What a Beautiful Apocalypse

[trailingvortex]

The LHC has switched on, generated data with the highest energy collisions ever produced, and we're not all either sucked into an artifical black hole or disconstituted because the very laws of physics have been altered. The scientists at Los Alamos predicted that a nuclear test might cause the world's atmophere to catch fire, but that didn't stop

Comments

[trailingvortex]

Tiny black holes might appear and swallow the earth. Though Hawking radiation should really cause these to evaporate before they can cause any harm.

Alternatively 'strangelets' might appear. I'll quote wikipedia here:

A strangelet is a hypothetical particle consisting of a bound state of roughly equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks. Its size would be a minimum of a few femtometers across (with the mass of a light nucleus).

...

If the strange matter hypothesis is correct and a strangelet comes in contact with a lump of ordinary matter such as Earth, it could convert the ordinary matter to strange matter.[12][13] This "ice-nine" disaster scenario is as follows: one strangelet hits a nucleus, catalyzing its immediate conversion to strange matter. This liberates energy, producing a larger, more stable strangelet, which in turn hits another nucleus, catalyzing its conversion to strange matter. In the end, all the nuclei of all the atoms of Earth are converted, and Earth is reduced to a hot, large lump of strange matter.

Both of these scenarios are pretty unlikely, and probably wouldn't stop physicists even were they a likely risk. ^_^

[trailingvortex]

Also, both would be a mercifully swift death. So fast you (or indeed the world) wouldn't even notice it.

[praxia]

so what are the odds of this again? and just what is the goal of this thing?

[trailingvortex]

Giving it odds would be meaningless. It's either certain or will not happen. Depends which predictions are correct. If you were a betting person, of course, you'd be betting it doesn't happen, as you wouldn't have to pay your debt if you were wrong. :D

Seriously, physicists envisage all sorts of scenarios, so a few hypotheses will naturally be doomsday ones. I wouldn't worry about it.

And why do they do it? In search of beauty! A Grand Unification Theory that explains the basic principles of the universe from which all things flow is the goal. To do this, they need to smash tiny things together really hard.

This rap explains it best:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM

[praxia]

So is this all that God Particle business?