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  1. #1041
    The Mizzle Fizzle of Nikkei's Haremizzle

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    Because you are sooooo far off base....

  2. #1042
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kilhart View Post
    Well, the thing is, as far as I've read, the perceived risk was 1 in 50 million of a global catastrophe, not of dissipating, harmless black holes. The scientists who came up with this number hopefully put some thought and calculation into it, so it should at least be put under consideration, no?
    Please define 'global catastrophe'.


    Edit: I think the odds of someone overdosing on Viagra and their massive engorged shlong pulling the moon out of orbit (and destroying us all) is higher than the LCH wiping out mankind. Let's call it 1:49,999,999.

  3. #1043
    The Mizzle Fizzle of Nikkei's Haremizzle

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    The funny thing about QM is that the words "never" and "chances are completely zero" are basically inapplicable in every way possible. Even with that in mind the probability of something like this happening is so very small that it's not ever worth mentioning or worth John Q. Public's time and worry. Leave the science to those that do and know it best; the scientists.

    Since we are talking purely about hypothetical scenarios that "could" potentially happen in the wonderful world of QM and purely about remote plausibilities, you do realize that there is a remote probability that all the air molecules in your room you are sitting in right now, can and will all of a sudden migrate and crossover and end up on the opposite half of the room that you are in atm, making it impossible for you to breathe and to reply to this post. You do realize that right?

    What have you done in regards to risk assessment and preventing this suffocation from happening? Yeah... the chances of a black hole, while not at ZERO, are about as likely and remote as that happening before you can type up a insufficient rebuttal to what I've just posted.

    F3@R ZEE @1R RAWRRRRRR

  4. #1044
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mizango View Post
    F3@R ZEE @1R RAWRRRRRR
    Are your children being exposed to Dihydrogen Monoxide? It's more likely than you think. Details at Eleven...

  5. #1045
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    Quote Originally Posted by Seraph View Post
    Are your children being exposed to Dihydrogen Monoxide? It's more likely than you think. Details at Eleven...
    lol

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    I wasn't able to find the actual documentation of what scientists meant by "global catastrophe" or how they arrived at 1 in 50 million, but in any case, what I have read gives me reason to at least search for more clarification on the subject. As an accounting major, I have no expertise on the subject, so I understand that people with more expertise will have a better understanding of it. At the same time, however, I'm trying to further my understanding of it through terms that I can understand. I choose to ask these questions through BG and not some other forum mostly because I like to limit the number of forums I browse regularly (right now it's two) and I'm at least somewhat familiar with these forums, giving me a general idea of the credibility/intellectual level of various posters.

  7. #1047
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    Quote Originally Posted by Woozie View Post
    My bad. I could have swore that's what you were arguing hidden variables in spam when we had our discussion about measurements and interpretations in QM. You even brought up Bohmian mechanics once.
    I said it's semi-Bohmian in interpretation, but I've since refined what I was trying to describe better, and see why it was confusing as shit to anyone not riding along in my head with me.

    It sounds to me like you're saying there are more variables in QM that affect the outcome of measurement, but these variables are hidden?
    I'm saying the outcome of the measurement itself, and the change in state it induces after the measurement is taken, affect the observed result. That the interaction along the direction of time need not be arbitrarily treated as if it is only towards one axis (i.e. future facing contributions are considered, but any other possibilities are ignored, preserving causal rules as we know them).


    You're saying that the reason we don't see them is not because they are hidden, but because they manifest in another dimension or something?
    No, I'm saying that we are only observing a portion of the entire state of the object in question, a narrow slice through time, which only gives a partial description of the full state after the experiment is performed.

    A and B being two entangled bodies which behave accordingly, observing A determines the state of B, and vice versa.

    With space representing the (<-, ->) axis, and time along the (^, v) axis.
    [-this is a spatial distance-]A[-this is a spatial distance-]B

    Non-locality implies that there is something unseen going on which causes effects to be transferred with null time coordinate change and positive spatial coordinate change. If it IS a transmission of some effect, it is clearly fast than light in nature, so it is described as being a state which is spread across a broader spatial distance than the observed physical interaction of the body.

    Yet this spread out state is unseen, you can't observe the portion in between the non-local interaction points as being changed in any way. So you just claim that the effected body is acting as though it is adjacent to the observed body, and include definitions of spatially extended probabilistic wave forms and whatnot.


    Is this the only way to explain the experimentally observed effects?

    State when entangled:
    AB

    State when observed:
    A [-space-] B

    So A and B are transported in some slower than light manner.

    AB
    |..\
    |....\
    |......\ ^
    |........\ Time
    |..........\ v
    |............\
    |..............\
    A [-space-] B

    Yet observing A changes the state of B before information could have crossed that distance.

    So you get a description where they're smeared out spatially in a sense

    Aaaaaa..bbbbbB

    It is also valid to describe it as being spread along the temporal axis though.

    AB
    a..b
    a....b
    a......b ^
    a........b Time
    a..........b v
    a............b
    a..............b
    A [-space-] B

    As long as the observation takes place within a period of time short enough that the states of A and B still overlap in the past, observing one will change the past states accordingly, changing the state of the partner at the time of the observation.


    Now, this could explain why it can be so difficult to maintain an entangled state for both massive objects (which would have a shorter period of interaction), and over long durations.

    Specifically those which place the observation long enough after the entanglement that the deepest point of interaction into the past no longer includes it. Then, "mysteriously", the entangled state decays.

    Do you think QM is an incomplete theory (what I'm asking is, do you think the measurement problems QM have arise out of the fact that there are more variables to consider than QM is capable of describing? Or do you believe that QM is as powerful as can be, and that these variables QM is missing out on are just beyond science [or at least beyond current QM]?)
    No, I think that we are just too massive to properly observe events as anything other than purely causal.

    In relation to a subatomic object, we are experiencing significant time dilation. This limits our interaction with the object in question to one narrow slice of it's full state.


    Well, technically you're right, but I can't imagine someone would be okay with a loss of causality in a situation where this can be avoided. From it philosophical standpoint, it's bad enough that I can't have both causality and locality, but if I'm going to choose one, I'm going to keep causality.
    That is why Einstein chose to subtly close off the option to have extended causal effects. When he set the Rate of Time Constant in GR, which relates to an objects motion through time, and thus determines the angle at which an object interacts with other objects temporally. He set it to equal 1 at infinite distance from a gravity well, subtly stating that the maximum rate at which an object can interact with time coincides with that object being massless. In this case the interaction is the maximum rate which can preserve causality.

    I know that he realized immediately that an object with a rate of time greater than 1 would interact with time across a broader angle. From a purely causal perspective, it would appear to interact with the causes and effects of events simultaneously.

    If R > 1 could occur at a non-zero mass, then objects at that scale and below would behave in a manner which violates causal rules.

    If R = 1 were set to occur at zero mass, then there could be no objects with R > 1, and no causal violations. Yay!


    After tidying that up, he set about showing that non-locality was also forbidden, but the EPR results proved you can't forbid both types of interactions.

    He knew that non-local interaction is trivially impossible in GR, and he knew that non-causal interaction is implied by GR if not limited artificially, so he limited it, and I presume he spent the rest of his life trying to ignore that possibility.


    What theory produced renormalization problems that are due to non-local effects? I'm not that far into field theory yet, but the normalization problems I've seen do not result from non-local effects of entangled wave functions, or any of the non-local effects used to describe any sort of wave function or the measure of it.
    It arises from trying to consider back reaction and self-interaction.

    If a body is spread spatially then you have to calculate both the interaction of the observed object, the interaction of the virtual states, the interaction of those interactions, and so on. These get more troublesome as you reduce the size of the object in question, and they offer no point where you should obviously stop calculating the interaction of the interactions and so forth.

    So you look at the observed mass of the body, work out a point where the interactions should obviously no longer matter, and cut them off beyond there, producing a renormalized calculation.

    You can also apply a cutoff to the smallest scales of the interactions, limiting the upper scale of the feedback runaways accordingly, producing an effective field theory.

    It works effectively, but to many it is unsatisfying, including one of my personal favorite physicists, Feynman.

    Quote Originally Posted by Richard Feynman
    The shell game that we play ... is technically called 'renormalization'. But no matter how clever the word, it is still what I would call a dippy process! Having to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is mathematically self-consistent. It's surprising that the theory still hasn't been proved self-consistent one way or the other by now; I suspect that renormalization is not mathematically legitimate.

  8. #1048
    Title: "HUBBLE GOTCHU!" (without the quotes, of course [and without "(without the quotes, of course)", of course], etc)
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kilhart View Post
    Well, the thing is, as far as I've read, the perceived risk was 1 in 50 million of a global catastrophe, not of dissipating, harmless black holes. The scientists who came up with this number hopefully put some thought and calculation into it, so it should at least be put under consideration, no?
    Chances are, the "scientist" that came up with this had a degree in journalism, not science. Until you can provide any form of documentation for us to review, we have no reason to assume this came from any credible source.

    The thing is, you can make almost any study say anything you want these days, and you can almost always find a scientist to back you up. I can probably find a way to calculate the odds of the moon crashing into us in the next three months to be 50% if I screw up the wording enough. And there's probably some scientist out there who believes it too.

    For this reason, seeing the original source is much more important than the statistic you've given. You cound someone who says "one in 50 million" but I've found someone who says we're just as likely to create dragons as black holes.

    A basic analysis if the science involved will show that the chances of a black hole/strange matter/all the other stuff is pretty much zero. Though the words "global catastrophe" is pretty vague. The LHC simply doesn't have enough energy to create a black hole, and the probability of suddenly producing that energy in a collision that is multiple orders of magnitude too low is certainly WAY less than 1 in 50 million. The probability of strange matter turning the world into grey goo is pretty much zero because if the strange matter hypothesis was even correct, virtually every neutron star in the sky would be a huge strange matter star, not a huge mass of degenerate neutrons. Every other world destruction scenario is even less likely ("yeah, that's right, less likely than zero!").

    As Miz pointed out, QM makes all kinds of scenarios possible. My entire body could spontaneously turn into energy, which would release the energy of 200 nuclear bombs according to the math I saw some guy on TV do once (I don't know the actual yeild of the average nuclear bomb, so I obviously couldn't check his calculation. His calculation assumed 100% conversion of matter to energy. Even if his math was wrong, my entire body turning into energy is certainly enough to wipe out an entire city in an instant). But this doesn't mean I should be quarantined or buried deep underground or anything.

    Our best science indicates that the LHC isn't a threat to us at all. Unless it creates dragons, then we're all gonna die D:

  9. #1049
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    Quote Originally Posted by Woozie View Post
    Our best science indicates that the LHC isn't a threat to us at all. Unless it creates dragons, then we're all gonna ride dragons to work and solve the global warming issue and the oil crisis at the same time.
    Fixed that for you, my good man. If you are gonna live fantasy, live it correctly.

  10. #1050
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kilhart View Post
    So... what stance do you guys hold in the most recent legal case against the LHC in regards to a violation of the right to life? I personally feel that it's worth discussing. The foreseen risk of a catastrophic event has been stated to be 1 in 50 million (on a related note, I'd be interested to read the documentation on how this number was reached), but if any of the scenarios does happen, over six billion lives will be lost and the human race will become extinct. 1 in 50 million is a very small probability, but when you consider what's at stake here and the fact that the vast majority of the world has no choice in the matter, I think it's far from negligible.

    On a related note, I understand there were similar concerns for the RHIC, but not nearly as strong. What was the perceived probability of the RHIC creating a doomsday scenario, and what makes the LHC alarm the general public much moreso than the RHIC, aside from higher energies/speeds? Does it cross a certain threshold where these risks become more apparent?
    Who evaluated this probability and how? It's virtually impossible to give such event a probability, since most theory are incomplete. I'm certain it's the result of an incomplete model that is used beyond its tested range (ie: newtonian physics above 3x10^9 m/s)

    Secondly, if you could blast a planet away with that kind of energy level, we would have noticed it in space by now. Unless we accidently discover a new source of energy (pretty much impossible for many reasons), it's not going to happen.


    Lastly, in the very unlikely (read it: not gonna happen) we push the universe self destruct button.... suck to be us. Maybe another race in another world will have more chance than us and live in a more stable universe.

  11. #1051
    Title: "HUBBLE GOTCHU!" (without the quotes, of course [and without "(without the quotes, of course)", of course], etc)
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    Quote Originally Posted by Seraph View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Woozie
    Our best science indicates that the LHC isn't a threat to us at all. Unless it creates dragons, then we're all gonna camp them for hours against 120 other people just to see others get the kill and all the loot while we sit around thinking about all the hours we've wasted
    Fixed that for you, my good man. If you are gonna live fantasy, live it correctly.
    Now THAT'S (apparently) the correct way to live in a fantasy world.

  12. #1052
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    We would need many orders of magnitude more energy in the collision to have a chance of destabilizing the vacuum, as I recall.

    I'm with Woozie on this, it's more likely to begin vomiting dragons than a world eating black hole, but what happened here is one guy said something about the black hole and that got passed on to another guy who calculated some odds of some event vaguely related to black holes of a certain mass, then that got passed to the journalist who turns it into 1 in 50 million chance that the LHC will destroy the world.

  13. #1053
    Title: "HUBBLE GOTCHU!" (without the quotes, of course [and without "(without the quotes, of course)", of course], etc)
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    Quote Originally Posted by Max™ View Post
    what happened here is one guy said something about the black hole and that got passed on to another guy who calculated some odds of some event vaguely related to black holes of a certain mass, then that got passed to the journalist who turns it into 1 in 50 million chance that the LHC will destroy the world.
    Exactly. Where's that science reporting pic Alleya posted?

    Edit: Here we go

    Quote Originally Posted by Alleya View Post
    I laughed, then I got depressed.

    http://zs1.smbc-comics.com/comics/20090830.gif

  14. #1054
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    Quote Originally Posted by Woozie View Post
    Now THAT'S (apparently) the correct way to live in a fantasy world.
    Whatever man. My ride gets 42.0 miles per sheep, highway.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Kaylia View Post
    Who evaluated this probability and how? It's virtually impossible to give such event a probability, since most theory are incomplete. I'm certain it's the result of an incomplete model that is used beyond its tested range (ie: newtonian physics above 3x10^9 m/s)
    Well, I tried finding the source through citations in Wiki, but the article cited comes up with "this article no longer exists" or something. I've seen "1 in 50 million" thrown around a lot in regards to the topic, but if it really is just a BS number, then my bad. D:

    I think the primary issue I've come across is the assertion by LHC critics that while the collisions created by the LHC happen on a regular basis when cosmic rays collide with the atmosphere or whatnot (apologies if I worded it incorrectly), the micro black holes created are moving at such a high velocity that they pass through the Earth without doing anything noticeable, while the ones that the LHC could potentially create would be trapped in the Earth's gravitational field. Is there any validity to this claim?

  16. #1056
    Title: "HUBBLE GOTCHU!" (without the quotes, of course [and without "(without the quotes, of course)", of course], etc)
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kilhart View Post
    Well, I tried finding the source through citations in Wiki, but the article cited comes up with "this article no longer exists" or something. I've seen "1 in 50 million" thrown around a lot in regards to the topic, but if it really is just a BS number, then my bad. D:

    I think the primary issue I've come across is the assertion by LHC critics that while the collisions created by the LHC happen on a regular basis when cosmic rays collide with the atmosphere or whatnot (apologies if I worded it incorrectly), the micro black holes created are moving at such a high velocity that they pass through the Earth without doing anything noticeable, while the ones that the LHC could potentially create would be trapped in the Earth's gravitational field. Is there any validity to this claim?
    If the LHC or cosmic rays were capable of creating black holes, then this would be a valid claim. A black hole created in a cosmic ray collision would go straight past or straight through the Earth, whereas one created in a laboratory could potentially stay (assuming it doesn't instantly evaporate, which it probably would if hawking was right about that).

    But since the LHC can't create black holes, there's really nothing to worry about.

  17. #1057
    The Mizzle Fizzle of Nikkei's Haremizzle

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    Quote Originally Posted by Kilhart View Post
    I think the primary issue I've come across is the assertion by LHC critics

    That's the problem right there. Fat 40 year old mid-wives becoming overnight Astrophysicists and protesting something they don't understand.

    That is the reality of it.

  18. #1058
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    Actually:

    According to the LSAG, even if micro black holes were produced by the LHC and were stable, they would be unable to accrete matter in a manner dangerous for the Earth. They would also have been produced by cosmic rays and have stopped in neutron stars and white dwarfs, and the stability of these astronomical bodies means that they cannot be dangerous
    According to wikipedia, although the Earth couldn't capture a black hole created by a cosmic ray collision, neutron stars and other bodies can. I never even thought of that.

    So either they aren't created, or they evaporate quickly, or they aren't dangerous. Otherwise, we wouldn't have neutrons stars or any other larges masses of dengerate matter since they would be dense enough to capture small black holes at high speeds.

  19. #1059
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    Hm.

  20. #1060
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    Nevermind the fact that such a (purely hypothetical) hole would be influenced by the gravity of the rest of the solar system, and probably fall into an orbit around the sun, not arbitrarily sit in a much smaller gravity well such as our planets.

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