Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Be Not Afraid [of the LHC SuperCollider]
Posted by Mark on Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 1:17 PM
Deep in the bowels of Europe this morning, very smart people activated the enormous, expensive Large Haron Collider, the world's largest atom smasher.
You may recall that the LHC was maybe sorta gonna have the potential to create a black hole that would devour the earth in a matter of minutes, a (quite unlikely, but, you know, petrifying-on-account-of-the-whole-black-hole-thing) potentiality which sent people dashing to the reassuring arms of science, religion, and Yahoo! Answers.
But the world is still here, the Large Hadron Collider did not destroy the earth, please continue on with your day-to-day existence, and, Sharon hastens to add via ichat, there is no need to raid the supermarkets and cheat on our spouses as if we are in the midst of a doomsday scenario or the novel Blindness by Jose Saramago.
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It should be noted that the Collider has not yet fulfilled its capabilities. In fact, there are no experiments scheduled for several months in which the LHC will surpass the accomplishments of other supercolliders. Once we're colliding proton beams charged at 5 TeV - 7 TeV, that's when things get nuts: Higgs bosons start flying, volcanos erupt blue lava, black holes appear, etc.
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