Two nightmare scenarios, two ends of the world. In the first,
there is little warning. For maybe a month there would be no sign
that life was about to come to an abrupt and nasty end for all
living things on Earth.
Then, earthquakes would start unexpectedly, alerting geologists
that something terrible, unimaginable, was amiss.
After a few days, these seismic disturbances would reach
catastrophic proportions.
Cities would be levelled, the oceans would rise and wash in a
series of mega-tsunamis that would attack the world's coasts,
killing millions.
Is the end of the world nigh? Doom-mongers fear the
consequences of scientists replicating the Big Bang
The fact that the earthquakes were striking randomly, not along
well-known geological faultlines, would be proof that something
devastating was afoot.
Finally, the end would come, in a disaster of Biblical scale. The
Earth would literally start to crack up.
Molten lava would wash over the land and the seas would start to
boil.
Mega-hurricanes would level buildings and forests the world over.
Eventually, mountains would crumble as the Earth's crust continued
to disintegrate.
The fabric of the planet itself would start to disappear, trillions
of tonnes of rock, water, air and life sucked into a whirlpool of
unimaginable force.
From space, our blue-and-white home would appear to vanish down a
plughole in a flash of light.
At least in this scenario we would have a little time, perhaps, to
come to terms with the end.
However, a second doomsday scenario is even more terrifying. There
would be no warning at all.
In an instant - about one-twentieth of a second - the entire Earth
would simply vanish from space.
Less than two seconds later, the Moon would follow suit. Eight
minutes later, the Sun would be ripped apart, followed by the rest
of the planets in the solar system and onwards, a wave of
destruction caused by a rent in the fabric of space itself,
spreading out from our world at the speed of light.
Any extra-terrestrials out there would die too, in due course. And
there would be nothing technology could do about it.
But why should we now be worrying about such possible causes of
Armageddon?
The answer is a gargantuan machine - the largest, most expensive
scientific experiment in history, the 'Large Hadron Collider', to
be turned on next Wednesday.
Doom? The Large Hadron Collider CMS detector under
construction
Although it was designed to answer the fundamental questions of
life, some people have claimed that it could end up destroying the
entire cosmos.
This gigantic £4 billion-plus atom-smasher has been built under the
Swiss-French border near Geneva, and is the most powerful device
ever built for probing the secrets of the atom and the forces and
particles which make up our Universe.
It is a staggering device, occupying a train-sized tunnel 18 miles
long, buried 300ft underground, studded with gigantic,
cathedral-sized ring-shaped detectors where collisions between
packets of 'heavy' subatomic particles, 'hadrons', will take place
in the hope that the innermost workings of matter and energy will
be revealed.
The LHC is, arguably, the most impressive machine ever built by
Mankind.
But a few people are convinced that it should never be turned on. A
lawsuit has been lodged at the European Court For Human Rights by a
small group of maverick scientists.
They claim there is a small - but not zero - chance that when the
LHC is activated it will create either a mini-black hole which
would fall into the ground and swallow the Earth from within
(scenario one).
Or, even more bizarrely, trigger a catastrophic chain reaction in
the very fabric of space and time itself, which would rip apart the
entire universe like the skin of a bursting balloon (scenario
two).
Bizarrely, this group, led by a German chemist called Otto Rossler,
are using the European Convention on human rights to argue that,
should the LHC destroy the entire Universe, it would 'violate the
right to life and right to private family life'.
In fact, since 1994, when the collider was first mooted by the
multi-national European nuclear research organisation (CERN), a
small number of doomsayers have claimed that by replicating the
conditions pertaining at the start of the universe (Big Bang),
about 13,700 million years ago, there would be a small but real
risk an unstoppable cataclysm would take place.
This is not a threat taken seriously by the scientists at CERN.
When I visited the place a couple of years ago, to see the collider
being built, any mention of mini-black holes and other risks
elicited only raised eyebrows and shrugs of derision.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is an underground accelerator
ring 27 kilometres in circumference at the CERN Laboratory in
Switzerland. It will recreate the conditions at the birth of the
universe by smashing protons together at incredibly high
speeds
The ALICE experiment's inner tracker is integrated. Collisions
in the LHC will generate temperatures more than 100,000 times
hotter than the heart of the Sun. Physicists hope that under these
conditions, the protons and neutrons will 'melt',
creatingquark‑gluon plasma, which is believed to have existed soon
after the Big Bang.
Workers dig tunnels where counter-circulating beams will be
dumped. Travelling just a fraction under the speed of light, the
beams at the LHC will each carry the energy of an aircraft carrier
travelling at 12 knots. In order to dispose of these beams safely,
a beam dump is used to extract the beam and diffuse it before it
collides with a radiation shielded graphite target.
A technician walks under the core magnet of the CMS experiment
(Compact Muon Solenoid). This will search for the 'Higgs boson'.
Peter Higgs suggested that all particles had no mass just after the
Big Bang. As the Universe cooled an invisible force field called
the 'Higgs field' formed together with the 'Higgs boson'. Any
particles that interact with it are given a mass. Scientists hope
this experiment will prove the theory.
ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) is one of the six particle
detector experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. A small group of
scientists fear the LHC could create a black hole that would
swallow the Earth.
The LHC was not designed to destroy the universe, of course, but to
fill in some of the embarrassingly large gaps that still run
through our basic understanding of physics and how the universe
works.
It could discover, for instance, what most of the Universe is
actually made of.
The ordinary 'stuff' that we see around us - the atoms and
molecules of water, carbon, iron, oxygen and the rest that make up
our bodies, the planet Earth, the Moon, the other planets, the Sun
and all the stars - actually accounts for only about one part in 25
of the total 'ingredients' of the cosmos.
Astronomers know that something else, invisible and mysterious,
must pervade every inch of space, its subtle gravity affecting the
movements of the galaxy.
This material - no one really has a clue what it is - has been
dubbed 'dark matter' and it is hoped that the collider just might
shed some light on what it is, perhaps uncovering a new type of
particle.
Perhaps more embarrassingly, we don't know what it is that gives
even ordinary matter its mass.
In the 1960s, British physicist Peter Higgs proposed the existence
of a new particle, now known as the 'Higgs Particle', which
effectively lends 'weight' to the stuff of the universe.
So important and fundamental is this hypothetical entity that it
has been dubbed the 'God particle'.
It is hoped that if Higgs is right, the collider could finally
clear up this mystery and, as a result of its super-powerful
collisions, traces of this particle could emerge.
That alone would, in itself, be justification for a large chunk of
that £4 billion outlay. By simulating the Big Bang, it is hoped the
LHC will act as a 'universe in a test tube', allowing scientists to
examine a whole suite of exotic subatomic particles and forces and
to go some way to completing the work started by Einstein and the
other giants of 20th-century physics.
So is there really a chance that the scientists have made a
terrible miscalculation and that their new toy could inadvertently
kill us all?
Happily, the simple answer is no. CERN's scientists have in fact
commissioned several safety reviews (such as those that have taken
place before other big particle accelerators have been turned
on).
All have concluded that there is no measurable risk whatsoever.
Perhaps the best argument against the LHC doomsday scenario is that
cosmic rays - natural high-energy particles from space - smash into
the Earth's atmosphere all the time with far, far more energy than
will be generated by this machine.
If it were possible to create a dangerous black hole by simply
bashing atomic particles together, this would have happened
naturally long ago, and we wouldn't be here to build this particle
accelerator in the first place. So we are safe.
In fact, what the scientists at CERN really fear is not the end of
the world, but that their machine simply isn't big or powerful
enough to uncover anything new - that to probe the deepest secrets
of the cosmos they will have to ask for yet more cash to build
something on an even greater scale.
Either that, or their equations are simply wrong and a whole new
approach is needed, despite the billions they have spent.
Not a doomsday for Earth, perhaps, but a catastrophe for
physics.
As for the rest of us, we have to hope that the scientists have
done their sums right - and keep our fingers crossed next
Wednesday.
Source: Daily Mail UK, September 6, 2008
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