We’ve all destroyed things accidentally. These are not our finest moments, but they happen. Maybe you broke a lamp in a sitcom style indoor football game when you were a kid. Perhaps you’ve shut a door too hard and cracked the window next to it. I’ve known someone to drive a car into their closed garage. That one’s a twofer.
Not to be outdone, the scientists of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) have spent 25 years creating a device that might accidentally destroy the Earth. Top that rookie!
Why would anyone build something with an “oops factor” of planetary annihilation? Because in order to find out what happened at the Big Bang, you essentially have to recreate it on a much smaller scale. Enter the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is buried 300 feet below the border of France and Switzerland. Here, protons will be accelerated through a 17 mile long circular tube at 99.9% of the speed of light. Then, living up to its name, they will be collided.
What happens afterwards is anyone’s guess. It is thought that they will find the Higgs Boson, a theoretical particle that is believed to give matter its mass. They may also find that the universe has quite a few more dimensions than previously thought. On the flipside, it could create a black hole that eats the world. Or they may unleash a “strangelet,” another theoretical particle that would turn earth into a "hot dead lump” almost instantaneously.
Recently, CERN released a report stating that the fears of the LHC destroying the world are bunk. The possibility of the doomsday scenarios are extremely slim. In truth though, it's a shame they gave the game away like that. The suspense would have been amazing.
Not to be outdone, the scientists of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) have spent 25 years creating a device that might accidentally destroy the Earth. Top that rookie!
Why would anyone build something with an “oops factor” of planetary annihilation? Because in order to find out what happened at the Big Bang, you essentially have to recreate it on a much smaller scale. Enter the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is buried 300 feet below the border of France and Switzerland. Here, protons will be accelerated through a 17 mile long circular tube at 99.9% of the speed of light. Then, living up to its name, they will be collided.
What happens afterwards is anyone’s guess. It is thought that they will find the Higgs Boson, a theoretical particle that is believed to give matter its mass. They may also find that the universe has quite a few more dimensions than previously thought. On the flipside, it could create a black hole that eats the world. Or they may unleash a “strangelet,” another theoretical particle that would turn earth into a "hot dead lump” almost instantaneously.
Recently, CERN released a report stating that the fears of the LHC destroying the world are bunk. The possibility of the doomsday scenarios are extremely slim. In truth though, it's a shame they gave the game away like that. The suspense would have been amazing.
posted by -jw-
