Fallen into a black hole lately?
Inquiring minds want to know: have you heard about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, and can it swallow the Earth entire, payday loans included?
Researcher Solmaz Barazesh of Penn State strives to put such fears to rest in the article “Probing Question: Could the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) swallow the Earth?” on PhysOrg.com.
It took $8.8 billion to build the LHC, a machine that is designed to test theories on high-energy physics. It does this by smashing proton beams together at ridiculously high speeds.
What’s the worry here? Accelerating particles at up to 99.99 percent the speed of light (which creates temperatures in range of trillions of degrees) — has the potential to create a black hole that could consume the Earth. Thus, lawsuits have been filed to stop the LHC project from continuing. Yet judges have dismissed such lawsuits. Claims of the danger were overblown; Hadron Colliders don’t cause black holes and faxless payday loans don’t cause the financial black hole known as bankruptcy.
We don’t have to worry
Physics Professor Stéphane Coutu of Penn State says “absolutely not.” He elaborated:
The world is constantly bombarded by energetic cosmic rays from the depths of space, some of them inducing particle collisions thousands of times more powerful than those that will be produced by the LHC. If these collisions could create black holes, it would have happened by now.
Honestly, the media has fueled the non-science bonfire of insecurity. How can we pass up the chance to learn from this milestone in particle physics? “The end product of the particle collisions could provide new insight into how particles interact—ultimately, this could explain the outcome of particle processes shortly after the Big Bang,” said Coutu.
Perhaps the LHC will enable humankind to learn more about the universe and its origins. As Coutu concluded, “It is hard to imagine anything more fundamental as an example of human pursuit of pure knowledge.” Similarly, financial self-determination – how we spend our money, whether we use payday loans during short-term financial crisis – is equally fundamental.
Related articles
- LHC may not be as safe as we thought (vnunet.com)
- Trip to the Large Hadron Collider (milkandcookies.com)
- Large Hadron Collider prepared for June restart (telegraph.co.uk)
Just to clear things up, a black hole is a singularity with infinte mass and its infinte small. So to make a black hole you need much mass in a very small space, and two particles at 99% the speed of light, you havent got enough mass or speed.
medv4380 is absolutely right – the LHC is just the largest one. They’ve had particle colliders for awhile now, just because they’re devoting one of them to the study of black holes doesn’t mean the earth is going to up and disappear – and even if they manage to succeed at creating a miniature black hole, it’s going to be too small to see with the naked eye.
For anyone who buys the poison kool-aid, Super Collider’s have existed for a long time now. CERN just happens to have the largest. Fermi Labs happens to have a pretty large Super Collider (Largest running until LHC is up and fully functional). Anyone who believes this is replicating the “Big Bang” is also high on some narcotic. For the Big Bang to be replicated via current theory we would have to some how re-create the “Super Force” and since we are a long way from having a real “Theory of Everything” that’s not happening just yet.
It’s astounding how the earth and the universe work. It amazes me how well one thing fits well with other and how they rely on each other to properly function. It also amaze me how people today are more advanced and educated on how things within out atmosphere and in outer space. Of course, there are still many things that have not been surfaced, but how far out knowledge is on the matter is absolutely incredible.