The chances of that happening are so low because:
1) The experiments simulates moments after the big-bang and not before,
2) The equipment utilized have been tested for safety over and over,
3)
The decays after collisions last for fractions of a second, actually billionths of a second. This is not enough time to cause any significant damage even though the temperatures inside the collider can reach up to millions of times hotter than the core of the Sun or any other star. Again this only affects a very tiny amount of space, invisible to bare eyes,
4) The experiments are done several hundreds of feet below ground-level, the spray of particles produced get absorbed by rocks and never really leave CERN,
5) The reactions produced are natural and other phenomena like the generation of heat energy by our Sun has similar mechanism and outcomes, yet we remain unharmed.
The possibility of a big-bang type of situation is not out of the realm of what can happen though. Scientist have always known that the Universe is continually expanding at an ever increasing rate (
which interestingly determines the progression of time). For that reason, it is probable that the cosmos will either tear itself apart and end up in a very cold and frozen state since everything will be isolated from each other (time will stop??).
Something else that can happen is the Universe collapsing, if for instance dark energy outweighs dark matter which could send us in the pre-big bang state. When this will happen has never been estimated correctly.
Martin.
On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 3:39 PM, Kinuthia Ngugi
<kinuthia.ngugi@gmail.com> wrote:
Such are the vagaries of high energy particle physics. Aside from this, there has been a big worry which is always downplayed: what if during the course of these experiments the physicists unwittingly create a Big Bang situation?....the universe as we know it goes up in a puff!
On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 2:58 PM, Martin Chiteri
<martin.chiteri@gmail.com> wrote:
That is true, excitement has always been up since the collisions went fully operational in 2008. The more seasoned Physicists are more skeptical of the initial results, until enough outcomes have been repeated. They refer the measurements as "sigma levels". I will not pretend to know what it means so I quote: "
A sigma level *IS NOT* only a measure of " *how likely we are right* " but *that there is an extremely low chance that random luck caused this result AND there is also an unknown and hard to quantify possibility that our theory is wrong and some other mechanism caused this result*."
Normally, let us say it takes about 10k - 15,000 repetitions from an experiment to conclude that what was observed agrees with theory and therefore qualifies as a formal Scientific discovery. For the LHC they take the number up to several billions to completely wipe out the element of doubt. In short, they want to make sure that the event is more likely to happen than someone retiring from employment or even dying from old age! :)
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