Loretta Schertz Keller: Science stretched to its extreme limits

You forgot 'idiot'. She's an artist and a freelance writer and an idiot. How much more EVIDENCE do people need before they own up to THE BIG SCAM, that is 'Global Warminig'? The fact that this 'artist' is still falling for the IDIOCY, that is AL GORE, leaves her with a credibility account of ZERO. Please, everybody stop and think for a moment. You want to change your lives, change EVERYTHING, on the word of AL GORE? Shouldn't you be getting a hole drilled in to your head, to alleviate the pressure, or something? This is Al Gore, we're talking about. The guy who didn't know who the busts were at Jeffersons' Monticello. They were Jefferson, Washington, and Benjamin Franklin. He knows NOTHING of the PAST, but he KNOWS what lies in our future? I'm sorry Loretta, but you've got to snap of it. Follow the money, Loretta. You lefty wimps like to use that phrase. Follow the money on this Global Ponzi Scheme. See where it leads you. And when you get there, say hi to Al Gore for me.

Loretta, please explain clearly to us why the same quantum mechanical rules that permit the formation of black holes in these collisions will not also result in Hawking Radiation, which is mandated by the same rules. All of these scenarios have been investigated long ago; see, e.g. http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-ph/pdf/9910/991...
You mislead your readers about Wagner's previous lawsuit. It was not just his lawsuit that failed, but all of his claims.

This is nothing new. Scientists have been using superconductors for experiments like this for decades. My one nitpick is her statement that the LHC 'can reach a speed over 99.9 percent of the speed of light'. Wrong! The LHC just sits there, it is the particles that are shot into thing that go whizzing around at very close to lightspeed. if scientists could build a huge object and move it at such high velocities, Star Trek would be a documentary, not science fiction. But then the whole tone of this article is fiction. Just like man-made global warming.

so let's say the worst happened...the absolute worst is that the earth vanishes as in a moment...pfft!

so what does that do to the delicate balance of orbits of the other planets around the sun?

does the vanishing of the earth into "someplace else" cause the entire universe to collapse in a chain-reaction of really big collisions starting from where we are now and spreading out to everywhere?

man! that would really be something to see but...where could you stand to...watch it!

the vanity of humanity is amazing! there is no possible way we can imagine how to "build" anything big enough or powerful enough to destroy ourselves because that particular kind of "destructive power" is meticulously reserved and guarded by God Himself. If the Big Gee weren't looking out for us, we would have popped our collective cork long, long before now. Believe it.

turn on the LHC! throw the big switch today! now is as good a time as any! kick the tires and light the fires! crank it up to full-blast and let the big dog eat!

while i'm glad this lady reported on what's happening, i think she is full of beans, along with gore and all the rest of the global-warming greenies. "Vanity, thy name is 'Enviornmentalism'"

Photon, proton, it's all the same to Loretta...what's in a name, right? This is no big deal, I already have a flashlight that puts out photons at almost the speed of light ('cause it's not in a vacuum) and it cost me only $9.99!

With articles like this it's no wonder that people can't understand science...

You mentioned "In layman's terms, massive bunches of subatomic particles called photons, which are a common form of hadrons". The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) uses the much heavier atomic particles called protons. Previous colliders used electrons which gave off photons (light) at high speeds, this braking by shedding energy as light caused the electrons to slow down. The use of protons in the LHC will not do this and will allow for collisions 6 times greater in energy than previous experiments.

Phil Plait at "Bad Astronomy Blog" basically covered how stupid these fears are (http://www.badastronomy.com/b ablog/2008/03/29/no-the-lhc-wo nt-destroy-the-earth/), but I'd just like to add that if the world burns, it won't be _science_ that lights the match.

Science needs to be totally unfettered - it's religion and politics that should be in chains.

Should these micro objects really be called Black Holes? Although they will be of Black Hole density they won't have enough stuff (mass) to have any gravity to speak of. And it's the massive gravity of true Black Holes that make them dangerous. The micro, highly dense objects won't have any dangerous pulling power and cannot get any. A better name for them would be micro Ultradense Objects, correct?

This article is painful. There seems to have been no research done at all by the author on her position. Arguement from fallacy is not an arguement.
A photon (light) is the carrier particle for electromagnetic radiation and is made up of no other constituent parts (as far as we know), and is certainly not a hadron, its a boson.
A proton is one of the fundamental building blocks of matter, made up of 3 quarks.
Now, A hadron is simply any strongly interacting COMPOSITE particle, meaning made up of lesser constituant parts, like quarks.
Now this has relevance since a proton (and a heavy lead ion) is also a hadron. Now i'll say this carefully and slowly:
Its called the Large HADRON Collider. They are not colliding flashlight beams.
And just to finish up, cosmic rays hit and cause reactions with the particles in our upper atmosphere on a continual basis. These reactions create events far more energetic that anything that will be produced at the LHC. If the world was going to end because of particle collisions it would already have happened.
I'm sorry if i'm being harsh, but this level of ignorance is simply unacceptable. There are too many excellent physics resources out there to simply let something like this pass. I suggest the author sticks to Art, since they cant seem to put in even a minimal amount of time to do the most basic research of a writing topic.

Uh, no, I was wrong before in post #8. The protons will have increased mass because they will be greatly accelerated by the LHC, and, as I should have recalled, the energy in the acceleration will be converted to mass according to Einstein's formula E=m(c squared). Hawking radiation, anyone?