Gonzalo Barr

The Telegraph reports that the CERN Large Hadron Collider 300 feet under the Franco-Swiss border was switched on this morning at 9:30 a.m. Swiss time (3:30 a.m. our time in Miami). The machine is a 17-mile tunnel within which two streams of protons will be shot from opposite directions until they collide. The results of those collisions may reproduce conditions shortly (I mean like nanoseconds) after the Big Bang, which is how we currently understand the beginning of the universe. Many researchers hope the collisions will prove the existence of the Higgs-Boson particle, believed to be a necessary yet never seen subatomic particle that gives all matter its mass. Other discoveries that researchers hope to make there include learning more about dark matter, which we cannot see or feel, but which makes up over ninety percent of all matter in the universe.

A minority fear that the collisions will create infinitesimally small black holes that will balloon to swallow up the earth bringing with it the end of the world and much of our planetary neighborhood. Stephen Hawking is quoted as dismissing these fears on the grounds that anything produced by the collider would be feeble and incapable of such a catastrophic result.

That’s comforting.

If you are the kind who prefers to see the glass half empty, the researchers are CERN will give you plenty more opportunities to bite your fingernails.

You see, what they did today was turn on the machine.  That’s all.  They flipped a switch, launched two streams of Hadrons, hence the name of the collider, and called it a day.  (Nice work, if you can get it.)  The first collisions will not occur for thirty days or so.  That would give you another month.  If the world does not end that time either, in 2010, the collider is expected to reach full performance capacity. Then it will be thirty times more powerful than any previous collider and we should see some real fireworks.  Or maybe we won’t see anything at all.  If nothing happens, everything will remain the same.  If the world is swallowed up by a black hole, it will happen faster than losing a call on your cell phone.  One instant you’re on, the next you’re not.  And there won’t be any of this talking to a dead phone either.  Hello?  Are you there?

The webzine, Slate, published an article on what happens if you were to be sucked into a black hole.  It isn’t pretty — “you would be ‘extruded through space like toothpaste being squeezed through a tube.’”  That’s much worse than what happened to Mr. Goldfinger below, toward the end of the eponymous movie, when he was sucked out through the window of a jet airplane in flight.  I must have been no more than six or seven years old when I saw the movie.  That was scary enough.

UPDATE (September 12, 2008):  Not everything about this topic is funny.  Here is a tragedy that will leave relatives wondering what they could have done to avoid it.  More here.

Photo: Gert Fröbe as Goldfinger in Goldfinger (1964); Source: Roger Highfield, “Large Hadron Collider is activated,” The Telegraph (Sept. 10, 2008)