Are we all going to die on Wednesday?
Article from: Sunday Herald Sun
Michael Hanlon
September 07, 2008 12:00am
THE majority of scientists say we have nothing to fear, but there are others who are not so sure.
The minority have raised the spectre of two nightmare scenarios, two ends of the world.
They fear a "black hole" - sucking in all matter - may be created when a huge machine is switched on deep below the Swiss-French border on Wednesday.
In the first scenario, there is little warning.
For maybe a month, there would be no sign that life was about to come to an abrupt and nasty end for us all.
Then, earthquakes would start unexpectedly, alerting geologists to something terribly and unimaginably amiss.
After a few days, the seismic disturbances would reach catastrophic proportions.
Cities would be levelled and swollen oceans, in a series of mega-tsunamis, would slam into the continents' coasts.
The fact that the earthquakes were striking randomly, instead of along well-known geological fault lines, would be proof something devastating was afoot.
Finally, the end would come, in a disaster of Biblical proportions.
Earth would start to crack up; molten lava would wash over the land and the seas would start to boil; mega-hurricanes and cyclones would level buildings and forests; eventually, mountains would crumble as Earth's crust continued to disintegrate.
The fabric of the planet would start to disappear, trillions of tonnes of rock, water, air and life sucked into a whirlpool of unimaginable force.
From space, our blue-and-white home would appear to vanish down a plughole in a flash.
At least in that scenario we would have a little time, perhaps, to come to terms with the end.
But a second doomsday scenario is even more terrifying, with no warning.
In an instant - about 1/20th of a second - Earth would simply vanish from space.
Less than two seconds later, the moon would follow.
Eight minutes later, the sun would be ripped apart, followed by the rest of the planets in the solar system and onwards, a wave of destruction caused by a rent in the fabric of space itself, spreading out from our world at the speed of light.
Certainly, such scenarios are unlikely, so why should we be even discussing Armageddon? Because a gargantuan machine - the biggest, most expensive scientific experiment in history, the
Large Hadron Collider - will be started on Wednesday.
But even though designed to answer the fundamental questions of life, some scientists have claimed it could destroy the cosmos.
This gigantic $8.6 billion-plus atom-smasher has been built under the Swiss-French border near Geneva and is the most powerful device built for probing the secrets of the atom and the forces and particles that make up our universe.
It is a staggering device, occupying a train-sized tunnel 27km long, buried 100m underground, studded with gigantic, cathedral-sized, ring-shaped detectors where collisions between packets of "heavy" subatomic particles, "hadrons", reveal workings of matter and energy.
The LHC is, arguably, the most impressive machine built by mankind.
But a few people are convinced that it should never be turned on.
A lawsuit has been lodged at the European Court For Human Rights by a small group of maverick scientists.
They claim there is a small - but not zero - chance that when the LHC is activated it will create a mini-black hole, which would fall into the ground and swallow the Earth from within (scenario one), or, more bizarrely, trigger a catastrophic chain reaction in the very fabric of space and time - ripping apart the entire universe like the skin of a bursting balloon (scenario two).
Strangely, the group, led by a German chemist called Otto Rossler, is using the European Convention on human rights to argue that, should the LHC destroy the universe, it would "violate the right to life and right to private family life".
In fact, since 1994, when the collider was first mooted by the multi-national European nuclear research organisation, a small number of doomsayers have claimed that by replicating the conditions pertaining at the start of the universe (Big Bang), about 13,700 million years ago, there would be a small, but real, risk of an unstoppable cataclysm.
That is not a threat taken seriously by the scientists at CERN.
When I visited the place a couple of years ago, to see the collider being built, any mention of mini-black holes and other risks elicited only raised eyebrows and shrugs of derision.
The LHC was not designed to destroy the universe, but to fill in embarrassingly big gaps that run through our basic understanding of physics and how the universe works.
It could discover, for instance, what most of the universe is actually made of.
The ordinary "stuff" that we see around us - the atoms and molecules of water, carbon, iron, oxygen and the rest that make up our bodies, planet Earth, the moon, other planets, the sun and all the stars - actually accounts for only about 1/25th of the total "ingredients" of the cosmos.
Astronomers know that something else, invisible and mysterious, must pervade every inch of space, its subtle gravity affecting the movements of the galaxy.
This material - no one really has a clue what it is - is dubbed "dark matter" and it is hoped the collider may shed light on what it is, possibly uncovering a new type of particle.
Perhaps more embarrassingly, we do not know what it is that gives even ordinary matter its mass.
In the 1960s, British physicist Peter Higgs proposed the existence of a new particle, now known as the "Higgs Particle", which effectively lends "weight" to the stuff of the universe.
So important and fundamental is this hypothetical entity that it has been dubbed the "God particle".
It is hoped that if Higgs is right, the collider could finally clear up this mystery and, as a result of its super-powerful collisions, traces of this particle could emerge. That alone would justify a big chunk of the huge outlay.
By simulating the Big Bang, it is hoped the LHC will act as a "universe in a test tube", allowing scientists to examine exotic sub-atomic particles and forces and go some way to completing the work started by Einstein and other giants of 20th-century physics.
So is there really a chance that the scientists have made a terrible miscalculation and that their new toy could inadvertently kill us all?
Happily, the answer is no.
CERN's scientists have commissioned safety reviews, such as those that have taken place before other big particle accelerators have been turned on.
All have concluded there is no measurable risk.
Perhaps the best argument against the LHC doomsday scenario is that cosmic rays - natural high-energy particles from space - smash into Earth's atmosphere all the time with far more energy than this machine generates.
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Sep 06, 2008, 11:00:22 PM
The poor French. It always has being a question of mine as to why they were allowed to ressurect their country after ww2 ? After all its not as if they ever contributed anything to earn such a right.. The way they pander to so many of the worlds a holes begs disbelief.
