The end: not as nigh as one may think.

Okay folks…  I am tired of this.  I have been receiving many comments and loads of emails from people who read my post a long time ago about the LHC.  For those of you who do not know what it is, keep reading or preferably go here.

As many of you may recall (but probably not) I wrote that the world was going to end, that the Swiss were going to be the perpetrators and that we were going to be none the wiser (though I was was going to be, and probably still will be, drunk when it happens).  This post of mine was supposed to be a satirical piece making fun of the doomsayers who actually think that science would create a machine that they thought would stand any chance of destroying the world (and themselves).  But there is a kicker in this rather bland story of mine.

People believed it and thought that I was being serious.

Let me write that again… People believed me.

First of all, please…  The things that I write about for the most part are simply for comedy.  If you have not figured that out by the other posts in my blog, pay attention.  Stop sending me e-mails about how I am a part of a conspiracy to destroy the world, stop sending me emails about how I am ill-informed and stupid for believing this diaboical thing called science and pay effing attention.  Secondly, how is it that anyone thinks that a scientist would create, build and operate a machine buried deep within the ground of Switzerland (which I believe is probably full of holes and goes great on a sammich) – and a little of France (which I believe is probably white and simply ran from the shovels of the construction crews) – that stood any chance whatsoever of killing them is beyond me.  Likewise the idea that people believe that science would be cavalier with the lives of the entire human species, along with the physical matter of our planet, sounds kind of stupid to me.  Granted, science has done some stupid shit (sorry again about the whole nuclear weapons thing), but there isn’t a (reputable) scientist alive who would think “this stands a good chance of killing in a gravity driven dissalusion of my entire atomic structure… Lock me in and give me the code to start it!,” and the scientists at CERN are the best in the business.

On another side of admittedly mroe-than-two-sided coin, there is the reason that the macine exists in the first place.  Here is a list published by one of my favorite science websites, Physorg.com:

World’s biggest atom-smasher: Mission profile

Following is a mission profile of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s biggest atom-smasher, which is due to start operations on Wednesday:

- Hunt for the HIGGS BOSON, a theorised particle that would explain why other particles have mass. Confirming the Higgs would fill a huge gap in the so-called Standard Model, the theory that summarises our present knowledge of particles. Over the years, scientists have whittled down the ranges of mass that the Higgs is likely to have. But they have lacked a machine capable of generating collisions powerful enough to to confirm whether this so-called God particle really does exist.

- Explore SUPERSYMMETRY, the notion that a whole bestiary of related but more massive particles exists beyond those in the Standard Model. Supersymmetry could explain one of the weirdest discoveries of recent years — that visible matter only accounts for some four percent of the cosmos. Dark matter (23 percent) and dark energy (73 percent) account for the rest. A popular theory is that dark matter comprises supersymmetric particles called neutralinos.

- Investigate the mystery of MATTER AND ANTI-MATTER. When energy transforms into matter, it produces a particle and its mirror image — called an anti-particle — which holds the opposite electrical charge. When particles and anti-particles collide, they annihilate each other in a small flash of energy. According to conventional theories of the cosmos, matter and anti-matter should exist in equal amounts, but the puzzle is that anti-matter is rare.

- Replicate the earliest moments after the BIG BANG that created the Universe. At its primal stage, matter existed as a sort of hot, dense soup called quark-gluon plasma. As it cooled, sub-atomic particles called quarks clumped together to form protons and neutrons and other composite particles. The LHC will smash heavy ions together, briefly generating temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the centre of the Sun and freeing quarks from their confinent. The researchers can then see how the liberated quarks aggregate to form ordinary matter.

As you can all see, there is nothing nefarious or militant in this list at all.  There is nothing even dangerous sounding here.  When they talk about massive temperature spikes they are talking about an affected area on the microscopic scale.  Massive releases of energy are on the order of the amount of energy it takes for a large bug to fly trough the air.  Part of the problem with the general populations conception of this experiment is that they don’t have the background to understand the way that the scientists talk about it.  Granted, the scientists should be a little more cognizant of the way they present information to people who don’t spend their lives in physics laboratories, but for people to panic and sue for stoppage and think the world is going to end when they obviously don’t understand what is going on is kind of on them as well.

(This is not to say that people are dumb, but if you dont know what anti-matter is or can’t quantify a Terra-electron Volt, then you don’t really have any right to freak out that the world is going to be swallowed by a quantum singularity.  This goes to the public’s willingness to listen to an un-informed and overly dramatic media, a subject for another blog on another day)

I am getting off of on a tangent here.  The main point is that people think this machine is going to destroy the world.  They think that reckless scientists in some far-away land are conspiring to run an experiment that they don’t understand regardless of the possible consequences.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  The bottom line is that these scientists are literally the smartest people in the world.  They use the only perfect thing in the universe – math – to understand what is going to happen, what could happen, and prove that they are not going to turn the planet into a large spinning blob of degenerate material.

So if you think that this is going to destroy the world, fear not, it isn’t going to happen… but go to the bar and get wasted and shiver in misguided fear.  For those of you who think this could be one of the greatest scientific experiments of all time, good on ya; go to the bar and celebrate… thats where I’ll be.