The Large Hadron Collider is a device built in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries. This partical collider is built in a 17 mile (27 km) long underground ring lined with over 9,000 magnets, and smashes particles together at high speeds in order to learn more about the origins of mass and other physics.
Some people are concerned that this particle accelerator could create a black hole that would swallow Earth from the inside out. There have actually been legal attempts to shut the experimenting down. But scientists assure us that even if this did occur, the miniscule black hole would evaporate within one-trillionth or one-millionth of a second.
Another fear is that the Large Hadron Collider will create strangelets, a theoretical particle that would convert anything it touches into more strangelets. Whether or not it’s of any comfort, the argument for this is that nothing bad has happened so far, so there shouldn’t be any worry.
Perhaps of stronger comfort is that studies show us Earth, just like everything else in space, is bombarded with cosmic ray particles at far higher energies than those being smashed in the LGC, and we’ve never witnessed the creation of anything Earth-threatening by these occurrences. Yet.
The fact is, although the chance is slim scientists are hopeful that a black hole will be created. This would provide an opportunity to study one and possibly provide evidence of Hawking Radiation, the only radiation predicted to be emitted from a black hole’s event horizon. If any black holes were to be created by the LGH it is thought that they would be so tiny as to have next to no mass, exerting a near-zero gravitational pull on matter. At this point even if it didn’t quickly evaporate and began to accrue mass, it would be so slow that the miniscule black hole wouldn’t attain measurable growth for billions and billions of years.
According to Discovery News, the leading theory explaining how micro-black holes are formed in our Universe explores the possibility of extra-dimensions. In this theory, more dimensions exist than the four we experience (three spatial plus space-time, of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity). The four dimensions we are aware of are called a brane, and other branes exist alongside us and exert force against our four-dimensional brane. Part of what brings scientists to suppose this possibility is it seems the only explanation of why gravity exerts the force that it does. In this theory “gravity is ‘leaking’ into our 4D universe from the neighboring branes.”
Does all this sound like it jumped right out of a futuristic sci-fi story? Well, where do you think they get the ideas for that stuff!
Can’t say it enough, folks: the future is now.
Learn more about the Large Hadron Collider at wikipedia >>
Other sources: Discovery News and Fox News Science