Our last day on earth

September 8, 2008

Large Hadron Collider ready to roll

At some point Wednesday (late Tuesday here in the U.S.), the switch will
be thrown for the initial testing of the Large Hadron Collider on the
border of Switzerland and France. The 17-mile underground loop will
eventually smash stuff together with seven times the force available at
the Fermilab collider in Illinois in an attempt to see what the
universe was like a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. The holy
grail for particle researchers will be the Higgs boson, the lone
particle in the Standard Theory yet to be detected.



The LHC will circulate protons around in only one direction for a
month or so to kick the tires, and then cycle them in the other
direction for more testing. Once everyone is happy, it's a go for it to
become a fully armed and operational collider: The streams of protons
circling in opposite directions will be guided into one of four areas
where they will hopefully crash into each other to reveal the
sub-atomic goop before almost instantly decaying back into more common
particles.

Some have raised the specter of the LHC
creating subatomic black holes and other phenomena that will devour us
all, despite nature having already conducted its own more-powerful
collisions with cosmic rays. The objectors to the LHC say that the big
difference between the cosmic ray collisions and those in the collider
is that the LHC collisions are head-on, causing the black holes to
stand still and not fly off into the nothingness.

The problem with that complaint, though, is that the beams of
protons aren't hitting each other directly; they're crossing in an X
pattern, like your old Hot Wheels race track where the cars are meant
to collide in the middle. With an angled impact, any resulting weird
stuff will fly off in odd directions and into space. There's also the
theory of black hole evaporation (aka "Hawking radiation") that says
all black holes are inevitably doomed to fizzle away into nothingness,
with lifespan directly related to size. According to the generally
accepted theory, these subatomic black holes will poof away in
.000000000000000000000000001 seconds.

CERN, the lab running the project, has commissioned several reports
that refute these fears. While it's not unwise to mistrust a company
policing itself, the most recent report has been peer-reviewed and
published in the Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics.
Questioning the report's authors is one thing, but the peers who
double-checked everything before publication have no reason to lie or
make any dangers look less probable than they may be. (You can read a PDF of the report itself.)

For some reason, the quote from the opening pages of Douglas Adams' "Restaurant at the End of the Universe" comes to mind:

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly
what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly
disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and
inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has
already happened.


The theory has never been tested. People believe that this will cause a massive black hole that will suck up the earth and kill all humanity. Truley, we hope this wont happen. However, tomorrow might be humanities last day in the universe. Think about how far we have come, what has happen in your life. Do u like it? Consider this. I believe we all should think about our past, and think of everyday as our last. Hopefully, it wont. I'll be playing Halo 3 and COD4 all day tomorrow. I'll wait for you.

Hopefully, signing off for now, not forever,
Stewie2552

oooooh im scared

im guessing u dont believe it........i hope i dont have to say, "i told u so"

i really wouldnt care if the world blew up tonight or watever we all gonna die any ways no use fighting it

wow, thats a nice thing to say. lol

If its gonna blow up anything it'll be Switzerland and France. I doubt something of that structure could render a black hole.

Second, its 95% fake, considering I saw that picture atleast two years ago when someone said they found Russia's secret weapon.