Amidst a bunch of conspiracy theorist nonsense, CERN will be switching on the Large Hadron Collider to begin the process of experimentation tomorrow (it’s already been switched on twice before for testing).
At roughly 3:30 a.m. Eastern time, scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, say they will try to send the first beam of protons around a 17-mile-long racetrack known as the Large Hadron Collider, 300 feet underneath the Swiss-French border outside Geneva.
And a generation of physicists, watching from control rooms and auditoriums on the scene, on Webcasts at webcast.cern or on Eurovision will meet their destiny. The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, outside Chicago, will hold a “pajama party” for staff members and journalists to watch the events live from a remote control room.
The collider, 14 years and $8 billion in the making, is the most expensive scientific experiment to date. Thousands of physicists from dozens of countries have been involved in building the collider and its huge particle detectors. It is designed to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts — seven times the energy of the next largest machine in the world, Fermilab’s Tevatron — and smash them together.
The experiment being conducted here is really cool–it’s an examination of the fundamental particles of the universe and a chance to confirm some physics theory about how everything is put together. It’s a shame that some conspiracy theorist nutjobs are hogging up a lot of bandwidth on the subject. But in case you are worried, I wrote a long article debunking most of the “end of the world” nonsense about a month ago that you can read here. It boils down to this:
The bottom line here appears to be that the odds of the LHC doing anything to destroy the Earth are pretty small. Maybe not zero, but pretty small. As physicist Princeton physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed joked, the nature of quantum mechanics is such that there’s an infinitestimally small chance of just about anything happening. So he supposes that it’s possible that when it’s switched on “[t]he Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”
I’m pretty sure we can handle dragons.
Image Credit: Image Editor
