You’ve got to figure that if anything goes wrong in this room, that guy’s hard hat isn’t going to be good for much.
Articles have popped up all over the media about this wonderful new large hadron collider thing, but I had to go to Wikipedia and beyond to gain any real insight into what it is and why it matters. Apparently it matters a lot — here’s why.
The trusty Wiktionary says a hadron is: “a strongly interacting particle such as a proton; a particle which is affected by the strong nuclear force; a hadron is composed of quarks.” It comes from the Greek hadros, or “thick.” Neutrons are hadrons too, because they contain quarks as well.
Anyway, the large hadron collider does just what you’d think — it sends trillions of hadrons (in this case protons) hurtling around a 27-kilometre tube at close to the speed of light, so we can see what happens when they collide and smash each other into bits. Scientists hope that the resulting jumbled wads of matter will contain evidence of Higgs bosons, the “God particles” that may be responsible for giving mass to matter and creating the laws of physics. If we can understand mass, we get a much better idea of how the universe works, and if all goes according to plan (which as we all know it always does in science) we’ll be a giant step closer to the big prize: a Grand Unified Theory that explains electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear force in a single elegant idea.
From PhysOrg:
The LHC will put hotly debated theories to the test as it generates a bonanza of new experimental data in the coming years. Potential breakthroughs include an explanation of what gives mass to fundamental particles and identification of the mysterious dark matter that makes up most of the mass in the universe. More exotic possibilities include evidence for new forces of nature or hidden extra dimensions of space and time.
“The LHC is a discovery machine. We don’t know what we’ll find,” said Abraham Seiden, professor of physics and director of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP) at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
From what I gather, no one really knows what will happen when they finally flip the thing on in two weeks. Some scientists worry that, in addition to mini black holes (which sound dangerous enough to me), the machine could also create “strangelets, vacuum bubbles and magnetic monopoles.” I don’t know what those are, but I bet you don’t want them in your morning cereal.
As for the black holes, Live Science assures us that they won’t destroy the Earth, in an article appropriately titled: “Despite Rumors, Black Hole Factory Will Not Destroy Earth.” “The chance of planetary annihilation,” it argues, “is totally miniscule.” Which is reassuring enough, though I suppose it’s reasonable to question the wisdom of any science experiment that carries even a miniscule chance of TOTAL PLANETARY ANNIHILATION.
More from Live Science:
CERN spokesman and former research physicist James Gillies also pointed out that Earth is bathed with cosmic rays powerful enough to create black holes all the time, and the planet hasn’t been destroyed yet.
Still, let’s assume that even if Hawking is a genius, he’s wrong, and that such black holes are more stable,” Landsberg said. Nearly all of the black holes will be traveling fast enough from the accelerator to escape Earth’s gravity. “Even if you produced 10 million black holes a year, only 10 would basically get trapped, orbiting around its center,” Landsberg said.
However, such trapped black holes are so tiny, they could pass through a block of iron the distance from the Earth to the Moon and not hit anything. They would each take about 100 hours to gobble up one proton.
At that rate, even if one did not take into account the fact that each black hole would slow down every time it gobbled up a proton, and thus suck down matter at an even slower rate, “about 100 protons would be destroyed every year by such a black hole, so it would take much more than the age of universe to destroy even one milligram of Earth material,” Landsberg concluded. “It’s quite hard to destroy the Earth.”
Oh, and this machine is not, as some naughty witty folk like to claim, a “large hardon collider.” Though I guess it could do that too.
Photo via National Geographic.
1 response so far ↓
1 JTankers // Aug 26, 2008 at 1:07 am
Slow growth unless the micro black hole captures electrons in orbit outside the event horizon and becomes charged as Dr. Otto E. Rossler theorizes or unless Reverse Hawking Radiation proves a reality as predictions for dark energy tend to predict.
So 30% chance for slow growth?
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