The Improbable Research blog (from the folks who hand out the Ig Noble Prizes), today brought my attention to a New Yorker article about the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is being built at CERN on the French/Swiss border near Geneva, and when it comes online will be the largest particle accelerator ever built.
Out of curiosity, I asked Wikipedia how the LHC compared to the Superconducting Super Collider, which was partially built in Texas before being canceled by Congress in 1993. The answer: the LHC will achieve energies of 7 TeV (trillion electron volts). The SSC was designed to achieve 20 TeV.
The New Yorker piece is the most recent in a string of articles that ponder the question of whether the LHC will accidentally create a mini-black hole that will swallow up the Earth and presumably our neighborhood of space.
The subject is fascinating, but in my opinion completely pointless. Humorously:
'...CERN officials are now instructed, with respect to the L.H.C.’s world-destroying potential, “not to say that the probability is very small but that the probability is zero.”'
Regardless of the PR, there is still a small chance that this could happen. But if it did, we wouldn't be around to care. So why care now? Humanity, from a big enough context, consists of a hair on a wart on a frog on a bump on a log on the bottom of the multiverse. We wouldn't even merit a paragraph in the obits of the Universe Gazette.
Comments (1)
One has to wonder if a mini-black hole would swallow the Earth instantaneously, or if the event horizon would expand more slowly, allowing everyone on Earth to vainly attempt running away from it in all directions, then cowering in a huge mass of population on the opposite side of the globe (somewhere just off the coast of New Zealand) until ultimately succumbing to the Hole. I vote for the latter scenario.
Posted by no meato burrito | May 17, 2007 10:15 AM
Posted on May 17, 2007 10:15