Hadron Collider

zer0 wrote

Thank you, choobus. It's one thing to be told you're wrong, another to be lead to the truth. I found this paper http://hires.physics.utah.edu/papers/physrev52-16.pdf and if you know some better ones I'd be interested. I will not continue to put my foot in my mouth any more than I already have. Suffice to say, I was wrong. Choob

It seems my explanation was less clear than I had thought it would be. My point wasn't to say "you are wrong, deal", but to say that the billions of years of Earth's existence have been more than sufficient to duplicate any collisions possible in the LHC. The confinement in the LHC's particle beams increases the odds of a direct collision occurring where it's measurable (i.e. in front of the detectors) rather than just anywhere. It doesn't increase the odds of the particle eventually striking something, which it was probably going to do anyway (just like a cosmic ray). There's no functional difference between the collisions occurring with cosmic rays and those occurring in the LHC, except for location and intensity (on which front the cosmic rays win, hands down).

Maybe this is why I'm not a physics teacher.