I am not talking about the possible (probable?) election of the McCain Palin ticket or some new mutation of avian flu, I am literally talking about the end of the world.
Tonight/Tomorrow, at 1:30 AM EST (thats the morning in Geneva, Switzerland), the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), as massive physics experiment built at CERN, will be switched on for the first time. Before I talk about the LHC I also want to mention a few really cool things about CERN. Besides doing lots of physics experiments, they also invented the internet.
Back in my senior year in high school, while making my college visits, I met with Dr. Keith Riles (incidentally I have him as a physics professor this semester) and he told me the story of who really invented the internet. Sorry, it wasn't Al Gore. In 1989, the people at CERN were trying to figure out how to send data out to universities for analysis. This was basically a side project that people worked on after they went home from work. A guy named Tim Berners-Lee came up with a solution that is now known as the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (hence the "http" before the website address). To promote his idea, he simply placed a computer on a desk outside his office with a sign that read, "Word Wide Web. Try it!"
I bring this up because CERN has re-invented the internet in preparation for the LHC. There will be SO much data generated by the experiment that an entirely new web needed to be created. This new technology has been named "The Grid" and will be
10,000 times faster than the best connection you can get from your cable provider. Of course, for the near future this tech will be reserved for huge installations and the academic community because it so complicated, expensive, and you don't really need it, but Its still really cool.
Ok, back to the LHC. The first task will be circulating a beam of protons around the 17 mile underground loop. Later, a second beam will be circulated in the opposite direction and after some highly precise alignment...BANG!
The basic idea is this: Make two things go really really fast, smash them together, watch what happens to all the debris, repeat.
Now of course its infinitely more complicated than that, hinted to by the $10 billion dollar price tag, but this kind of thing has been done before, just with less energy and on a smaller scale.
The main thrust of this experiment is to simulate the conditions of the universe less than a millionth of a second after the big bang. Hopefully, a new particle will pop out. One of the most desired particles, the Higgs-Boson, is for now just a theoretical construct that answers a fairly important question of why things have mass. If its found, well knowing why we have mass is kind of a big deal.
Now getting back to the important stuff like...the end of the world. Members of the Flat Earth Society (not really) and other uneducated knit-wits with the help of literally 2 or 3 crackpot physicists (did I mention CERN has thousands of scientists from all over the world working on this project so 2 or 3 is meaningless) continue to insist that this experiment is going to create a black hole that gobbles up Earth and must be stopped at all costs.
Thats right. Giant, freedom hating, blasphemous, black holes, and they're out to destroy YOUR life because they hate YOU!
So a couple of things. Black holes? Yes, its true. Theoretically, black holes could be created by this experiment. Actually, it would be REALLY REALLY COOL if they were. Here is the caveat: they will be so tiny that they could NEVER...EVER...do anything to harm anyone. Period. End of story. No matter what Sarah Palin or Jesus tells you. So get over it and let smart people do great things.
And if the world really does end tomorrow, I will find that hilarious.
For a much better article by someone who probably knows what they are talking about read this:
CERN and the LHC:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/26016
The Grid:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/future-internet.ars
This is one of the ATLAS detectors that will look at the debris from the collisions. This thing is HUGE and was actually built at University of Michigan (and other places but who cares).
Just to give you a sense of how big these things actually are.
According to wikipedia, this is data taken from smashing two gold atoms into each other. Each streak represents a particle that flew out of the collision
**EDIT** I apologize that was such a random post, I wrote it in my 3 minute breaks between classes, I will clean it up a bit later if I get time.
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