impossible questions

[sharky]

hi guys!

there are magazines out there with "crazy" questions. you buy then and have the answers for questions , wich are really really pointless. maybe we could save up some money by answering them by ourself.. here are some, if you have other just post! and if you know the answer too please!
continue with the numeration! it will help to gind teh question once you have found the answer!

1) Why do the boubbles (the one made by the childrens at the park) have all the colors?
2) Why is the sky blue?
3) why are the cluds black if there is a storm?
4) why is water cold (at room temperature) if you are into it and air not?
5) when it rains, why didnt the drops fall before? what kept them from falling?



bye

sharky

[sharky]

some more questions...

6) if a specific color of an object, means that only certain wavelenghts of the illumination are rejected, what would we see if we could see objects without the use of light?

7) if you see a plane in the sky, you can see the vapors where the plane flew.. why are those "vapor lines" sometimes longer sometimes shorter?

8) if you pee on a pülane, is it thrown out of the plane? if yes, does it freeze douring the fall?

[Elfihn]

1) Why do the boubbles (the one made by the childrens at the park) have all the colors? - Most Likely chemicals
2) Why is the sky blue? - Chemicals in the atmosphere
3) why are the cluds black if there is a storm? - I don't know
4) why is water cold (at room temperature) if you are into it and air not? - Warm air rises, Cold air falls. Cold air falls into the water.
5) when it rains, why didnt the drops fall before? what kept them from falling? - I really have no idea
6) if a specific color of an object, means that only certain wavelenghts of the illumination are rejected, what would we see if we could see objects without the use of light? - Yet again, no idea.
7) if you see a plane in the sky, you can see the vapors where the plane flew.. why are those "vapor lines" sometimes longer sometimes shorter? - No idea

[cybereality]

5) when it rains, why didnt the drops fall before? what kept them from falling?

Alright, you got me there. In fact, that doesn't make any sense. I can't believe no one has ever brought that up!

I've got one too:

8. What is real?

[Likay]

I've got one too:

8. What is real?

Define real.

[Freke1]

4. Because the water "sucks" the warmth out of Your skin much much better than air. It's called heat conduction. That's why they put wood on frying pans. Wood (like air) is a bad heat conductor so the heat doesn't move from the frying pan to Your fingers.

8. The Matrix is real just kidding.
Reality is tauth to us when we are kids I think. When the first western people came sailing to America and anchored up, the indians couldn't see the ships but they could see the waves from the ships. The medicinman kept staring out over the water, and after 2 days he could see the ships. He then told the rest of the indians what ships were and now they could all see the ships. True story. Your parents teach You what reality is and then there's no way back

[sharky]

great guys! post some other impossible question!

i have a new one..

9) tears contain salt, why doesnt it burn in your eyes when you cry?

[Likay]

Not an impossible sharky. The human body contains some amount and also needs salt for the osmosis to work. Therefore tears doesn't hurt your eyes. Neither do salty seawater (not mention dead sea here). On the other hand chlorified water makes the eyes hurts a bit.

For those who might be pessimistic sometimes, think about this: Everything goes!
Some things goes good, some things goes bad and some things don't go at all, but everything goes.

cheers.

[Sabre2552]

hi guys!

there are magazines out there with "crazy" questions. you buy then and have the answers for questions , wich are really really pointless. maybe we could save up some money by answering them by ourself.. here are some, if you have other just post! and if you know the answer too please!
continue with the numeration! it will help to gind teh question once you have found the answer!

1) Why do the boubbles (the one made by the childrens at the park) have all the colors?
2) Why is the sky blue?
3) why are the cluds black if there is a storm?
4) why is water cold (at room temperature) if you are into it and air not?
5) when it rains, why didnt the drops fall before? what kept them from falling?



bye

sharky

1 and 4 I don't know in enough detail to say for certain, but the others I know!

2) It's because of the uneven scattering of light in the atmosphere due to the gasses that compose it. The shorter wavelengths (bluish) are scattered much more than the longer wavelengths (redish), so the sky appears blue.

3) Clouds get darker as they get denser. The ones that are really dense are darker, which are the ones which are raining.

5) The water is not yet dense enough for gravity to have a greater effect on it. Once enough water vapor has accumulated, the water comes down as precipitation.

some more questions...

6) if a specific color of an object, means that only certain wavelenghts of the illumination are rejected, what would we see if we could see objects without the use of light?

7) if you see a plane in the sky, you can see the vapors where the plane flew.. why are those "vapor lines" sometimes longer sometimes shorter?

8) if you pee on a pülane, is it thrown out of the plane? if yes, does it freeze douring the fall?

Hmm... I'm not sure about 7, but I don't think that would be a scientific phenomenon, just something like changing motor speeds and the dispersing of gasses in the atmosphere.

6) You cannot "see" without light, so that question doesn't really make sense. There are other ways of locating objects in 3D space, but those are not "sight". For instance, SONAR perceives the location of objects through sound, but it does not actually see them. However, the data acquired is able to be formed into something that we can see.

8. The wastes are contained in a tank until the plane lands. Then it's pumped out and dealt with like any other waste would.

great guys! post some other impossible question!

i have a new one..

9) tears contain salt, why doesnt it burn in your eyes when you cry?

9) The tears don't have a high enough concentration of salt to burn your eyes. Although the salt there is perceivable through taste, it's not as concentrated as, say, opening your eyes while underwater in the ocean.

[nubie]

great guys! post some other impossible question!

i have a new one..

9) tears contain salt, why doesnt it burn in your eyes when you cry?

Interesting, yesterday it was hot and my eyes stung a lot when I put my head under the car. I thought it was my sweat getting in my eyes.

[sharky]

here are two new questions i got running trough my day..

1) why do dogs hate cats? (its in theyr dna is not a valid answer, and "because they stole the cookie" also isnt..)
2) if you drive your car you see trough the whindhield just normal.. if it is a bit dirty you see trough anyway. but as soon as you go nto the direct sunlight the windshield turns white and you cant see anything. why is this fenomena only affected by DIRECT sunlight and not by "reflected/surrounding" light?

[Neil]

Cats don't have owners, they have staff. Dogs are usually their staff. Nuff said.

I can't answer the second one.

Regards,
Neil

[sharky]

why dont dogs hate birds then?

[Welder]

1) My dogs always liked my cats Dogs hate anything that is smaller than they are if they dont know what it is.. Especially if it pesters them like cats do.

2) Maybe because it creates glare.

[Neil]

why dont dogs hate birds then?

Cats eat birds...common enemy.

Regards,
Neil

[sharky]

1) My dogs always liked my cats Dogs hate anything that is smaller than they are if they dont know what it is.. Especially if it pesters them like cats do.

2) Maybe because it creates glare.

1) because they most likely grew up with each other.. else the doggy would "play" with the Kitty..

2) hm.. not too convinced.. because if it not affected by the angle of the light.. just the fact that it is direct light is what makes the effect..

[cybereality]

Is Schrödinger's cat alive or dead?

[Welder]

1) My dogs always liked my cats Dogs hate anything that is smaller than they are if they dont know what it is.. Especially if it pesters them like cats do.

2) Maybe because it creates glare.

1) because they most likely grew up with each other.. else the doggy would "play" with the Kitty..

2) hm.. not too convinced.. because if it not affected by the angle of the light.. just the fact that it is direct light is what makes the effect..

Yes, but if you take a prism and put it in direct sunlight, is it not affected more strongly if its in direct sunlight?

[fReAq]

In pursuit of the answer to 'what is real', here is an interesting question:

What is zero multiplied by infinity?

[sharky]

that is 0.

because if you take any number 0 times it still is 0.. its like saying you have nothing of everything.. that still is nothing

[CarlKenner]

1) please say that again in English this time.

2) The sky isn't blue, it is YELLOW. I'm serious. The sky is like a transparent yellow filter. Our sun is WHITE if you look at it from the moon, or a spaceship, or the hubble telescope. (Of course looking at the sun is a bad idea unless you want to go blind.) The sun looks yellow from Earth because the sky is yellow. If you are wondering why the stars and moon don't look yellow, it is because the colour sensors in your eyes only work on bright light, so dark objects always look completely grey unless they are very strongly coloured. But if you could see colours better in the dark, they would look like they are seen through a yellow filter.

Unlike other yellow filters, the blue light isn't absorbed and converted to heat. Instead the blue light is scattered randomly in every direction. It then hits another bit of sky and is scattered again, and again, and again. Some of it will go back out into space, but some of the light scattered by that bit of sky will go back to your eye. So that bit of sky looks blue. But it is actually the blue part of the white sun disk that has been spread all over the sky, while the red and green parts of the white sun disk go straight through to your eyes and thus look yellow where the sun is.

The scattering of blue (and a bit of green and violet which together add a bit of white to the blue sky colour) is called Rayleigh scattering and is caused by the small size of air molecules compared to the wavelength of light.

[fReAq]

Since we are all in favour of an extra dimension in our gameplay, hows about a little respect for the void that creates these dimensions too?

You see
zero x infinity = 1

These three create the whole thing!

(proof being that x / 0 = infinity, mult both sides by 0)

[CarlKenner]

3) All clouds are made out of water, but rain clouds have a lot more water in them. They are much denser and much thicker, so they absorb a lot more of the light.

4) There are two possible reasons. In a room some things start out hotter than others, but eventually heat will move from hotter objects to colder objects until everything is the same temperature. Once everything is the same temperature, heat stops moving. But some chemicals can suck in a lot more heat energy from other objects before they rise in temperature themselves. H2O is one of those chemicals. It takes a LOT of energy to make water rise in temperature 1 degree. So the hot object touching the water might have to go down 3 degrees to make the water go up 1 degree. They still stop when they reach the same temperature however. But it means water heats up a lot slower than everything else in the room. So one reason is that perhaps the water hasn't had enough time to heat up yet, so it is actually colder.

The other, more likely reason is that it is actually the same temperature, but FEELS colder. The human body is 37 degrees (sorry I don't speak crazy American units). Which is a lot hotter than room temperature. Things feel cold when you touch them, because some of the heat goes from your body to that object. The more molecules of that object that are in contact with your body, the more heat will leave your body and go into that object. So a dense liquid which is in constant contact with your body will suck out a lot more heat from your body than a gas, even if they are the same temperature. And water sucks heat better than other liquids.


If the water is actually at a lower temperature, it is because water can absorb massive amounts of energy before i

[sharky]

1) please say that again in English this time.

2) The sky isn't blue, it is YELLOW. I'm serious. The sky is like a transparent yellow filter. Our sun is WHITE if you look at it from the moon, or a spaceship, or the hubble telescope. (Of course looking at the sun is a bad idea unless you want to go blind.) The sun looks yellow from Earth because the sky is yellow. If you are wondering why the stars and moon don't look yellow, it is because the colour sensors in your eyes only work on bright light, so dark objects always look completely grey unless they are very strongly coloured. But if you could see colours better in the dark, they would look like they are seen through a yellow filter.

Unlike other yellow filters, the blue light isn't absorbed and converted to heat. Instead the blue light is scattered randomly in every direction. It then hits another bit of sky and is scattered again, and again, and again. Some of it will go back out into space, but some of the light scattered by that bit of sky will go back to your eye. So that bit of sky looks blue. But it is actually the blue part of the white sun disk that has been spread all over the sky, while the red and green parts of the white sun disk go straight through to your eyes and thus look yellow where the sun is.

The scattering of blue (and a bit of green and violet which together add a bit of white to the blue sky colour) is called Rayleigh scattering and is caused by the small size of air molecules compared to the wavelength of light.

1) i will a soon as i speak english as good as you..

2) cool. first time i hear about this. still a bit difficult to understand but sounds cool. have to read it another 3 times. why does the sky appear blue on a video camera too then?

Since we are all in favour of an extra dimension in our gameplay, hows about a little respect for the void that creates these dimensions too?

You see
zero x infinity = 1

These three create the whole thing!

(proof being that x / 0 = infinity, mult both sides by 0)

ok this goes beyond my comprehension. my brain tells me that if i take something 0 times (no matter how big it is) i simply dont have it. no matter if i take 0 times one cookie or infinite cookies. but as you say i am wrong. how about trying to explain the math concept in a way that even lil-brain sharky understands it?
i have been told that x/0 is not infinity but simply not existent and my calculator tells me that it is a "division by zero" error and not infinite like INF/1...

[mastRmind]

(proof being that x / 0 = infinity, mult both sides by 0)

x/0 is not infinity it is undefined. Infinity times 0 also happens to be undefined.

[crim3]

Remember that infinity is not number. And maybe the same could be said about 0.

[sharky]

well, infinity is not a number, but you can immagine it as the biggest number. so if:

1/3=0,3333333
1/5=0,2
1/100=0,01
etc..

we can say that the bigger the number the smaller the result. so if we take the ideal biggest possible number (infinity) we get the smallest possible result (zero).

based on this 0 and infinity can be seen as numbers for our case.

now:

x*0=0

since for x we can put whatever we want, we can take as x the ideal biggest possible number we can say that infinity*0=0.

but it would be cool to hear what vadim thinks about this...

[Likay]

If you take nothing and divide by nothing you can have anything right?

Is Schrödinger's cat alive or dead?

It's dead. No cats live for 100 years.

[CarlKenner]

I didn't explain it very well, I'll try again.

Imagine a screen that has massive ghosting in all directions, and lets say the amount of brightness in the non-ghosted part is reduced by the ghosting. If you look at a high contrast space scene with a bright white sphere on a black background, then the white sphere will have a huge grey smear around it. If the ghosting extends far enough, then the whole screen will be a grey smear with a slightly brighter grey circle where the white sphere was supposed to be.

Now imagine that the screen only has ghosting for the blue channel, and we look at the same high contrast image. The blue part of the white sphere will be smeared all over the entire screen, and as such the whole screen will look blue, while the white sphere will look yellow since most of the blue from it will have been smeared around the screen instead.

If the sphere in the high contrast image was actually red or yellow, then on the same screen you would not see any ghosting and the background would look black.

The sky works the same way. The sun is a white-coloured star on a black background. The blue of the sky is just the ghosting from that white circle. If we had a yellow or red sun, then the sky would look black.

The reason the sky ghosts like that is because small air molecules scatter blue (and violet and a bit of green) light in all directions while not affecting other colours of light.

You can read more about why the sky is blue here:

http://www.sciencemadesimple.com/sky_blue.html

[sharky]

WOW! thats amazing! thank you for your explanation! so this is why you see the sky black if oyu leave the atmosphere...

cool

[yuriythebest]

how to record HD non-jittery 3d video using iz3d drivers from a single computer without external recording hardware?

[sharky]

2 more questions

--gravity is a force, and for every force to be produced you need energy. where does the energy that creates gravity come from? why isnt it consuming?

--magnets can be very strong, but where do they take the energy it needs to take something "glued" toghether?

[LukePC1]

2 more questions

--gravity is a force, and for every force to be produced you need energy. where does the energy that creates gravity come from? why isnt it consuming?

--magnets can be very strong, but where do they take the energy it needs to take something "glued" toghether?

I think I can answer the first one:

The energy is already there. It has ever been since the BIG BANG. Don't know, where it came before that. Maybe that should be the question...

Well force does NOT consume any energy, but when the object 'crashes down' it gets potential Energy into movement energy and when it gets to the ground into destruction energy and then heat.

Not shure about the magnets, but you can break a magnet and then have 2. You can do it until the magnet is realy REALY small...

[sharky]

afaik, to accelerate a object you need energy. if you let something fall (free fall) it accelerates. in theory you dont need energy to keep a constant movement.. you only need teh energy used fromt eh friction or whatever stops it from moving. so to accelerate the object towards the earth you need energy.. but where does it come from? and why doesnt it decrease?

[CarlKenner]

Forces don't require energy, that's completely wrong. A solid rock can hold up an object sitting on it forever, and by doing so it is producing a force equivalent to the force of gravity, but it doesn't need any energy to do so.

The definition of energy is the ability to lift an object, let's say a heavy rock, from a shelf at one height to another higher shelf a certain distance above it while the force of gravity is trying to stop you. It is all about fighting against a force, and making progress. The amount of energy is defined as E (energy) = s (distance it was moved against force) x F (amount of force trying to stop you). Note that in the case of gravity, the amount of force trying to stop you is determined by the weight of the object.

Keeping a rock at the same height doesn't need any energy at all (as you can see in the formula when s = 0), which is why an inanimate object like a table can hold something up without needing any energy, even though gravity is trying to push it down. But a table can't make a rock move upwards.

To make a rock move upwards you would need to strap a rocket to it and the rocket would burn a certain amount of fuel to give it the energy to lift that rock from the low shelf to the high shelf a meter or two above. Once it lands on the high shelf the rocket can be turned off and the rock can then sit on that high shelf forever without needing any more energy.

Or if you are a boring normal person, you could forget the rockets and just lift the rock with your arms from the low shelf to the high shelf, in which case you would be burning calories to give you the energy to move that rock. Calories is synonymous with energy, because it is one of the units all energy is measured in, just like distance is measured in feet.

Even though it requires energy to move the object from the low shelf to the high shelf... moving in the opposite direction doesn't need any energy at all. In fact, it produces energy. All you have to do is give the object a nudge off the edge of the high shelf and it will fall back down onto the low shelf by itself. The amount of energy the falling object produces over that distance is exactly the same as the amount of energy it took to lift it up there in the first place.

So in a sense it doesn't require any energy to make the object accelerate down, but if you look at it another way you have to put in the energy into lifting the object up high in the first place before it can fall down, and that is the energy you get back when it falls. So you could say the energy comes from whatever seperated the object and the earth in the first place. If you trace everything back in time, all the mass in the world was originally seperated by the big bang, which was the initial source of all the energy you get when the mass in the universe falls back together again due to gravity.

Magnets work exactly the same as gravity, only this time the amount of force is determined by the strengths of the magnets rather than their weight. Imagine you are in space and there is no gravity and you are standing on a powerful magnet (with magnetic boots) while lifting another powerful magnetic rock. Moving the magnetic rock from the bottom shelf to the top shelf requires a certain amount of energy even though there is no gravity fighting you, only magnetism. But keeping the magnet on that shelf uses no energy. When the magnetic rock falls back down onto the ground magnet, the same amount of energy is produced.

Being glued together does not require any energy, in fact it means the system has zero energy. Pulling the magnets apart is what requires energy. Then later you get that energy back when the magnets fall back together again, and you are back at zero again.

[LukePC1]

Great explanation and thanks for the support

I think I didn't spend enough effort into my explanation to make it understandable - but maybe you did understand it or the idea behind it, even if the explanation was crap

Mystery solved

[BlackShark]

Carl, you are mixing energy, work, and forces.

Pure energy doesn't exist in our world, it has to take some physical form like kinetic energy (speed) heat or mass for example.

All forces involve energy in some way.
Holding an object in the air against gravity requires energy.

Gravity is caused by mass (a form of energy), but the actual cause and effect phenomenon that ties particles mass and gravity is still unknown.
Physicists around the globe are working on it, and the LHC (large hadron collider) : the largest particle accelerator which has just been built in geneva at CERN is trying to adress this issue.

What you mixed up with is work.
Work is the effective energy used to do something.

If you're holding something still in the air against gravity then you are producing no work but you are still consuming energy to maintain this object in the air.
Moving this object in any direction requires work.
Work is provided by you if you move the object horizontally, and is provided by you and gravity at the same time if you move it vertically.

Potential energy is the equivalent amount of energy that gravity would require to bring an object from point A to point B and if there was no other forces involved. It is calculated as the opposite of the work of gravity. But the actual amount of energy required by gravity to move an object from point A to point B is different since there are other parameters that may interfere like air resistance, or some stupid guy holding this object in mid-air
The actual energy is usually higher but it can also be lower if you use your own force to help gravity : for instance if you throw the object downwards.


Magnets are better known than gravity but more complex since calculating a magnetic force requires knowing many advanced physics phenomenons involving electricity, electric fiels, magnetic fields and if you want to follow the whole energy pattern you also need to know quantum physics, which make fewer people know how they actually work. (i reassure you, i am totally unable to do it but i'm gonna give you the big lines)
The magnetic field is created by electric currents inside the magnet.
In a ferromagnet material (magnet stone) the electrons can jump from one atom to an other almost freely (like in all conductive materials). But ferromagnets have a special feature in it's internal structure that makes the electrons follow certain patterns. When an electron moves it creates a very tiny magnetic field around its movement. There are millions of different patterns in every possible direction inside a single magnet stone but it creates an average magnetic field.
If this average magnetic field is strong enough to be noticeable (a lot of patterns go in the same directon), then the ferromagnet material becomes a magnet.

You can also create a magnet by manually creating an electric current. Any electric current passing through an electric cable creates a small magnetic field around the cable. But it is usually way too weak to have any visible effect. In order to increase significantly the strength of this magnetic field : the simplest way to go is to roll your electric cable many many many times in circle, turning always in the same direction and make a coil.
Make a continuous direct current circulate through the coil and you get a strong enough magnetic fields inside the coil to get visible effects and you get an electromagnet.

Magnets use energy : electromagnets require you to provide electricity, in ferromagnets the energy comes from the natural motion of the electrons inside the material which is naturally maintained by a lot of physics phenomenons like heat, molecule electric interactions and the many quantum physics stuff that happen at the atom scale : but i don't know enough to tell you anything about these.
But remember that it does consumes energy to maintain the magnetic field of a magnet : the simplest example i can give you is tha tyif you put two magnets against each other, they progressively loose their magnetic force over time.

As far as where the energy comes from : it's there since the big bang and it's dissipating progressively over time.
It's going down, nature has many tricks to reuse energy so it's going slowly but the ultimate fate of the universe is to run out of energy... unless something happens that makes the universe crunchs on itself but we won't know that for a few billion years.

[CarlKenner]

I know what I'm talking about.

The definition of energy IS the potential to do "Work" (moving an object a distance against a force), exactly as I said. Look in any science book. That is all energy is. Just a theoretical ability to do something under the right circumstances.

The only reason there is a limit on the ability to do Work is a consequence of the way forces work, as expressed by that famous law of science "what goes up must come down", or more specifically "what goes up must come down at exactly the same speed it went up at, if you throw it". So even though "physical form"s of energy that BlackShark talks about can be easily and literally decreased to nothing by throwing a ball up onto a shelf for example... when you knock the ball off the shelf again ten years later, that ball will get back the exact same amount of kinetic energy that disappeared when you threw it up onto the shelf. In that way something which we call "energy" can be stored for later use. But what we call "energy" is NOT something real. It is just a theoretical ability to do something (such as Work) later, perhaps just because it is sitting up on a high shelf.

The same rules about gravity apply to magnets and electric charges too. There is also a Strong nuclear force, which is a bit different but still has the same limitations. Since those forces are the ONLY things that can speed up or slow down things (physically pushing things is actually the electric charge force), and they can only speed things up by the exact same amount they slowed them down before, there is a theoretical limit on the amount of movement there can be in the universe.

Actually I lied, there is one more thing that can speed things up or slow things down, which is not really a force (but is sometimes called the Weak force). A funny thing happens when you speed up a subatomic particle like a proton or a neutron or an electron, really really really fast and then slam it into another subatomic particle. The original particles explode and turn into a bunch of other random particles or light, with some of the speed (squared) of the collision converted into mass of the new particles (which will be heavier than the original particles) and the rest of the speed of the collision going into the speed of those new particles. There are also some situations (decay of radioactive substances) where particles can transform into lighter particles and some of the mass goes into speed of the new particles. You get a LOT of energy from a little bit of lost mass, so these new particles shoot off at ridiculous speed and do a lot of damage to any organic matter they hit. But in this situation the amount of energy you get back when mass is converted into energy is the exact same as the amount of energy you loose when energy is converted into mass.

It is wrong to think of mass as a form of energy. It is just one of the many things that can be converted into speed in certain situations.

What Blackshark says about holding an object in the air against gravity requiring energy is complete garbage. Any piece of string can do that. And no, you don't need to convert the mass in the string into energy with a nuclear reaction for the string to work, so anyone suggesting that there is some sort of energy in the string being used to hold up the object in the air, is talking rubbish. It does take energy to lift the object off the ground up to the bottom of the string, but then when you leave it tied to the string it is not using any energy, and when you untie the string, it will fall with the same amount of energy you used lifting it up that distance.

Science is NOT magic. It is just simple common sense based on everyday observations. You should not think of it as something mysterious going on.

"Hadrons" is the collective term for protons and neutrons, their antimatter equivalents, and other similar subatomic particles. Everything except electrons, because electrons are completely different from protons and neutrons (electrons are tiny little things that whirl around great big protons and neutrons). The Large Hadron Collider does not collide large hadrons, it is just a hadron collider that is large. The point of the hadron collider is to do what I said earlier and observe the particles that you get when you speed up a proton really really really fast and slam it into another particle. We already know most of the different kinds of particles you can get by doing that, since we've been doing that for decades. But because the speed is converted into mass, and a tiny bit of mass requires a lot of speed, current particle accelerators can only produce particles with small masses. To produce heavier particles they need a more powerful accelerator that can speed up particles even faster, which is the point of the Large Hardron Collider. They are hoping some of the heavier particles will be more interesting, or at least satisfy their curiosity and help them work out the relationship between different kinds of particles. There is no chance of it destroying the universe, since these particles are already created by the sun all the time, we just are never in a convenient spot to observe them and can't predict when they will strike the earth in order to set up fancy equipment there. Whatever these heavy particles do, it is something that occasionally happens in the world already.

By the way, it is impossible to move an object "sideways", because like I said ONLY forces (like Gravity) can speed up or slow down an object. If you have a rock held up against gravity by a piece of string and you want to move it sideways, then you would need to use something like a magnet or an electric charge. As I said, physically pushing an object is using an electric charge (because of the electrons in your hand and the object repelling each other). But let's pull it with a magnet. If you put a magnet beside our lump of iron, the lump of iron will be pulled "sideways" from the point of view of gravity, but it is "downwards" from the point of view of the magnet. The magnet works by almost the same rules as gravity, and this sideways movement is just another kind of falling.

If an object already happens to be moving sideways with respect to gravity, then it can keep moving sideways forever without ever using up any energy. For example the moon orbiting the Earth.

Take what BlackShark says with a pinch of salt. He is wrong about some things.

[sharky]

some more..

1) if an atomic bomb explodes, could the electromagnetic wave kill my video tapes?
2) if a car travels at lightspeed, would the lights still work?
3) why is blue the color for boys and pink for girls?
4) why does a year last 365 days and a day have 24 hours?
5) why do we need to add 1 day every 4 years?
6) why does one our have 60 minutes and not 100?

[BlackShark]

What Blackshark says about holding an object in the air against gravity requiring energy is complete garbage. Any piece of string can do that. And no, you don't need to convert the mass in the string into energy with a nuclear reaction for the string to work, so anyone suggesting that there is some sort of energy in the string being used to hold up the object in the air, is talking rubbish. It does take energy to lift the object off the ground up to the bottom of the string, but then when you leave it tied to the string it is not using any energy, and when you untie the string, it will fall with the same amount of energy you used lifting it up that distance.

Science is NOT magic. It is just simple common sense based on everyday observations. You should not think of it as something mysterious going on.

This is where i don't agree with you.
Because I have a very simple example that contradicts your statement i experienced yesterday when i went shopping : replace the string with your body.

Lift some object in the air (make it heavy you'll get the idea even quicker : like a bowling ball, in my case it was a pack of bottles of milk).
After a while (a short while if the object is heavy) you'll get tired because you're constantly using your energy to maintain the object in the air against gravity.

So why would I require energy and not the string ?
I don't believe in magic either (except in videogames but that's an other story). So since I need to use energy to maintain a bowling ball in the air, so does the string.

I'm not saying that the string is wasting this energy into oblivion or generating an infinite quantity of energy out of nowhere, that would be magic, I do believe in the law of conservation of energy.
It's just that I do not have the complete answer about how the energy is transferred from the materials (the string attached to the ceiling or the shelf, itself standing on the ground, etc...) and completes a circle which results in a complete nullifying of the forces (gravity vs tension of the string vs shelf vs ground vs earth vs gravity).