Buried beneath hundreds of feet of pastureland, straddling the border of France and Switzerland, lies the world’s largest and most powerful scientific instrument… a “big bang simulator.” Seventeen miles in circumference, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider uses more than 3 million amperes of current to accelerate counter-rotating beams of protons to within a small fraction of the speed of light. These protons acquire mass as they approach relativistic speeds… the faster and faster the proton packets go the more massive they become as energy is converted directly into matter.
In just a few weeks high-energy physicists operating the big machine will coax the proton beams into head-on collision. Conditions at the heart of the accelerator will be similar to the extreme temperatures and energy densities that existed a tiny fraction of a second after the the moment of creation. By studying the debris from these collisions scientists hope to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of “everything.” They may even see traces of the elusive Higgs Boson, the so-called “God Particle” thought to give matter properties of mass.
But, there is the more remote chance that a microscopic black hole may be spawned. Most scientists dismiss claims of any real danger that the Earth itself could be swallowed up and plunged into the abyss of “spaghettification,” since any microscopic black holes would likely evaporate in a billionth of a second or less. But one can never be too sure. Best advice... on the eve of beam collision day, have a margarita or two and kiss your ass goodbye. Bottoms up!
UPDATE (21 Sep 08): The day of our extinction has been postponed at least a couple of months due to an electrical failure followed by a helium leak in the collider.
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