Why the World Might Just End Today at 12:30 pm IST
Today at 12.30 pm IST, a group of physicists will turn on a machine that will recreate the birth of the universe,this will be the largest experiment in human history. Scientists will take a step closer to understanding the beginning of time when the European Organization for Nuclear Research(CERN) powers up the world’s biggest magnetic loop in the search for the universe’s missing matter.
Back during the days of the atomic bomb development, some scientists feared that an atomic bomb could destroy the entire atmosphere. However, Robert Oppenheimer’s team soon proved that this was a calculation error (they didn’t have computers as we understand them today). Scientists Konopinski, C. Marvin, and Teller wrote the report LA-602, showing that ignition of the atmosphere was impossible, not just unlikely.
Similarly, now some fear that the Large Hadron Collider, which is a state of the art European particle accelerator that will send beams of protons around a 17-mile underground ring, will create a black hole, putting the Earth and all of its creatures at risk. CERN issued a report revealing that, even if a black hole were to form, it would rapidly evaporate due to Hawking Radiation.
The unknown outcome has prompted a challenge at the European Court of Human Rights by chemist Otto Roessler, of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, to try to stop the experiment, claiming the event will create a black hole that will destroy the planet.
Particle physicists on the outskirts of Geneva are trying to find out what most of the universe is made of, and where it is, because most of the matter created in the “Big Bang” 13.7 billion years ago has disappeared. Adding up all the stars, planets, and black holes in the universe only accounts for about 4 percent of all the mass created when time began. The rest is dark matter (23%) and dark energy (73%). Physicists think the LHC could provide clues about the nature of this mysterious “stuff”. The LHC should answer one very simple question: What is mass? “We know the answer will be found at the LHC,” said Jim Virdee, a particle physicist at Imperial College London. The currently favoured model involves a particle called the Higgs boson – dubbed the “God Particle”. According to the theory, particles acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervading field carried by the Higgs.
After a decade of work, physicists will fire the first particles around a 27-kilometer (16 mile) long magnetic loop buried 100 meters (328 feet) under ground in a tunnel large enough for subway trains through an environment colder than outer space. As the particles lap at close to the speed of light some will collide, triggering new particles that may also help scientists understand why the expansion of the universe is accelerating instead of slowing as predicted by theory.“We may find a whole new family of particles that might account for the missing mass, the `dark matter’ that we know must be there,” says David Evans, a scientist who helped to build some of the electronic equipment that have one-billionth of a second to spot a collision. “One way or another, there’s a 100 percent chance we will find something new to physics.”
Within a year the particle accelerator’s four experiments, one of which involves equipment weighing 7,000 metric tons or the equivalent of a subterranean Eiffel Tower, will have spewed enough data to fill a pile of compact discs 12 miles high. Some of the material that the physicists may find is labeled “dark energy,” and may help explain why “something is still driving the expansion of the universe, but at the moment we have no idea what it is,” says Evans, who dismisses the risk of earth being swallowed by a black hole. The experiments are “a once- in-a-lifetime experience, 10-times more powerful than anything anyone has ever built and the first time we know for sure that something new and exciting is going to happen.”
At the heart of this is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which was constructed at a cost of $4.4 billion. It is the latest in a series of successively more powerful particle accelerators that have been built at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) laboratory in Geneva. Within the LHC’s circular tunnel, 27 km in circumference, beams of protons will be accelerated to up to 99.999999% of the speed of light. When they smash together, they will generate concentrations of energy resembling those that occurred during the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
