By Daniel Pagan
Last week, physicists, theologians, doomsayers and observers held their breath as switches were turned on to fire a laser through the Large Hadron Collider to see if everything was ready for the “big test” in October. The LHC crashes particles into each other to see inside them. This had some people screaming like they were on fire and even resulted in a lawsuit being filed in Hawaii. Science fiction writers have been working furiously, like monkeys dosed with LSD, coming up with nightmarish scenarios about the LHC destroying the world. A girl in India even killed herself due to nightmares about a LHC-induced disaster. Despite all the fear-mongering and the lawsuit, there is nothing to fear from the LHC. Instead, we should celebrate the fact that we may be able to solve the mysteries of particle physics and find out why the Big Bang occurred in the first place.
There are still unanswered questions that have been puzzling physicists since Newton got bonked on his head by an apple. Where does mass come from and how did it get created in the first place? Why do particles weigh the amount they do and why do some not have any mass? What is the universe made of and what is dark matter? Finally, what was the Big Bang like, why did it take place and how did it create the universe? With the LHC, scientists have a tool to try and find some answers.
Some physicists believe that the answer may lie in the elusive Higgs boson particle, theorized in 1964. Known as the God Particle, it may be responsible for matter having mass and for the creation of matter. The catch is that it has never been observed. Physicists hope the LHC will be able to find it by smashing particles together at incredible speeds and studying what this produces. Atoms have strong bonds and release a large amount of energy in their destruction– like a nuclear explosion. The LHC allows scientists to do this.
Given the complex nature of the LHC, it is understandable that people fear its awesome powers. But Martin Rees, an English astrophysict and President of the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, estimates that the probability of the LHC causing a global catastrophe is one in 50 million. He also said he wouldn’t lose any sleep over it and trusts the scientists who built it. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, did two reviews and couldn’t find any problems. The American Physical Society, the second largest organization of physicists, concluded the same thing. A lawsuit to stop the LHC experiment was rejected when the judge could find no basis for concerns about the LHC. Particle accelerators are common and many people have one in their house– a microwave oven, cathode ray tube TV or computer monitor. They all accelerate charged particles in vacuums with a high voltage– same principles, different machines and different scales.
It has been suggested that the LHC could produce micro-black holes that would swallow up the Earth. This claim has been dismissed as improbable. To make micro-black holes, there would need to be magnitudes more energy than can be produced in particle accelerators like the LHC. We don’t yet have any method to produce energy powerful enough. Stephen Hawking noted that a powerful hydrogen bomb using all the deuterium in all the water on Earth could create a black hole, but there is the question of if creating this bomb would work at all. After creation, any collision product would be unstable and immediately disintegrate– that is, the black hole would swallow itself after creation. Also, the collisions seen in particle accelerators happen all the time in nature such as in the Sun with its nuclear explosions and the atmosphere, where cosmic ray particles collide with each other. The high frequency of these collisions and our continued existence makes the LHC disaster worry seem insignificant.
Many interesting discoveries in science come up when prevailing theories are proven incorrect, like Einstein’s theory of relativity and our modern understanding of the atomic structure. If the LHC experiment finds no Higgs boson, many physics theories will be re-written. The LHC is an impressive human invention and we should celebrate that achievement instead of cowering in fear. We should look at what the LHC does and how it may answer the big questions. Regarding the Earth’s destruction, we’ll see what happens when the first high-energy collisions take place Oct. 21.