Scientists are about to fire up the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator. The 13-mile long circular tunnel runs through Switzerland, and a bit of France. The object of the game (the $8 billion game, by the way) is to smash protons into each other, replicating the conditions an instant after the Big Bang.
The practical applications for this? None.
The prize? Possibly answering a key question about everything. The search for the Higgs boson, a particle that’s not yet discovered, but theorized. Physicists believe that the Higgs — sometimes called the “God Particle” — is what creates mass.
Sadly, there’s been a mild media frenzy (including CNN, which published an AP story on the topic last June) focused not on the potential for discovery, but on concerns that there’s a theoretical chance that smashing these two proton streams together at nearly the speed of light will create tiny black holes that will unite, swallow up the Large Hadron Collider, then swallow up Switzerland, France, Earth, and the rest of the solar system.
As I understand it, there’s a universe of difference between the massive black holes of space that swallow up matter, and the tiny ones that would be generated in the LHC, each with a lifespan of a tiny fraction of a nanosecond.
That hasn’t stopped a wave of online protests, and a lawsuit in US court to stop the project (the US Department of Energy is a participant in the collider experiment).
Okay, it should be clear by now that particle physics is not my strong suit. Botany isn’t either, and Walter Wagner, the guy who filed the lawsuit, is a card-carrying botanist. He also filed a similar suit against the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which has been operating at Brookhaven National Labs since 2000, with no apparent impact to Life As We Know It.
I’d love to hear your take on all this. If you share Mr. Wagner’s concerns, please get your comments in by 3:30AM ET Wednesday. If not, take your time. I’m pretty sure the world will still be here tomorrow, when testing begins, or through the next month as the tests complete and they try out the Real Thing. If I’m wrong, I’ll buy every one of you a nice lunch. But I’m pretty sure we’ll go back to destroying the world the slow, methodical, hard way, and not in a flash while you’re sleeping tonight.
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