The Large Hadron Collider (LHC): will a black hole swallow us?
by Russ Humphreys
Artist’s impression from ESA / V. Beckmann (NASA-GSFC)
Dust torus around supermassive black hole
Published: 12 September 2008(GMT+10)
The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland fired its first shot last Wednesday
(September 10, 2008). Contrary to some peoples’ worries, it doesn’t
appear to have made a black hole that is swallowing up the earth. The needless worries
[see editorial box ‘Sheep without a shepherd’]
were generated by science publicity that
- it would reproduce a small-scale piece of the alleged Big Bang, and
- the Big Bang piece might make a tiny—but hungry—black hole.
The truth is not as cataclysmic as that, but still interesting to us science groupies.
The LHC, operated by the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN)1 is designed to fling small bunches of protons (a
type of “hadron” or heavier elementary particle) at each other at speeds
close to that of light. When the accelerator gets up to its full capacity, in about
a year, each proton will have a record-breaking 7 trillion electron-volts (TeV)
of energy. For comparison, the atoms in your body bounce around each with one-fortieth
of an electron-volt.
Photo by Maximilien Brice, copyright CERN
Trillions of electron-volts is indeed a lot of energy for man to pack into a tiny
particle, but God does it all the time, in cosmic rays that strike the earth continually.
My doctoral dissertation studied cosmic ray protons with 10 TeV energies striking
a block of graphite (consisting of carbon atoms) atop a mountain in Colorado. When
the LHC eventually begins clashing two proton beams in opposite directions, the
collisions will produce the same results as a 100,000 [not ‘200,000’ — corrected 15 Sep. 08 — R.H.] TeV cosmic-ray proton slamming
into a stationary nucleus. To date, nobody has noticed any little black holes stemming
from those not-infrequent very high energy cosmic rays, certainly not earth-gobbling
black holes!
Such collisions are fascinating to physicists because they probe the nature of matter
at very small scales. The LHC will explore particle forces at distances about one-thousandth
the diameter of a proton. When the two protons collide, they will produce a tiny
ball of extremely hot, dense “plasma” made up of the constituents of
protons, “quarks” and “gluons.”
The great temperature of the ball of plasma, over a billion degrees Celsius, should
rip (as happens at lower energies) many tiny but massive particles out of the fabric
of space itself. (Not to worry—God has made the ‘fabric’ able
to repair itself when things cool down.) The distribution of these secondary particles
tells physicists how the forces between particles work. Experimenters may even find
the elusive particle known as the ‘Higgs boson,2 ’ which I (and a few other physicists) could
interpret as the main constituent of the fabric of space itself. So though the Big
Bang is science fiction, the tiny bang the LHC will make should tell us lots of
fascinating new things about the basic stuff of the cosmos God has created. In the
long run, it can’t help but glorify Him.
Photo by Vanessa Fitzgerald
Sheep without a shepherd
The media hype in the West was bad enough, but in India the media publicity caused
an unprecedented reaction among some sections of the public. It was reported that
one teenage girl, Chayya, was so traumatized by doomsday warnings about the European
‘Big Bang’ experiment that she killed herself.1
Her grief-stricken father, Biharilal, was quoted as saying: ‘In the past two
days, Chayya asked me and other relatives about the world coming to an end on September
10. We tried to divert her attention and told her she should not worry about such
things, but to no avail.’
News outlets reported that ‘many women and children rushed to temples and
observed fasts as they prayed for deliverance’. Belated assurances from scientists
and the media failed to calm some people.
‘I visited temple, prayed to god,’ said housewife Rukmini Moharana.
‘I am observing the fast for safety because god can only save us.’
- MSN News, <news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=629454>, 11 September 2008.
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Update: see follow-up comments and replies to this article, Large Hadron Collider continues to confuse.
Recommended Resources
References
- The original name of the group was the European Council for
Nuclear Research, which in French is Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire,
hence the acronym CERN. Even though the name later changed, the acronym has persisted.
Return to text.
- Predicted to exist, but not yet found, it is frequently referred
to by physicists as the ‘God particle’. Return to text.
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