There Will Be No Swiss Armageddon: Large Hadron Collider

ARMAGEDDON out of here: - Satan is upon us:

MOSCOW. (Yury Zaitsev for RIA Novosti) - A black hole will appear in mid-July on the border between France and Switzerland, swallowing up first Europe and then the entire planet. Such are the apocalyptic forecasts being made ahead of the scheduled launching, in three weeks, of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The ambitious research project, aimed at looking into superconductivity, high energies and God or devil knows what else, is an international effort involving several countries, including Russia. The report that the LHC will also produce a black hole is the most talked about item…

The hadron collider straddling the French-Swiss border is a ring accelerator designed to collide charged particles into each other at massive speeds. When it is turned on more than a billion collisions per second will occur inside it. The huge circumference of the collider ring (26.65 km) will allow the LHC to whisk particles to speeds close to that of light and produce super-high energy collisions.

The LHC is expected to generate collision energies of proton bunches (rather than traveling in a continuous beam, particles in accelerators are generally “bunched” together) as high as 7 teraelectronvolts (TeV). Electron-proton bunches will collide with energies of up to 1.5 TeV, and bunches of heavy ions, such as lead, with a total energy of over 1,250 TeV. This is nothing short of a new phenomenon in physics, in particular the likely confirmation of a theory that teraelectronic energies and corresponding gravitation give rise to black holes.

Some theorists, however, and the public at large have started voicing fears that when such processes are modeled there will be a danger of collider experiments getting out of hand and giving rise to a chain reaction that could destroy our planet. The most widely expressed fear is that microscopic black holes may appear and capture the surrounding matter.

Switzerland is finished - but will we notice?

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Anorak

Posted: 21st, June 2008 | In: Strange But True Comments (10) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink