| Big Bang Machine which didn’t destroy the Earth |
Compiled by Devika Chhibber
This year, fear grasped the world with the news of the scientific experiment of Hadron Collider taking place, as many argued that it might release particles called “strangelets,” which could gobble the globe. The ‘Big Bang’ experiment – which many said, including some scientists, would result in the end of the world did succeeded initially but ultimately failed.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world`s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, intended to collide opposing beams of protons or lead ions, each moving at approximately 99.999999% of the speed of light.
The Large Hadron Collider was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) with the intention of testing various predictions of high-energy physics. It also has Indian imprint, with the instrument on which the Collider is put, being made in India.
Those afraid of the experiment believe it may lead to the creation of a black hole – an intense gravitational field sucking in everything including light. According to Rossler, the experiment might lead to a scenario where the Earth will be sucked inside out “within four years of a mini-black hole forming”.
On 10 September 2008, the proton beams were successfully circulated in the main ring of the LHC for the first time. On 19 September 2008, the operations were halted due to a serious fault between two superconducting bending magnets. Due to the resulting damage, the LHC will not be operational again until summer 2009. There were also reports of protesters hacking the system.
Controversy
This controversy was created when physicist Walter Wagner wrote a letter to Scientific American, asking whether the creation of a quark-gluon plasma might create a globe-gobbling black hole. In his answer to Wagner’s letter, Frank Wilczek of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study referred to a speculative scenario involving something called “strangelets.”
Strangelets would contain “strange” quarks, which are somewhat heavier and less understood than the garden-variety “up” and “down” quarks that make up ordinary protons and neutrons. If a series of highly unlikely conditions apply, strangelets could in theory start consuming ordinary matter, turning the entire Earth into a sphere of strangeness. This scenario captured the attention of physicists and the press jumping to conclusions and calling the whole experiment dangerous like “Big Bang Machine Could Destroy Earth.”
The Experiment
What the experiment is all about: In a giant machine called the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN research centre straddling the Franco-Swiss border, the physicists will smash particles together to create, on a small-scale, re-enactments of the event that started up the cosmos.
The LHC is using giant magnets housed in cathedral-size caverns to fire beams of energy particles around a 27 km (17 mile) tunnel where they will collide at close to the speed of light.
Scientists at CERN, the 54-year-old European Organisation for Nuclear Research, close to the foothills of the French Jura mountains, will pursue concepts such as "dark matter", "dark energy", extra dimensions and, most of all, the "Higgs Boson" believed to have made it all possible.
Doomsday failed
The Large Hadron Collider tested doomsday again on Sep 11 as a 30-ton transformer, which is used to power coolants in the 17-mile underground, vacuum-sealed loop in the world`s most powerful particle accelerator, failed on Sept. 11. Because of the failure, the collider switched off the main cryogenic compressors for two sectors of the machine. |
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