen plenty of hardons colliding in my day.
Listen, we're all gonna die someday. Quite frankly, getting sucked into a singularity would be freaking awesome!
Not that its going to happen. It's not. Probably a greater chance of a black hole whizzing through this solar system and eating the sun.
Dr. Mckay is never wrong.
OH NOES!
before this post, i've forgotten it existed....
just switch it on dangit.... the hell with vacuum leaks....
if it's as dangerous as people made it out to be, our alien overlords (now observing us from the galactic flagship Nibiru) would've stopped us already...
but we knew that they didnthave the potental to destroy ... pretty much the universe
either
1) its already up and running for over a year now
or
2) its a hoax and the thing doesn't even exist.
Or it's just not ready yet?
We're doomed... Eventually.
Hmmm, I'll have to postpone my plan to break into the LHC, steal some 'God particle' Antimatter, assassinate the pope and then have a game of wits with Tom Hanks as he tries to stop me from blowing up Vatican City.
Maybe in the downtime I'll just write a book about my plan instead. They could make a really dull movie about it.
looooool yh! arrest dan brown lool
Probably just going over security so no Illuminati get through
We'll be fine. If we do create a black hole the amount of energy produced in one of the LHC's collisions would create one with about the same gravitational pull of an orange - not enough to suck any appreciable matter towards it!
yeah , but blackholes grow , dont they?
@sinjinn - black holes grow if they are able to swallow matter in excess of the energy they radiate. The same field of study that tells us the black holes will be created, also tells us that small black holes dissipate extremely quickly, long before they are able to attract any nearby matter (and it is not nearby at all, relative to their size).
Look at that little fire extinguisher! Like that'll dowse an epic nuclear explosion.
Got to love health and safety stuff!
Like the requirement to have "Warning, this water may be hot" just above the HOT TAP in toilets!!
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can achieve an energy that no other particle accelerators have reached before, but Nature routinely produces higher energies in cosmic-ray collisions. Whatever the LHC will do, Nature has already done many times over during the lifetime of the Earth and other astronomical bodies.
And the thing about black holes:
Nature forms black holes when certain stars, much larger than our Sun, collapse on themselves at the end of their lives. They concentrate a very large amount of matter in a very small space. Speculations about microscopic black holes at the LHC refer to particles produced in the collisions of pairs of protons, each of which has an energy comparable to that of a mosquito in flight. Astronomical black holes are much heavier than anything that could be produced at the LHC.
According to the well-established properties of gravity, described by Einstein’s relativity, it is impossible for microscopic black holes to be produced at the LHC. There are, however, some speculative theories that predict the production of such particles at the LHC. All these theories predict that these particles would disintegrate immediately. Black holes, therefore, would have no time to start accreting matter and to cause macroscopic effects.
and theories are never wrong.
I hope you realize there is a difference between a scientific theory and the way people use theory in ever day life.
I hope Apple bring out a new product before then.
What in the world did it gave you the impression we were even remotely interested in facts?
Did I mention how great engadget's comment system is?
if it does get pushed back to 2012 i think alarm bells of everyone in the world should be ringing and we should all march down there and stop it,i also heard the cern main computer is nicked named skynet....
That picture indeed is reminiscent of a large hardon.
I'd have said it was average sized
I dont know why you guys keep perpetuating the 'end of the world' but, joke or not...
Its bad press for a good cause
Cue Patrick Stewart epic speech...
But "seriously", I think it's like monkeys playing with a grenade or something.
You mean this one?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg_cwI1Xj4M
Hail to the Freeman...
Yep we're boned.
This is just another conspiration theory...
Everyone knows that the end of the world is December the 21st 2012...
Oh great, my birthday is in November!!!
So is your death day.
It started up briefly last year, but just circulated beams ( no collisions). That's when the problems that are delaying it now showed up.
WE ARE ALL GOING DO DIE! hahaha XD
I, for one, welcome our temporary headcrab overlords. And after them, Our Benefactors.
Touché
I may be alone here, but the jokes about robots taking over the world and the LHC destroying the world are getting very tired.
Well, I'm sure the robotic overlords will outlaw such jokes, plus the world won't be there for much longer anyway so sit tight.
Why are people worried about this thing? Look at the picture -- they've got a fire extinguisher right there just in case anything goes wrong!
Its ok! John Conner and Arni will save us all!
http://www.scene-stealers.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/2003_terminator_3_rise_of_the_machines_008.jpg
this thing IS the recession
That's right, it wasn't bush's stupidity and greed and capitalism failing, no it was scientific international research.
What's your site again so we can keep informed?
On the other hand, if it does create a black hole then we'd have spend a few billion into a self-collapsing disaster, and that is similar to the recession aright :]
Sorry I was so snippy anyway, there was no need,f(or me to take things so serious).
Ugh, must be a real pain in the ass working with LHC; 17 miles long and a 1 inch cut or leak can screw the entire thing up. >.
I for one think it is about time that we stop with the Earth ending black holes BS. The LHC will not end the earth and any black holes created will last an extremely small fraction of a second.
It won't end the world but it'll end our freedom...
HURR HURR END OF TEH WURLD. Give it a rest.
hard on collider? i just met her
Does it really matter if it's the LHC, a super volcano, or a large impact event? We are all going sooner or later. Isn't it better if choose our own exit strategy?
Le CERN FAIL
Don't worry the world WON'T end, but we will be enslaved by the combine... but on the bright side most of them are robots and cyborgs so Engadget's predictions of a Robopocalypse will be true!
yay!
This may be a dumb question, but when did Neil Peart predict the end of the world? I missed that. Reading his books would make you think he wouldn't put much credence in prognostication. Seems like a generally positive man.