Will the world end today?
Now why would i ask that. Well, today, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva will be switched on.
Curving round a vast subterranean chamber, the machine, some 27km in circumference, is the world’s largest particle accelerator. Once it is switched on, it will fire beams of hadron particles in opposite directions at 99.9999991% of the speed of light, recreating the conditions that existed moments after the big bang.
Among other things, scientists hope that the collisions will produce the Higgs boson – a particle key to unlocking the secrets of the universe’s creation.
Now some people – such as German chemistry professor Otto Rössler of the University of Tübingen – believe that the LHC could create a black hole that will devour the entire earth. If he’s right, this blog won’t exist shortly but then neither will you.
On the other hand, Professor Llewellyn Smith has assured Radio 4’s “Today” programme that the LHC – designed to help solve fundamental questions about the structure of matter and, hopefully, arrive at a “theory of everything” – is completely safe and will not be doing anything that has not happened “100,000 times over” in nature since the earth has existed.
Let’s see who’s right. Oh, that’s it – if Otto Rössler is correct, he won’t be around to say “I told you so” and we won’t be here to say “We should have listened to you”. If the LHC does not destroy all (and I’m betting it won’t), let’s hope that it makes some exciting discoveries which aid our understanding of our universe.
September 10th, 2008 at 9:51 am
Lucky escape for Arsenal / Gordon Brown if it did.
No eat your peanuts Arthur …