More Than Living

LHC at CERN — it’s not the end of the world">The LHC at CERN — it’s not the end of the world

Well, it’s been fun, but there’s a min­is­cule pos­sib­il­ity that this will be the last post on Living: tomor­row, the world’s largest particle accel­er­ator – built into the rock near Geneva on the Franco-​​Swiss border – is switched on.

If all goes well, the Large Hadron Col­lider (LHC) will help CERN phys­i­cists begin to extend their under­stand­ing of the basic build­ing blocks of matter and mass. If things get out of shape, though, there’s a very tiny chance that they’ll create a micro black hole and finish us all off.

A sober­ing thought, but should we be worried?

The short answer is no, at least not yet: Wed­nes­day sees the first full proton beam firing, but the high-​​energy col­li­sions that carry any risk of a black hole won’t start until after the LHC’s offi­cial open­ing on 21 October.

What then, though? Based on sci­ent­ists’ cur­rent under­stand­ing of matter – the so-​​called Stand­ard Model – the energy needed to create a micro black hole is far more than we could pos­sibly unleash in a particle accel­er­ator. As Wiki­pe­dia reas­sur­ingly explains:

To col­lide two aggreg­ates of fer­mi­ons to within a dis­tance of a Planck length with the cur­rently achiev­able mag­netic field strength would require a ring accel­er­ator [of] about 1000 light years in diameter.

Er, quite.

But the main reason they’ve built the LHC is to improve on the Stand­ard Model. Some sci­ent­ists wonder if a ‘higher-​​dimensional com­pon­ent to grav­ity’ could result in the form­a­tion of micro black holes at LHC that, unlike any naturally-​​occurring micro black holes, might be trav­el­ling slowly enough to hang around on the earth. If they were stable enough to start pulling bits of the earth into them, that would be Very Bad News.

Some­thing that should be reas­sur­ing, but some­how isn’t, is CERN’s blithe asser­tion (accord­ing to the BBC) that “any black holes will evap­or­ate quickly and harm­lessly”. Its page on the safety of the LHC does a much better job.

Don’t panic!

There are also con­cerns about strange­lets. They might sound like a bad hous­ing exper­i­ence, but they’re stranger. The worst-​​case scen­ario, should a strange­let be cre­ated, is that it could cause a chain reac­tion; chan­ging the centre of every atom on the planet from good old pro­tons and neut­rons into new­fangled strangelets.

The good news is that nobody even knows whether strange­lets exist, let alone what it would feel like to sud­denly become a strange­let in a strange land. Even if they do exist, there’s another good reason not to be wor­ried about strange­lets – they’re less likely to be cre­ated in a high-​​energy particle accel­er­ator like LHC than in any of the other, lower-​​energy accel­er­at­ors that have been fail­ing to create them for decades.

In fact the over­whelm­ing sci­entific con­sensus is that there’s no pos­sible way the LHC could bring about some­thing apocalyptic.

So the good news is that it’s not the end of the world, but there’s bad news: you do still need to do your Christ­mas shopping.

IMAGE by Flickr user gamsiz &

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2008-​​09-​​09 21:54:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

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