Living it BiG

There have been several nostradamic predictions about the world’s end in the last couple of years — and, well, we’re all still here, right? In less than 20 hours (as of this writing) scientists are going to turn on the large hadron collider — a particle accelerator, that, well, creates black holes and may create strange matter. (And no, I didn’t just make up that term to funkify this little doomsday article!)

First off, what is the large hadron collider? It is a large (the name says it!) particle accelerator that’s located at CERN, near Switzerland. It is located in a tunnel that spans from Switzerland to France.

Basically, the experiment’s going to be trying to create a blackhole, sounds dangerous, huh? Well, it wouldn’t be a government-backed project if it would cause harm, right? But we’re talking about theories here. Like so many works of fiction, “something” could go wrong, for no particular reason; be it a miscalculation, an unpredicted result or a freak accident — well I’m here to scare you!

Here are 3 scenarios of what might happen once this badboy’s lit.

Gobbled by Strangelets. Strangelet, such a happy term, right? It’s short for “strange nugget,” and, well, there’s nothing happy about it. A strangelet is a bit of strange matter, (yes, I’m still not making that up!) that, upon contact with normal earth matter, turns the earth matter into strange matter itself. Imagine if this strangelet was stabilized, and, well, started turning the nuclei of nearby earth matter into strange matter — imagine this going on a thousand times over, at a speed that can only match the number of earth matter that comes into contact with the strangelet that’s growing. Bam! Instantly the earth will become nothing more than a huge ball of strange matter. Or, alternate scenario, since strangelets are anti-matter candidates, they may just blow up upon contact with Earth.

Devoured by a microscopic black hole. They say that a black hole evaporates in time because of Hawking radiation — and, well, say, for your normal average sized-black hole, it will take lifetimes before you ever see it happen. But a small, teensy, tiny microscopic black hole? If, say, they do make a black hole in the facility — it might not disappear — and since black holes are of such high density, placed on the earth’s surface, it’ll slice it’s way to the earth’s core like a hot knife through butter, after which, it’ll oscillate back, over and over, until it has consumed enough matter to slow down. By that time, the earth might be gone, by the way.

Nothing happens, and you have to die knowing that a failed experiment might’ve killed you like Y2K did with the panic back in ’99. It can just go kaput. Imagine the beams of particles being bombarded into one another, re-creating the big bang … and then poof! Nothing. I mean, life’s too short to be playing around with theories, right? And besides, what will advancement in matter studies do? Can we re-create another earth for which to try these sort of experiments on?

[Update: They pushed back the experiment, woohoo!]

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