The Large Hadron Collider

It's been a long time since I updated my blog, and thoughts of retiring it quietly have entered my mind. But the recent developments in the world of science are too big to go unmentioned.

Enter the Large Hadron Collider, created to try to tell us what happened during the Big Bang. An article from the Guardian should shed some more light on this. In simple terms, this huge contraption is meant to "crash protons together 600 million times per second". Sounds awesome.

Then after each impact, "giant detectors will scour the subatomic wreckage looking for evidence of new physics". Even more awesome.

"Scientists have some pretty good hunches about what the machine might find". Wait, wait... what? They have "pretty good hunches"? Cops have "good hunches" about whether entering a certain situation might get them shot or not. If they have a good hunch that they won't, they still might get shot. That's the whole point of a hunch, it's not reliable. So, I guess these guys have a good hunch that this won't just destroy all life as we know it. Essentially, no one really knows for sure what's going to happen when these protons start bashing into each other. Find your enthusiasm waning a bit? Not surprising.

The article goes on to list what scientists have a 'hunch', they will find. Let's see, they expect, supersymmetry, dark matter, the Higgs Boson (aka the God particle), extra dimensions, black holes, and antimatter. Know where else you'd find such a list... in the lair of a mad scientist. Maybe it's just me but any experiment likely to create dark matter, antimatter and God particles, is an experiment you'd like to stay away from.

The black hole part alone caused some coldness in the feet but apparently, the LHC won't cause ordinary dear-God-look-at-the-size-of-that-thing black holes. Oh no, it will only cause micro black holes and we're safe from it because of something called Hawking radiation. Whew. Oh wait, there's more about this Hawking radiation... "However, the existence of Hawking radiation has never been observed, nor are there currently viable experimental tests that would allow it to be observed. Hence there is still some theoretical dispute over whether Hawking radiation actually exists".

And if you're thinking they're only micro black holes and therefore harmless, here's what a Science Daily article says. According to the Safety Assessment Group, since something called cosmic ray collisions occur on a daily basis and do not destroy the earth; and the LHC collisions would be a fraction of the cosmic ray ones, it "shows that even fast-moving black holes produced by cosmic rays would have stopped inside the Earth or other astronomical bodies. Their existence proves that any such black holes could not gobble matter at a risky rate". So, they're saying they will create black holes. And as I read it, they reassure us by saying, it won't swallow you all immediately, only, I don't know, in a few days or maybe months. Cue the creepy music.

Then we have the strangelets. Some scientists say the LHC will produce them and others say it won't. Apparently, strangelets, once stable, bond with other nuclei and form strange matter. Me thinks that anything that science couldn't think up a cool name for is something to be afraid of.

Am I trying to cause mass panic? Not really, since not many people read my blog. Still, one has to just look at all this stuff and wonder; experimentation in the name of science is great, but an experiment that may or may not cause the earth to resemble the real world in the Matrix. I mean... duuuude.

I know there was a time long long ago when people believed in a constant. People, including scientists, believed in it implicitly in this time. In a time when they thought the earth was flat. Then someone challenged it, and now we sit at our desks in 2008 and call those guys morons. And these scientists, in 2008, with 'hunches' know one thing for sure. If the LHC were to blow the bejesus out of the earth, at least no one will call them morons in the future.

But maybe this is all just mindless paranoia. Probably the LHC will just give us new insights into the world and universe around us, and we'd all be content. The scientists would be happy with all this new stuff they found out. Surely, then, they wouldn't build anything bigger to destroy the earth with, right? Right?

http://vlhc.org/ : The website of the Very Large Hadron Collider, aka The Good-heavens-you-really-are-trying-to-kill-us-all machine.

Probably the only thing, out of all this, that I can get behind is the finding of hidden dimensions. It would be totally cool if the LHC opened up an inter-dimensional portal and dinosaurs came storming out. Then Steven Spielberg would stand up and say "I TOLD YOU SO" and fly across to Switzerland where he'd be promptly eaten by a dinosaur holding a grudge for not being included in 'Jurassic Park".

Ok, I think I should stop now.