Cool Gadgets and Beyond

Well, the Swiss and the French seem to be pulling it off…construction of the Large Hadron Collider which is located on the border of Switzerland and France near Geneva, is proceeding apace. The 26.659 Km or 16.565 mile circumference tunnel is complete, the supporting equipment is being installed now, and trials are scheduled to begin in 2Q07, with the giant gadget to be fully operational by 2008.

The LHC is designed to take large hadrons (such as protons and neutrons), accelerate them to 99.999999% of the speed of light in the collider, smash them together to allow CERNoids to study the detritus. … uh, wait just a minute…perhaps they meant that they plan to take regular hadrons and smash them together in a large collider … it’s so confusing.

In any event, the work they’re doing at CERN may result in some good news and some bad news for you personally.

The good news is that their work may well result in discovery of the elusive Higgs boson and so help explain why matter has mass.

And the (potentially) bad news is that there is a vanishingly small, aka teentsy weentsy in technical terms, chance that Large Hadron Collider could destroy Earth. How so? The physics of TeV colliders like LHC predicts that they should produce about 1 mini black hole per second even after allowing for the effects of Voloshin Suppression. The good part of the bad news is that these BHs will have a very short life span, on the order of 10^-26 seconds and so will evaporate almost instantaneously. Some have estimated that the chances of planetary destruction at about 10^-40 … which is reassuringly low.

But, in case their math is a bit off, we attach this gratuitous image of Switzerland being pulled into the black hole just created by the Large Hadron Collider.

Giant device is closing in on Universe’s tiniest secret