I can just see Dr. Evil turning his pinky up in excitement over the Large Hadron Collider. I’d venture to say that most of the general public has no idea what a particle collider is, or what it does. If the media would stop their reports of Britney Spear’s latest episode, and reported on this there would be a larger debate over its’ existence.

So what about a Large Hadron Collider, could cause such a fuss that it’s more important than Britney’s escapades? Well in the dumbest way of explaining it, there’s a small chance that the device could bring an end to life on Earth as we know it. The LHC, as most experts refer to it as, is a huge particle collider that is being built in the hills of Switzerland and France (yeah, this thing is big enough to span across two countries). It is 17 miles in circumfrence, and is buried nearly 100 meters underground. The project is spear headed, by the brilliant minds over at CERN. These people were responsible for the beginnings of the internet, and a number of scientific breakthroughs in the past 30 years.

So just why is CERN creating a device that could produce such a disastrous outcome? They are trying to research certain sub atomic particles, which before would have been considered impossible to study. More specifically, they are trying to produce, what is called Higgs boson. The theory of Higgs boson, is how massless matter develops into matter which has mass. Finding Higgs boson could lead to discovery of how the universe started, and where it is going.

The problem with the LHC, is that not even the smartest minds in the world know what this thing is going to produce. Most of the experts agree that nothing that is harmful to humans will be created. Some theories that have been speculated on is that the collider could produce micro-blackholes. Blackholes, you may have heard or seen in science fiction novels, and on the Discovery channel. While the LHC wouldn’t be powerful enough to create a blackhole as we know it, it could still produce a miniature sized one. Most experts believe that if such a blackhole were to be created, it would almost instantly breakup. But there is another side to the argument that says there is a chance that such a blackhole could get caught in the Earth’s gravitational pull, and end up enveloping the entire planet.

Walter Wagner, a nuclear safety officer, believes there’s enough chance of a catastrophic event that he has filed a lawsuit against the construction of the collider. While not completely ending the construction and research, he believes that more time is needed to asses the safety of the machine. He wants another four months to do the safety checking. Before the lawsuit, the collider was being prepped to “switch on” in May. But it looks as though that date will be pushed back to later this year, or early into 09.

I really don’t know what to think about this situation. I would like to believe all the brilliant minds that say everything is going to be groovy. But they aren’t even positive of what this machine is going to produce. So I’m not too upset about the delay that Wagner is causing with his lawsuit. But I definitely want to see what the LHC produces, I’m kind of hoping for demon aliens to pop out like in DOOM.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 7:17 am and is filed under Future Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.