The Large Hadron Collider
Well, the Swiss and the French seem to be pulling it off…construction of the Large Hadron Collider which is located on the border of Switzerland and France near Geneva, is proceeding apace. The 26.659 Km or 16.565 mile circumference tunnel is complete, the supporting equipment is being installed now, and trials are scheduled to begin in 2Q07, with the giant gadget to be fully operational by 2008.
The LHC is designed to take large hadrons (such as protons and neutrons), accelerate them to 99.999999% of the speed of light in the collider, smash them together to allow CERNoids to study the detritus. … uh, wait just a minute…perhaps they meant that they plan to take regular hadrons and smash them together in a large collider … it’s so confusing.
In any event, the work they’re doing at CERN may result in some good news and some bad news for you personally.
The good news is that their work may well result in discovery of the elusive Higgs boson and so help explain why matter has mass.
And the (potentially) bad news is that there is a vanishingly small, aka teentsy weentsy in technical terms, chance that Large Hadron Collider could destroy Earth. How so? The physics of TeV colliders like LHC predicts that they should produce about 1 mini black hole per second even after allowing for the effects of Voloshin Suppression. The good part of the bad news is that these BHs will have a very short life span, on the order of 10^-26 seconds and so will evaporate almost instantaneously. Some have estimated the chances of planetary destruction at about 10^-40 … which is reassuringly low.
But, in case their math is a bit off, we attach this gratuitous image of Switzerland being pulled into the black hole just created by the Large Hadron Collider.
Giant device is closing in on Universe’s tiniest secret - London Times, November 20, 2006
September 9th, 2008 at 1:26 am
good article.. but out 0f 100% , what would you say the chances of the world ending and the procedure stuffing up being? also with your picture above that has just the words of SWITZERLAND like stufin up, does that mean it will only happen to switzerland or the whole world? One more thing, how long would it take before we die?
can u please respond to me with the email i have given you above.
thankyou
September 9th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Sorry to have misled you, but the picture at the ending of the Large Hadron Collider post was intended to be a bit of facile humor.
The chances of anything bad happening as a result of the operation of the LHC, must be vanishingly small, simply because we’re still here. As Wikipedia explains, “Cosmic rays can have energies of over 10^20 eV, far higher than the 10^12 to 10^13 eV that man-made particle accelerators can produce”.
Startup of the LHC is tomorrow Wed Sept 10 2008. Looking forward to CERN advancing the frontiers of knowledge.
Cheers.
September 10th, 2008 at 7:06 am
sad how naive and ignorant some people are…
sam, in fact i just called the CERN’s safety deparment and asked them what might happen, and they told me that the black hole will appear underneath your toilet-seat sam. so, theoretically it will suck you in at first… then the rest of the world.
no, but seriously nice picture
September 10th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Haven’t you eggheads learned anything from Spiderman 2? Look what happened to Doc Ock! We are all doomed! Hahahaha!
September 10th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Nice pic of some people’s thoughts on what will happen.
I think I speak for Chicago and say thanks to France, Switzerland, CERN and the EU for making this possible over there rather then here at Fermilab.
Anyway I am sure they wouldn’t do anything that would put us at any real risk.
September 10th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
essa foto do mundo é muito foda
September 10th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Switzerland, eh? Oh well. I think I’ll buy some good chocolate while there’s still some left.
September 10th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
Wait a minute, is that 10^-40 for each black hole or 10^-40 forever? If it’s for each black hole and there’s a black hole every second, then should we expect a big kaboom sometime in the next 15 years?
September 10th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
This thing gives me butterflies, i really hope it works cause i still have alot to live for and if some scientists say “the worlds not going to end” and it does im going to be really pissed hahaha. This is now literally putting our lives into the hands of Stephan hawkings.
September 11th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
It’s going to be like Black Mesa, and Stephan Hawkings as Gordon Freeman! So better slack off and praise Bob to save your soul!!!!!
September 11th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
It like the beginning of half-life the video game. It will open other dimensions and demons and monster will come to our dimension and fight us
September 13th, 2008 at 8:37 am
Te theory of relativity should be proved wrong ………any way
September 20th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
some of the comments here by thickies made tears of laughter spring to my eyes.
10^-40? This is compared to a 10^-11 chance of you spontaneously evaporating whilst shaving.
September 25th, 2008 at 3:51 am
I think if it destroyed the world, at least the Universe is short of one more megalomaniac race of “sentient beings.”
On the slightly positive, if anything useful comes of this hopefully it’s something that’s actually useful to us, not some rubbish equations.
And I never did like Science and those random probabilities, I don’t get the point in saying you’re speeding something up to 99.999999999999999999999999999% the speed of light, just stick with 99% or “very fast”. And all this 10^_^101 rubbish, what’s it even supposed to mean? There’s a 10^-8 chance that I turn into a dinosaur and can poo out small readily-built villages? There’s a 10^-2 chance that any of this actually makes sense?
I’m not sure what they were expecting when they split the atom, but if human history is anything to go by then colliding tiny particles at ridiculous speed can only mean trouble. Let’s hope they make some error and destroy the planet so nature gives us the big fat finger.
September 25th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Hi! please dont end the world!