Physics homework, that is ...
Equipment at the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator under construction on the Franco-Swiss border, dwarfs a worker in a hardhat.
Updated: 12:29 a.m. PT Sept 7, 2006
NORWICH, England - Deep underground, along the border between Switzerland and France, someone will throw a switch next year to start one of the most ambitious scientific experiments in history, probing the deepest secrets of the universe, and possibly finding new dimensions of existence that are beyond our ordinary experience.
Or possibly ... destroying the entire earth and everyone on it.
At least, so say some - although the scientist who was interviewed by MSNBC put the odds of such a terminal catastrophe at less than one chance in ten followed by 39 zeros - pretty slim - and there are carefully documented calculations, grounded in what is already known about high energy physics, that reduce the "odds" to zero.
The LHC (Large Hadron Collider), nearing completion, is contained in a circular tunnel, 27 kilometers long and buried deep below the countryside on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland. When scientific experiments are inaugurated in 2007, the LHC will be the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. High-energy protons in two counter-rotating beams will be smashed together at previously unobtainable speeds in a search for the hidden signatures of supersymmetry, dark energy and dark matter, and the still mysterious origins of mass.
Billions of protons traveling at just a whisker below the speed of light will be injected, accelerated, and kept circulating for hours, guided by thousands of powerful superconducting magnets.
For most of their circulation, the counter-rotating beams will travel in two separate vacuum pipes, but at four separate stations they will collide in the hearts of the major physics experiments, known by the acronyms ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb, where sensitive detection equipment will capture the results as collisions between protons produce a shower of exotic, short-lived subatomic particles.
The detection equipment will be tasked with monitoring up to 600 million collision events per second, relying on the world's largest scientific computing network to analyze "petabytes" of data for signs of extremely rare subatomic events, such as the isolation of the elusive Higgs boson - theoretically, the carrier of all mass in the universe.
Scientists will be trying to recreate some of the critical parameters of the Big Bang: The mysterious explosion at the beginning of measurable time that is widely believed to have produced the observable universe. In the process, it is expected that "micro" black holes will be generated at a rate of about one per second: Black holes like the fictional one that was celebrated in 1997's Event Horizon, and the more probably real and massive star and galaxy-sized black holes that astronomers are always talking about of late - but on a subatomic scale. And it's that well known term "black holes" - along with "strange matter", "magnetic monopoles" and "false vacuums" - that has some Internet posters speculating about the possibility that an out-of-control experiment at LHC could trigger doomsday for the entire world.
If subatomic black holes are actually generated, scientists calculate that they will all evaporate to nothing, almost instantaneously, by a process called Hawking radiation - but what if ... ?
One doomsday scenario goes like this: Subatomic black holes, having a greater density than any ordinary matter, will sink by gravity to the center of the earth, enlarging themselves by absorbing ordinary matter along the way. At the center of the earth, all of LHC's escaping black holes will merge into one sizeable black hole - and start to absorb the entire planet, from the inside out ...
It's not stopping the scientists at LHC.
Credits: http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/ http://www.physics.uci.edu/ http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/ http://www.analogsf.com/0305/altview.shtml http://www.particlephysics.ac.uk/ http://aboutfacts.net/AirSpaceCraft22.htm http://symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000095 http://www.exitmundi.nl/blackholes_lab.htm http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14717643/
Image hosting: http://imageshack.us/
Crime Scene Earth: Every clock tick, the earth is traversed by an unimaginable number of neutrinos, ghostly subatomic particles that are emitted by the sun. They're almost undetectable. In 1993, however, the earth may have been hit by a real cosmic "bullet" - an exotically dense form of matter - too small to have been visible to the naked eye, yet massive enough to have registered on earthquake detectors at seismic stations around the world. The "bullet" (if there really was one) bored through the earth in less than sixty seconds with the energy of a fifty kiloton atomic bomb, exiting a half-world away from where it entered, and at almost the same fantastic speed ...
For more, see Gone In Sixty Seconds.
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Originally Posted by chip anderson
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