Large Hadron Collider: Blue earth safe from black holes

William Atkins
Wednesday, 25 June 2008 18:41

Science - Energy

Over five years of independent research by particle physicists concludes that any black holes produced by CERN's Large Hadron Collider will not demolish the Earth.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will become the world’s largest and highest-energy producing particle accelerator when it becomes operational between August and October 2008.

According to CERN, “The LHC reproduces in the laboratory, under controlled conditions, collisions at centre-of-mass energies less than those reached in the atmosphere by some of the cosmic rays that have been bombarding the Earth for billions of years.”

The LHC will accelerate protons to energies of up to 7 trillion electron volts. The protons will then be crashed into one another at nearly the speed of light.

Such collisions will create energies and densities that are similar to those occurring less than a second after the Big Bang, the theoretical beginning of our Universe—our existence.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) built the LHC between the borders of France and Switzerland, near Geneva, Switzerland.

When fully operational the LHC may be able to produce the Higgs boson, an elusive little particle that will help cosmologists piece together some unknown facets within the Standard Model of particle physics.

The LHC may possibly even help physicists develop a theory (called the Grand Unified Theory, or GUT for short) that unifies three of the four known fundamental forces of nature: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force.

The theory will not, however, unity these three forces with the remaining force: gravity. (If someone should be able to unity all four forces, then they would have developed a very important theory that scientists call the Theory Of Everything (TOE).

The problem externally to the LHC has been perceived safety concerns with some people about whether black holes possibly produced by the LHC could destroy the Earth. Please read on.