{"id":1091,"date":"2008-09-10T07:31:42","date_gmt":"2008-09-10T06:31:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=1091"},"modified":"2008-09-10T07:31:42","modified_gmt":"2008-09-10T06:31:42","slug":"will-the-world-end-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=1091","title":{"rendered":"Will the world end today?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now why would i ask that. Well, today, the Large Hadron Collider<\/a> in Geneva will be switched on.
\nCurving 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.
\nAmong other things, scientists hope that the collisions will produce the Higgs boson – a particle key to unlocking the secrets of the universe’s creation.
\nNow some people – such as German chemistry professor Otto R\u00f6ssler of the University of T\u00fcbingen – 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.
\nOn 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.
\nLet’s see who’s right. Oh, that’s it – if Otto R\u00f6ssler 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1091\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}