Ask an Amateur Scientist – The Large Hadron Collider

By Brian Thompson
I. The Setup

There’s a machine nearing the final stages of construction which, when activated, will destroy our planet. No, Lex Luthor has nothing to do with it. Gorilla Grodd’s involvement hasn’t been confirmed, but there have been several unexplained banana peels spotted around the construction site. You’d think that a doomsday device like this would be built in secret by a team of red jumpsuit-wearing henchmen. Perhaps you might find it buried near the Earth’s core or in geosynchronous orbit above the dark side of the moon. You definitely wouldn’t expect to find it right out in the open near Geneva, Switzerland. Those people are supposed to be neutral! What are they doing teaming up with the Legion of Doom?

Whether or not the project was dreamed up in the mess hall at Arkham Asylum, the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will go online this summer, and it will be the most powerful particle collider ever built. The idea of any collider is to smash particles into each other and watch what happens. Actually, the motivations of the scientists involved are not unlike your motivations in strapping a Lego man on board a bottle rocket. But whereas you were trying to discover the exact temperature to turn that yellow-faced smile into a melty frown, these people want to understand how the universe ticks. And just like the exploding Lego man experiment, the more powerful the particle collision, the cooler the results. In fact, so many scientists are anxious to get their gloved paws on this thing that 2,000 physicists from 34 countries have collaborated with the world’s best universities and labs to build the LHC.

[nms:lego men,1,0]

But according to two guys named Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho, these scientists may as well consider themselves mad and turn in their lab coats for purple and green spandex. Wagner and Sancho (no, that’s not the name of an ‘80s cop show, so don’t bother picturing them sliding over the hood of a Camaro) have filed a lawsuit in the Honolulu’s Federal District Court to force a halt to the construction of the LHC until more research is done into the effects of its experiments. See, the thing is, Wagner and Sancho think that the LHC might accidentally create black holes or other quantum baddies that could, you know, suck the Earth into an oblivion and destroy all life as we know it. But really, after surviving the release of Bio-Dome on home video, is there any man-made abomination that could destroy the human race?

II. The Findings

Look, I don’t understand everything about quantum physics, and unlike Deepak Chopra, I’m not going to pretend I do. The basic idea here is that shooting subatomic particles at each other at Speed Force-level velocities results in a kind of energy explosion. The particles hopefully break into their smaller components, and we can very briefly get a glimpse of what makes energy energy and, subsequently, what makes stuff stuff. Think about it for a second. Atoms are made of protons, electrons, and neutrons, and those particles are made of even smaller elementary particles. At a certain level, this is all just massless energy. But put these things together, and you end up with stuff as massive as the sun or even Dom DeLuise. The transition from massless energy to massive matter is a mystery of physics. Several elementary particles have been theorized and later observed, but the Higgs boson has still managed to escape our lustful gaze. We’re pretty sure that slinky so and so is hiding somewhere (most likely under the covers), but we haven’t seen it yet. Which is too bad, because its discovery would go a long way toward explaining the no-mass/mass missing link. And it could also lead to the Holy Grail of quantum physics: the Grand Unified Theory. (Fun fact: scientists once thought they’d found the Grand Unified Theory in a castle full of girls obsessed with spanking and oral sex, but it turned out to be a dead end.) The hope with the LHC is that in such energetic collisions, the Higgs boson might show its ugly face.

Wagner and Sancho (Guns for Hire!), however, believe that in addition to slipping the makeup of the universe into something a little more comfortable, the LHC collisions could also create unwanted quantum monsters-specifically, black holes and strangelets.

I don’t know how much you know about black holes from watching Disney’s The Black Hole (other than the fact that that little robot was just the cutest thing ever), but it is theoretically possible that particles slammed into each other at a high enough speed could collapse into a black hole. Such a black hole would fall through the planet, sucking all the Earth’s matter into it and finally euthanizing Pat Robertson. That’s the bright side. It would also kill us all, so that would be a bummer. But the physicists involved in planning the LHC (remember, we’re talking 2,000 of them here-and only 47% virgins) have taken this possibility into account. They are, after all, both scientists and human beings. They’re not in the business of destroying the Earth (or are they??). They’ve concluded that the LHC won’t be able to create collisions with a high enough energy to form black holes. And even if they did, the black holes would almost instantaneously evaporate due to Hawking radiation (look that stuff up…if you want your mind blown, man). Wagner and Sancho (Detectives at Large!) counter that argument by saying that Hawking radiation is only theoretical, and we don’t know for sure that it would destroy a black hole before it sucked up all our sweet old grandmothers. However, the same theoretical physics that allow for the creation of black holes from particle collisions require the existence of Hawking radiation. If one is real, then the other one has to be also.

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Strangelets aren’t quite as popular as black holes (yet, oddly, Dr. Strange is infinitely more popular than Black Lightning), but the fears about them are just about the same. They’re theoretical bundles of quarks that are supposed to transform any matter they touch into more strangelets. They’re kind of like that song you can’t get out of your head except that they might turn you into pure energy. While there’s no theory saying that strangelets would evaporate all by themselves, there’s also no reason to think the LHC could create them. According to a study conducted by MIT, Yale, and Princeton, particles slam into the moon (for just one example) at much higher speeds than anything the LHC could duplicate, and it hasn’t been transformed into strangelets. You can, however, spot the man on the moon flinching from time to time and asking the universe to “cut it out.”

III. The Conclusion

Phil Plait over at the Bad Astronomy blog (to whom I owe a debt of thanks for pointing me in the right direction for this article) reluctantly brings up a couple of facts about Wagner and Sancho (Rescue Rangers!). Several years ago, Wagner tried to obtain a similar injunction over the Brookhaven collider for the same reasons he’s afraid of the LHC. The Brookhaven collider, though less powerful than the new one, never caused any kind of quantum apocalypse. Unless-wait…okay, we’re all still here. But it has been a boon to the study of physics. Wagner may be a physicist himself, but it seems he may just be a little bit paranoid.

Sancho, however, is kind of a nut. He’s a promoter of an oddball “Unification Theory” which posits that all matter in the universe follows an organic structure like a giant organism. You can try and make out the gobbledygook here. Much of it is completely unintelligible, but the few assertions I was able to pick out are simply wrong. Of course, I may just be buying into the “dogma” of “modern science”, which Sancho conscientiously warns us about at the end of his manifesto/paper.

So the bottom line here is that there’s really nothing to worry about with the LHC. You can sleep soundly this summer knowing that whatever’s going on outside of Geneva won’t result in your ceasing to exist before you wake up. Unless I’m secretly employed by Brainiac and am writing this from the safety of his skull ship. In which case, enjoy your oblivion as I get my kicks by shaking the Bottle City of Kandor.

About The Amateur Scientist: Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years.

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