Did anyone watch End Day on bbc three at 10:30?

"Based on scientific predictions, this drama documentary uses digital effects to imagine five apocalyptic scenarios that could spell the end of life as we know it."

/\That was the description on freeview guide/\

It's scary stuff! Especially the giant black hole in new york that sucked up planes and everything.

That sounds interesting, how did they explain a black hole appearing in NYC?

That really sounds like something the BBC should be wasting our money on.....

Why would a blackhole appear in New York???

Courtesy of BBC (http://eb.cx/1g):

Deep within the bowels of a particle accelerator on the East Coast of the US, an extraordinary experiment is being prepared. Scientists are pursuing their quest to understand the nature of matter itself. On the streets, the public holds a protest to stop their work...

Fact!

Scientists are experimenting with the very nature of reality itself; building ever larger and more powerful particle accelerators in what could turn out to be a game of total annihilation.

In a 600 million dollar laboratory, within a vast ring of magnets miles across, atoms can be made to travel at the speed of light then crashed to create particles that haven't existed since the Big Bang… and possibly some that have never existed at all.

Scientists accept that black holes can be created but these are small enough to evaporate before they can suck in all surrounding matter. They have also calculated the precise risk of another terrifying possibility: a phase change of space-time leading to the complete breakdown of the universe as we know it.

But most frightening of all is the creation of a group of strange quarks called ‘dangerous strangelets’. These are so dense they could burrow to the centre of the Earth, transforming everything they touch into anti-matter, condensing our planet into a tiny lifeless sphere.

They are experimenting right now...

Do you feel safe?

Fiction?

It's End Day and within a deep underground chamber physicists have briefly created exotic particles and space-time warps by violently smashing atoms.

But something unforeseen happens. ‘Strangelets’ appear. Suddenly, the normal laws of physics cease to apply. Reality warps and alters. Atoms are transformed into totally new forms of matter.

The singularity burrows into the Earth, twisting the atomic structure of the surrounding rcoks as it falls into the planet's centre.

A wave of total destruction expands outwards, consuming everything in its path. Life ends. The Earth vanishes...

The universe as we know it ceases to exist.

they've been using it to determine if pentaquarks (an arrangement of 5 quarks, which is what is inside each proton alongside gluons) exist.. which they've determined don't.

My thread about the consistancy of what the universe was like a few milliseconds after the big bang and it's making me wonder more and more if we are going to create the next big bang by accident and destroy our universe whilst setting off the creation of the next (now that would be an interesting scenario for those who believe in creationism... we are here because of a fuckup in the previous universe!)

That really sounds like something the BBC should be wasting our money on.....

Why would a blackhole appear in New York???


Just watch any Hollywood movie. All disasters occur in NYC, didn't you know that? :)

Or LA, Tokyo, Paris and Corby.

Or LA, Tokyo and Paris.

Hey, you forgot to say Corby :D

an arrangement of 5 quarks, which is what is inside each proton

I thought protons were made up of 3 quarks?

If a Black Hole appears, I think we'd be dead before we even knew it was there. Let alone some dramatic Day After Tomorrow NYC disaster scenario :laugh:

Why would a blackhole appear in New York???

because the keymaster met up with the gatekeeper? :|

I thought protons were made up of 3 quarks?
Indeed, as far as my A-Level Physics is concerned, a proton has two up quarks and one down quark- though there are rare occasions five can be grouped.

the scary thing is stranglets can happen. ok they say youre more likely to win the lottery three weeks in a row but still if you have a one a billion chance of blowing up the world do you do it? i watched it anyway, pretty cool stuff.

I'd think the fact we are still here in this 14,000,000,000 year old universe means it's pretty much not going to happen, unless we accept the immeasurabley small odds that there are no other advanced races further along in this research than us who haven't done it already. Though if everything in the universe is limited to the speed of light, then many may well have and the effects just haven't reached us yet :p

I thought protons were made up of 3 quarks?
I meant the quark is what is found inside of protons... not the grouping of 5 quarks which was thought to exist but has recently been dismissed

If a Black Hole appears, I think we'd be dead before we even knew it was there. Let alone some dramatic Day After Tomorrow NYC disaster scenario :laugh:

actually if you had a tiny little black hole created, the first place it would go is down - towards the core. Give it a few weeks looping round and round in its tiny little orbit inside the planet, eating an atom here and there, getting steadily bigger...

well, it'd take time. You'd be getting little earthquakes here and there, axial wobbles that would produce all kinds of weird weather effects - and then little tsunami. Then big earthquakes and huge tsunami.

Towards the end the earthquakes would be so big they'd be throwing bits of the crust into short sub-orbital trajectories, massive magma oceans, the whole planet crucnhing itself up into a little ball. Eventually all you'd have is a black hole with the mass of the earth, and the moon orbiting it serenely, like nothing happened.

jon, how do you know that those black holes you see arent formed by fucked up particle acceleration experiments?

the scary thing is stranglets can happen. ok they say youre more likely to win the lottery three weeks in a row

seeing as you're more likely to die from natural circumstances than win the lottery, that means your more likely to die three weeks in a row than one of these stranglets form. Come on guys, when's that going to happen?? Chill.

jon, how do you know that those black holes you see arent formed by fucked up particle acceleration experiments?
Good point :D

but londoner up north, thats misleading. you see one of these accidents will kill everyone on the planet so statistically its actually more dangerous. thats why we stand more chance of being killed my a meteor strike than a road accident, when it does happen 6 billion die as opposed to a couple of people.