Giant Physics Donut Doesn't Swallow Earth Whole

Yesterday, the world waited impatiently, lawsuits pended, men in white coats and hard-hats held their breaths as the switch of a $6 billion science project was flicked on. Eyes were glued to giant screens in the NASA mission-control like command center. A second later, a spark on the screen, a sign that the protons are flowing properly and the world is not over. The entire room of scientists and quantum physicists cheered and embraced each other while the rest of the world sighed in relief.

As I sit here writing about the triumph of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) over years of speculation, criticism, and end of the world scenarios, I didn’t realize exactly how close we came to doomsday yesterday. A five-year collaboration with thousands of scientists from 60 nations worldwide, the 16.9-mile long tube stuffed 100 feet underground between the Swiss and French borders is the most expensive gadget ever built for high-energy physics.

Cooled to a chilly 1.9 Kelvin (-271c) required to keep the array of superconductive magnets running, the collider accelerates gold particles to 99.9% the speed of light on opposite paths and smashes them head-on. The resulting sub-atomic debris is the primary interest of physicists worldwide, as it could prove the existence of theoretic states of matter and other weird things like black holes, dark matter, Higgs Boson particles, anti-matter, and perhaps even other dimensions. The potential jackpot of this experiment is probably the Higgs Boson particle, which is the subatomic particle responsible for the existence of mass.

So why all the lawsuits, the breath-holding, and the theories that the Earth could instantly turn into a lifeless lump or be sucked in a mini-black hole? Simply put, people were misinformed and exaggerated the apocalyptic rumors to epic proportions.

When the project started in 2003, CERN, the joint-European physics lab financing and running the experiment, sponsored a safety report for the LHC. One of the facts estimated the amount of energy released by the colliding subatomic particles at 10^17 electrovolts (eV), equivalent to the energy of two colliding mosquitoes. Even so, since the beginning of its creation, Earth has been bombarded by cosmic rays up to 10^20 eV constantly.

Here I quote a statement from the safety report:

“Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programs on Earth already – and the planet still exists.”

Other planets in the solar system, our sun, and the rest of the universe have been the target of these high energy rays since the big bang about 14 billion years ago. The sun is a much bigger target than little Earth is, and if these collisions caused explosions, we would be observing them all over the universe already. Presuming that a microscopic black hole does form, it would instantly disappear by the existence of Hawking Radiation, a type of radiation that physicist Stephen Hawkings theorized to be proportional to the size of a black hole.

However, it proves vital to be skeptical, especially of a physics lab after it has poured years and billions of euros and dollars into a science experiment. If Hawking Radiation proves to be nonexistent and a stable microscopic black hole forms, it would sink to the center of Earth and begin devouring us all at one particle every few years. If this were true, than all the cosmic ray bombardment that the Earth has taken until now would put 0.5 kg of black holes at the center of the Earth today.

The real test is later this month when the scientists finish calibrating the collider and start smashing atoms. Perhaps yesterday was not the time to celebrate. If the end of the world rests on some big science project at the hands of a few physicists in two weeks, then perhaps between now and apocalypse I would break out some bottles of French Wines and Cubans, go skydiving, and really indulge before the end of time.