Reboot 2.0 - Will Super-Science Doom Us All? (Let’s Hope Not)

September 9th, 2008

Another year has slipped through our fingers, but let’s try this reboot 2.0 with tomorrow’s inaugural debut of the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator on steroids built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.

It’s the biggest particle accelerator in the world, and tomorrow scientists will switch it on to hurl tiny particles against one another in the hopes of plumbing the depths of hidden dimensions, invisible dark matter and some sort of weird particle called a “Higgs boson.”

A woman walking near the world's largest superconducting solenoid magnet (CMS), at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)'s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particule accelerator in Geneva, in 2007. Particle physicists were to fire up the world's biggest atom-smasher on Wednesday in a mission to answer some of the most perplexing questions in the cosmos. Credit: AFP/File/Fabrice Coffini
A look at a giant magnet, part of the Large Hadron Supercollider. Credit: AFP/File/Fabrice Coffini
The Large Hadron Collider is an atom-smashing accelerator designed to fling a proton beam around a 17-mile tunnel at nearly the speed of light, so fast it makes a complete lap 11,000 times a second at full steam. You can read all about it here.Apparently some folks are afraid it’s going to kill us all when its switched on, since they expect it to create a tiny black hole that will gobble up the Earth. The BBC and National Geographic portrayed such a scenario as one of four world-ending disasters a couple of years ago, and while I admit that being sicked into the event horizon of a singularity is frightening, the mighty eggheads like Stephen Hawking says it won’t happen and that’s good enough for me.

Incidentally, the world of sf hasn’t missed this one either. In “The Void” (It will swallow you hole!), scientists fire up a supercollider that spawns a black hole which, you know, pretty much sucks. (See that’s a supercollider pun.)I actually own that movie, and it apparently has a fan club. I should probably check it out again for pointers before tomorrow’s atom-smashing goodness.

Animated explanation of how the LHC Grid works: http://tinyurl.com/5ll4g5

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