The first beam to be injected into the Large Hadron Collider is going to get fired up pretty soon, and there's been a lot of speculation about what will happen when two proton streams crash into each other at 99.9999982% of the speed of light (roughly 299,792 km/s). The scientists in charge are hoping to detect evidence of the Higgs Boson, a subatomic particle thought to play a role in giving things mass. More worrisome types have speculated about the creation of tiny black holes (which might collapse and explode, taking the earth with it) or strangelets (packets of "strange matter" that may have the ability to convert normal matter into more strange matter, in a chain reaction that could turn the Earth into a small, hot lump of strange matter called a Quark Star).
Either way, something cool will probably happen, and you can count down the days until you potentially turn into a small, hot lump of strangelets here.
3 comments:
I had a funny experience the other day when someone was trying to explain the LHC to me, but clearly had no background in physics whatsoever, and was just fixated on the fact that there was "like a 1 in 50 million chance that it would create a black hole and suck the earth into it."
I think they were exaggerating.
It's a 1 in 500 million (500,000,000) chance that the energy formed from the collisions will form in such a way as to cause the potential for stranglet or micro black hole activity, however, theory suggests that these tiny black holes, if actually possible, would decay immediately. There certainly wouldn't be enough energy to suck the Earth into it. Cosmic particles are hitting the Earth with this sort of force all the time, and in fact, all over the universe without anything bad happening. Every major scientist who has commented on the project has suggested that it is perfectly safe.
Way to totally kill the joke.
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