dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

ALICE is closely connected to CERN. ALICE, which stands for "A Large Ion Collider Experiment," is one of the major detector experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, located at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, operates the LHC and hosts ALICE along with other experiments like ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb.

ALICE is specifically designed to study heavy-ion collisions, such as those involving lead nuclei, to investigate the properties of quark-gluon plasma—a state of matter believed to have existed shortly after the Big Bang. The experiment relies on the LHC’s ability to accelerate and collide these ions at ultra-high energies, making it an integral part of CERN’s research program into the fundamental nature of matter and the universe.

It's claimed to bend space-time but not enough to noticeby "science"

What are they hiding there, I wonder?

Yes, large energies, like those produced in the collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) where ALICE operates, can theoretically distort space-time, but the effect is extraordinarily small and localized. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, energy and mass are interchangeable (via E=mc2E = mc^2E = mc^2

), and any concentration of energy or mass warps the fabric of space-time, creating what we perceive as gravity. The greater the energy density, the more significant the distortion.

In the LHC, particles like protons or lead ions are accelerated to speeds approaching the speed of light, reaching energies up to 13-14 TeV (teraelectronvolts) for proton collisions and even higher total energy in heavy-ion collisions (on the order of 1,150 TeV for lead-lead collisions in ALICE). When these particles collide, they concentrate an immense amount of energy into an incredibly tiny volume—smaller than the size of an atomic nucleus (about 10−1510^{-15}10^{-15}

meters, or a femtometer).

This energy density does distort space-time, but the scale is minuscule. To quantify it, the gravitational effect of such a collision can be estimated using the Schwarzschild radius, which describes the size of a black hole formed by a given mass or energy. For the energy in an LHC collision (e.g., 14 TeV, equivalent to about 2.5×10−202.5 times 10^{-20}2.5 times 10^{-20}

kg via E=mc2E = mc^2E = mc^2

), the Schwarzschild radius is on the order of 10−5410^{-54}10^{-54}

meters—far smaller than the Planck length (10−3510^{-35}10^{-35}

meters), the scale at which quantum gravity effects might become significant. This distortion is so tiny that it’s effectively undetectable with current technology and has no measurable impact beyond the collision point.

There’s also been speculation about microscopic black holes forming at the LHC, a idea tied to certain theories with extra dimensions (like string theory), where gravity might become stronger at very small scales. However, even if such black holes formed, they’d evaporate almost instantly via Hawking radiation due to their tiny mass, posing no risk and leaving negligible space-time distortion.

So, while the energies in ALICE and the LHC do technically distort space-time, the effect is so fleeting and small that it’s confined to the subatomic realm and doesn’t influence the larger universe in any practical way. The LHC’s purpose remains safely focused on probing particle physics, not bending the cosmos!