:::::Before you read this, it is full of scientific content. If you are not a scientific person ,it still pertains to you, so try to get through it. IF not, at least go here and see what the largest and most accurate scientific instrument in existance looks like. Thanks: Jeremy:::::
Many of you who know me know that I am a massive nerd. This ordinarily is not something that bothers me, except in the rare instances where it allows me to glimpse a future that few of my friends see. In this case, that future would be one wherein the world is torn asunder at the sub-atomic level and everyone dies. But more on that later.
I have a huge infatuation with the Large Hadron Collider. This massive, 27 Km circumference, 1.7 billion Euro Instrument is the largest, most powerful and most exquisitely sensitive piece of scientific equipment ever devised by man. It is designed to take Hadrons, large chunks of sub-atomic matter that used to belong to full atoms, spin them up to speed approaching the speed of light through a tunnel coated with magnets cooled to the coldest temperatures on earth, and smash them together in a test chamber cooled to 1.7 degrees above absolute zero in an effort to see what happens. This smashing liberates huge amounts of energy, but is fortunately so small that the energy doesn’t blow up half of switzerland. Or at least it wouldn’t if they could actually get it running.
The truly scary stuff is coming up next. The whole point of this is that the LHC is designed to help us discover something called the Higgs Boson. This is a mysterious field that some say imparts material properties to energy. (We are all made of atoms, small pieces of vibrating energy that are bound to each other. The Higgs Bosun is supposed to be the thing that turns that intangible energy into stuff.) Now I am not one to say that I know more about this than people who have been studying high-energy particle physics for all their lives, people who are arguably the smartest people in existence, but this sounds like hogwash. It reminds me of the Ether of pre-scientific-revolution Europe.
Anyway, you can learn more about the LHC here, so I won’t bore you with any more details.
Now, ordinarily I would not have a problem with this kind of scientific endeavour. On the contrary, as a staunch supporter of the manned space program, I would be a hypocrite for even suggesting that money should not be spent on scientific boondoggle. That being said, the space program is fairly innocuous in that it does not hold the possibility of KILLING EVERYONE.
Thats right, you, me, that neighbor who wont shut up his dogs at 3 in the morning… everyone.
The basic physics behind smashing two of the most basic and powerful components of the universe together as fast as we can make them go just to find out what comes out (something I equate to smashing 2 cars together in an effort to see what they are made of by what comes out) means that energies are released that were not really sure about. According to darn near every source I can find, the LHC is very capable of creating high enough energies and strong enough fields to produce small black holes as a by product of its testing.
Lets put soemthing into perspective for you:
The largest nuclear explosion ever created by man, the 50 megaton Tsar Bomba, had the mass of about 50o pounds of fusionable material and created a mushrom cloud 2 MILES in diameter. It spread nuclear ashes all the way around the world and probably killed hundreds of people through indirect contact with its fallout. It signaled the possible destruction of the human race by its very existance. A Black hole, on the other, far scarier hand, squeezes a mass of hundreds of our suns (numbers which can only be expressed as exponents) into an area about the size of New York City and has a gravitational pull so strong that not even light can escape it. This force is responsible for the gravitational energies that keep our GALAXY together and can consume the equivalent mass of our entire solar system in about 15 minutes. It burns the equivalent energy of our earths entire nuclear arsenal in picoseconds.
It would tear our planet apart at the sub-atomic level and spit us out as X-Rays so fast that we would not even have the barest inkling that something was wrong.
Basicaly this instrument, as influential as it could be, is something that could destroy not only our planet, but our entire solar system in a fairly spectacular manner. Of course, the scientists say that this is something that could never happen. They say that while there is a very high possibility of eddies in space time forming (black holes), they would be so small that they would evaporate before they had a chance to ingest any matter. Lets hope so, because if they so much as chow on a few atoms, these black holes would start consuming like Rosie O’Donald at a Las Vegas Buffet; and I, for one, would not want to be the chicken drumstick on that table.
However, I am willing to give the scientific comunity the benefit of the doubt seeing as how I am a history major and have in fact not been studying high-energy physics my whole life. That being said, I will be joining several of my friends at the bar in May when they finally (barring further setbacks) start conducting full power tests with this behemoth of an atom smasher, having a “please don’t render me into degenerate, low energy plasma” beer.
