I'm going to boycott Bill Maher's movie at a SUB-roots-roots level. In fact I'm going to boycott it at a cellular level. No wait, I'm going to boycott it a molecular level. Hold the presses, I'm going to boycott it at a QUARK level, motherfuckers!

In reply to this comment by EDD:
^ CONCERNING STRANGELETS:

First of all, strangelets are merely hypothetical type of matter. None have so far been observed or produced. We would see some corrution of Neutron stars more often if the stuff was actual and not theoretical. Lambda particles I think have happened, but they decay so fast it is not really a subject of much fear mongering

Secondly, the RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) in the US has been working for 8 years now and no strangelets have been produced there. In comparison, LHC collisions will have more energy, thus making it even less probable a strangelet might form (equivalent would be ice forming in boiling water). In addition, LHC quarks will be even more dilute than at RHIC.

Read this study on RHIC by MIT, Yale and Princeton physicists to find out more.


"It is believed that the higher energy of the lead-lead collisions of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), compared to the RHIC, will produce more strange quarks in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) than are produced at RHIC's QGP. This higher production of strange quarks might allow for production of a strangelet at the LHC, and searches are planned for such upon commencement of collisions at the LHC ALICE detector."

"Angelis et al., "Model of Centauro and strangelet production in heavy ion collisions", Phys. Atom. Nucl. 67:396-405 (2004) arXiv:nucl-th/0301003 "

I thought that was an interesting read on the subject. It's all theoretical though, so far, we haven't really seen the stuff at all.

Sorry for the long gap between posts, the hurricane messed with my normal routine.

^ CONCERNING STRANGELETS:

First of all, strangelets are merely hypothetical type of matter. None have so far been observed or produced.

Secondly, the RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) in the US has been working for 8 years now and no strangelets have been produced there. In comparison, LHC collisions will have more energy, thus making it even less probable a strangelet might form (equivalent would be ice forming in boiling water). In addition, LHC quarks will be even more dilute than at RHIC.

Read this study on RHIC by MIT, Yale and Princeton physicists to find out more.

>> ^EDD:
^ Those collisions planned at LHC have no - that's ZERO, NIL, NONE, NOUGHT, NADA, ZIP - risk of creating micro black holes unless one supplements the standard model of particle physics with several extensions that factor in the possibility of extra spatial dimensions which these micro black holes might originate from. And even then those very same extensions lead one to conclude that the decay on those mbhs due to Hawking radiation would have them existing (and not in a manner in which they can do ANY harm) for a matter of seconds at the outside.
So whoever made this video - DIAF. That's right - you should die in a freaking fire for attempting to induce mass hysteria based on your complete fucking ignorance.


Wasn't there also a fear of that strange matter (quark matter) in the form of Strangelets being created as well?

"Clearly this potential risk is based on speculative theories. But
these theories were constructed to explore real possibilities. The probability
that they are correct is not negligible."

R. Plaga a
aFranzstr. 40, D-53111 Bonn, Germany

Quantum black holes are in principle unstable, i.e. they evaporate because
no conserved quantum number forbids them to do so. However, it is well
known that their Hawking luminosity is strongly suppressed with respect to
semiclassical expectations for black-hole masses below the Planck mass in
4 space-time dimensions.

>> ^MINK:
what exactly is "smartness" ?
the way i see it, atheists do the same trick in reverse, they say "science is the way to understand the world, and science has no room for God, so... therefore... there is no God!!! I am smart now!"
Yes i know some atheists are not that retarded, but a lot are. If you say religion is incompatible with science, and then you try to use science to criticise religion, well... you're retarded.
The smart answer is to say "God is everything, therefore God is science, and atheism, and murder, and bombs, and flowers, and jealousy, and 9/11 conspiracy theories, and cheese sandwiches, and love, and DNA, and evolution, and the bit on a car engine that lets the fuel into the piston, etc ad INFINITUM"... then work on from there.


The field of science has nothing to do with religion. It has no such "goal" to disprove the existence of god and if there are atheists that claim such a thing, then they are definitely NOT scientists. Science is the very best tool we have of discovering the truth about the universe: from quarks to quasars. The UNINTENDED side effect is that such discoveries are inconvenient to religion's dogma. Note the word in caps.

History is filled with scientific advances of this kind. But let's not pretend that scientists' motivation is to "bring down" religion. You think men such as Galileo and Kepler worked out the orbital arrangement of the solar system to disprove god? They were looking for the truth, my dear boy. The insurmountable problem seems to be that religion cannot integrate these truths into their world. But then, religion does not need to. Faith is the natural enemy of truth, not the other way around. By that, I mean religion is the plaintiff and science is the defendant.

So let's all be clear: NOTHING will bring down religion. Note the word in caps.

I have problems with religion as created by man but with belief in God subjectively I have no problem with, it's really not my place to tell others what to believe.

I just don't like other religions telling me because I don't worship God or overtly praise him in some way am lesser of a being. I just think frankly God has better things on his mind then indulge himself in a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of an atom of an electron of a quark his creation.

Man's belief in relating to a higher God on their own plain is ridiculous I believe, mostly because that relationship has been used and abused to commit various acts of war.

But that is simply because the belief in God was the mechanism of power in the old days, I been told by God to kill all those who oppose him thus you should obey.

But I believe for most people Faith and belief in God is a way of forgiving yourself and your inability to control the situations in life, because it provides a very safe comforting answer to myriad complicated psychological questions. What is my purpose? What will happen in the future? Will everything be okay? Am I part of something more? Belief in God and possessing Faith that a greater being is watching over you is very comfortable in that sense.

That is not meant to say it's stupid or anything like that but simply to illustrate that belief and religion have a very important psychological soothing effect that explains it's hold over Humanity for so many years.

I don't believe religion will ever go away, it will only mutate into newer forms over time. Christianity, Islam, Judaism are just newer forms of older religions, of Pagan traditions that held sway before.

Come the 22nd Century I can fully see us worshiping Black Holes or something, because Faith and God are ultimately unknown figments of our imaginations, we create the image of what we think God will be or is or not. Simply because we are limited by how far we have evolved both physically, mentally, psychologically and the ideas we have so far about the framing of the world.

The Bible is fallible, not because it's made by God but because it's made by Man.

'Theories such as string theory and M-theory predict that physical space in general has in fact 10 and 11 dimensions, respectively. The extra dimensions are spacelike. We perceive only three spatial dimensions, and no physical experiments have confirmed the reality of additional dimensions. A possible explanation that has been suggested is that space is as it were "curled up" in the extra dimensions on a very small, subatomic scale, possibly at the quark/string level of scale or below.'
wiki

for instance the big bang had to have happened in another form of time or causality means it would never have happened. our universe has to exist in some framework, with gravity, time and our own few dimensions working the way that they do.

Benny Goodman = Elvis = The Beatles = Led Zepplin = Michael Jackson = Public Enemy = Nirvana = Radiohead = ????.............

woooooooaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh there horsey.. what!?

fans of each of these can adjust these comments because i'm not well versed in all but a few...
Benny Goodman, no idea - no comment
Elvis - more or less a crooner with elements of rock?
Beatles - guitar pop? and occasionally experimental
Led Zep - rock, experimental
Jackson - pop with attitude?
Public Enemey - who?
Nirvana - angsty grunge rock?
Radiohead - rock followed by completely experimental mixing styles and such

i don't want to get into some really really detailed shit here, because i'm not qualified for it... but surely calling those the same is a bit like saying all cars are exactly the same?

especially when you go directly from led zep to michael jackson.... double especially when you name pop and experimental stuff in the same sentence

i think that's mental

now go ahead and say "but they all follow the same chord progression timbre resonance factor!"... fair enough, but again that's like saying "every element in the periodic table is exactly the same because they are all made up of protons, neutrons and electrons" (do not start with me about string theory or quarks plz) - they have to be made up of the same things, just like a c sharp is the same as a b flat because they're both made up of compressions of air, and the only difference is how fast the compression occurs..

now if that's what you're saying - fair enough, you're right, but you need to get out more

otherwise please don't say they sound the same.. i'm not clinging to my generation, saying one is better than the other, more unique than the other... especially because i'm a fan of pink floyd and i'm far out of their generation.. but ....... dayum

Lamont Sanford - was guessed

Ficus Pandorata from Quark - did not guess

gluonium is self-evident. Its a strongly-interacting particle that has no valence quarks. It is composed entirely of gluons. Such a state is possible because gluons carry color charge and feel the strong force. It exists only in high energy particle collisions and it existed just after the big bang, before the universe condensed out of a quark gluon plasma and just before the epoch of baryogenesis at T+ .00000000000000000000000000000001 seconds.

keep in mind that this talk is about 3-4 years old. Since then, (in the last year) the mass of the Top quark has been constrained to within 1% and this has allowed an inferred upper limit estimate (with 95% confidence limit) of the Higgs mass to be 144 GeV or less. LEP searched to 114 GeV and the Tevatron can search up to something like 170 GeV. It would appear to be all down to luminosity of the collider now. Tevatron has collected 1 inverse femtobarn of collision data in the past year, that number should be brought up to 8 inverse femtobarns before the facility has to close in 2009. I think they can fand it before the LHC.

"don't forget the gluon!" What's really interesting is that the Tevatron may scoop the LHC in discovering the Higgs. Just 4 or 5 years ago the upper mass limit for the Higgs was around 240 GeV. Beyond the mass range the Tevatron can see. But since then, with ever finer measurement of the exact mass of the top quark (171 GeV) and the W boson (80.4 GeV) the newest upper mass limit for the Higgs (using electroweak interaction constraintns) has recently been brought down to 144 GeV! This is well within the range the Tevatron can examine. (The Higgs mass up to 114 GeV has already been ruled out.)