I think Varius made that last post just to provoke me.

I had been planning this big elaborate article on how awesome the Large Hadron Collider is going to be, and all the phenomenal feats of engineering it took just to build the thing, and the wonderful new epiphanies it could bring about in our understanding of the building blocks of the universe. And then I get home and encounter a bunch of messages asking me if the Apocalypse is imminent. So, in the interest of keeping the peace, let’s shelve my original topic and instead talk about why you’re not in any danger from the Large Hadron Collider, the greatest particle accelerator ever invented by humans.

First off, even when something interesting does happen over at CERN, it’s not going to happen tomorrow. “Switching it on” doesn’t mean that it just goes, and blammo, the Goddess Eris shows up for tea and biscuits. “Switching it on” means that they’re going to begin the proton acceleration process. See, first you have to strip the electrons away from hydrogen atoms to get some protons. Then you have to speed them up. Making something as tiny as a proton go 99% of the speed of light is a lot of acceleration. You know how a car goes from zero to sixty in about a minute or so? Well, a car is a lot bigger than a proton, and 60 MPH is a lot slower than the speed of light. The acceleration process is going to take about two months. That’s two months of nothing but running the little bastards around a track until they’re going fast enough to be worth anything. So if you must panic, panic on November 10th, not September 10th. This means that, if Armageddon were to happen, you’d still get to see if Obama wins the election first.

But don’t actually panic!

So, once the protons are finally going fast enough, they shoot them into the bigger track, going two different directions. And then they smash ‘em together. And there are four detectors positioned around the 27-kilometer ring to record what happens at the moment the protons are smashed together, and here’s why: the particles that pop into existence when a collision like that happens don’t stick around. They’re weird and unstable, and they break down almost immediately. So it’s vital that you get it on tape.

This includes black holes, you big babies. Real black holes are massive cosmic monsters of unbelievable density that gobble up space shit. But there’s a gravitational tipping-point that has to be exceeded before a black hole can survive long enough to be scary. the tiny theoretical black holes that may or may not emerge from the LHC’s collisions don’t qualify. It’s like if you had a bear the size of a gnat. Yes, bears are vicious and scary and they eat things. But a bear the size of a gnat is too tiny to eat anything except maybe dust mites, and dust mites aren’t very appetizing, since they run around eating dead skin flakes all day.

Black holes don’t exist because some experiment on an alien planet went awry. Black holes form when very large stars collapse in upon themselves. Microscopic black holes can’t cut it, and any that would pop into existence would pop right back out of existence within a few nanoseconds, which is why they need those four big detector devices.

Again, just for the refrain value: Tiny atom-smasher black holes don’t grow big and gobble up planets, they dissolve into nothingness.

And if you’re still afraid of things flying around at the speed of light, let me ask you this: is the light on in the room you’re in? Are you reading this on a computer? Because if so, the lightbulb and the computer screen are both shooting things at you at the speed of light right now. Yes, those are photons, not protons, but nevertheless, the speed alone shouldn’t make you nervous. And accelerated protons? Well, particles of matter (which are made largely of protons) hurtle through space and collide with the Earth every second of every day, and always have.

Frankly, a lot of what’s going to happen in the LHC in November is probably happening right now in the stratosphere of this planet. But apparently it’s easier to install a racetrack under Switzerland than it is to put a detector on a blimp and fly to the outer edges of the Earth. In other words, a lot of this collision phenomena is relatively normal, and what we really needed to do was just have a way to watch when it happened.

But Horatio, if that’s true, then why are some people afraid of the LHC? For the same reason that some people are afraid that Barack Obama is the Antichrist, and for the same reason that some people used to be afraid that listening to Elvis Presley songs would turn the youth of the time into a generation of oversexed demon children. Because some people like to be afraid of crazy shit, because it’s a convenient distraction from all the normal scary things that are actually a threat.

You are not going to get killed by a particle accelerator tomorrow. If you die tomorrow, it will be because of something mundane, like getting attacked by a bear, or getting blown up by a suicide bomber, or falling out of a window. So have that drink!

Source Note: A lot of the information in this article was taken from the August 30th, 2008 issue of New Scientist Magazine. You can find lots of informative goodies on the LHC from them here.