Tokyo Blog

Of a night time, I’ve been watching old episodes of BBC’s Horizon programme on YouTube. I’ve been getting a bit of a thing for outer space recently, so I was checking out the one on super-massive black holes, and I also saw the one about computer advancement, where the progress of computers was forecasted as was the mapping of the human brain. This was pretty scary in itself, because one of the possible scenarios was that we create a neural network capable of learning that supersedes humanity and then destroys it!

Actually, that was nothing compared to the stuff I saw on the Large Hadron Collider, the huge 27km round ring buried deep under the Franco Swiss border near Geneva. It’s the largest collider in the world, and also the most energetic. It will reenact the conditions found a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. This is what’s so new about this collider. Normally fast moving particles are fired at stationary target particles and create a safer kind of phenomenon, but the Large Hadron Collider sends two beams of particles the opposite way around the enormous ring until they are travelling at the speed of light. Then, they align the beams and…

Well, that’s the problem. Scientists have estimated what might happen at the moment they recreate the beginning of the universe, but there is still much uncertainty. Scientists independent from CERN (the authority heading up the experiment), warn that one of several ‘doomsday scenarios’ could occur. What is almost certain is that the process will create micro black holes. Lots of them. These are expected to be short lived, based on the theory of Hawking Radiation - but this theory hasn’t been proven. What could happen when a MBH is created at a slow speed, is that it gets trapped by Earth’s field of gravity and (since it can pass through matter, and is incredibly small) will come to rest at the very center of the Earth. It is conceivable, therefore, that several of these could end up there. The immense heat, pressure and gravitational force at this location would start the black hole feeding. One scientist estimated that it would take less than 50 months for the black hole to accrete the entire earth. The other fear is that a ’strangelet’ is produced that turns everything it touches to ’strange matter’ in a chain reaction-type fashion, or that a ‘monopole’ causes a similar chain reaction catastrophe. More far fetched suggestions include a possible tear in space time that would result in either time distortions or a time loop local to the occurance of the experiment, the creation of a fully-fledged wormhole at the surface of Earth (not good), or even the creation of a new Universe at the expense of our own!

Either way, it sounds a bit risky to me. The thing that worried me most, is why do so few people know about it? It’s the biggest, most expensive experiment in the history of mankind. It was actually due to go online this month, but it’s real start-up date is a bit of a mystery now. A law suit filed in the US may have set it back to 2009, but that is unconfirmed. All that is known, is that it’s finished and is being prepared (the chambers have to be cooled to 2k before it reaches it’s operating temperature). Please Google this for yourself.