Particle colliders give me a "large hadron"

So, if you haven't checked your calendar recently, today is September 10, which means that at 7:32 Greenwich Mean Time, they switched on the ol' LHC, which if you haven't religiously followed this blog or read particle physics journals over the last few months (and if you haven't, come on, what's wrong with you?) stands for the Large Hadron Collider. That means this huge atom smasher has now begun firing up for its first attempts to destroy the earth find out what matter is made of.

So, what is it, you may ask?

Well, "it" is a gender-neutral pronoun used in the English language to refer to a previously specified object - but that's not important right now. Let's stay on topic.

The Large Hadron Collider, on the other hand, is a few things:

1) A 17-mile-diameter series of tubes, a lot like the internet, except it's used to smash tiny atoms and subatomic particles together at relativistic (near-light) speeds.

2) The name of a porn video I saw a long time ago, I think.  It "had Ron" Jeremy in it (zing!).  Oh wait...no...that was "Large Hardon Collider."

3) Something that is fairly likely to destroy the world, and even has a small probability of destroying the entire universe. Oh, yeaahh!

Below are a couple of photos of this bad boy.  On the left is an aerial shot of the border between France and Switzerland where the big ring is located.  On the right is the belly of the beast itself: a big ol' tube lined with supercooled superconducting magnets used to accelerate protons, lead ions, and the like to ridiculous speeds.

Eventually, this huge device will be used to cause "large hadrons," which are actually extremely small, to collide at near light speed.  When these collide, the hadrons should break apart, releasing particles, energy, and other things that the LHC will try to detect.  One of the main theories physicists are aiming to prove is string theory: the idea that matter, light, gravity, and everything else is composed of subatomic strings that vibrate in 11 dimensions.  Duh!  Do we really need an experiment to tell us that?  What else could all that stuff be composed of other than 11th dimension vibrating strings, Captain Obvious?

Anyway, when the collisions start happening, the scene at the LHC might look something like this:

What will the LHC find?  Likely candidates include the Higgs boson (which may or may not be the reason matter has mass), supersymmetry (which would give us insight into the validity of many quantum theories), dark matter, micro black holes, new subatomic particles, and other things nobody guessed.  Of course, despite all the theories, nobody really knows exactly what will come out of the LHC.  For all we know, it might even produce some of this crazy stuff.

The ridiculous thing is that a lot of scientists actually believe the LHC could produce micro black holes.  This is no reason to worry however, they say, because these black holes will theoretically evaporate via Hawking radiation before they can grow to any considerable size.  Theoretically.

Otherwise, something like the following might play out...

Scientist 1: "Oh no!  It's a black hole!"
Scientist 2: "Not to worry. It's only a micro black hole. It's not stable and will evaporate in less than a second. Even if it doesn't evaporate, it will escape the earth's gravity. Even if it doesn't escape the earth's gravity, it will take millions of years to accrete enough matter to kill us.  M'kay?"

Scientist 1: "Got it.  Let's keep smashing hadrons."

Scientist 1: "Oh no! The black hole got bigger!  It's going to kill us all!"
Scientist 2: "Whoopsy daisy! Looks like I put a decimal point in the wrong place or something.   I was hopped up on a bunch of Vicodin for my bad back the week I came up with those formulas.  My bad!"
Scientist 1: "I'm going to kill you!"
Scientist 2: "No, the black hole is going to kill me, and it's also going to kill you. Sorry about that, chief!"

Scientist 1: "Stop calling me 'chief,' guy!"

Scientist 2: "Stop calling me 'guy,' chief!"
(black hole consumes the entire planet)

Alien 1: "Awesome! The poor bastards never saw it coming!"
Alien 2: "Come on, dude. That ended exactly the same way as 'Large Hadron Collider 16: Planet Gzyxqiofn of the Crab Nebula.' So unoriginal. This series is really starting to circle the drain."

Alien 1: "Well, so much for Earth.  I say good riddance - that place was a real dump.  I'm going to miss 'Buffalo This' though."

Alien 2: "I'm not. That guy was an idiot. Hey, let's get out of here before that black hole spaghettifies us."

Alien 1: "Oh yeah, good idea."

Now I've already heard people say things today along the lines of, "Phew, we're still here!  Looks like there was no reason to worry about the LHC after all!"  Not so fast, Einstein.  It wasn't simply turning on the machine that was supposed to destroy the earth.  They haven't even started colliding particles yet and won't begin doing so for at least a few weeks.  Even then, they won't be using the full power of the machine; the collisions will get increasingly powerful through the rest of 2008 and into 2009.  Every time the power is ramped up, we enter a new and uncharted realm of particle collisions with uncertain consequences.  In the case of a strangelet disaster or vacuum metastability event, we'll find out that something has gone wrong immediately, and by "find out that something has gone wrong," I really mean "all die."  In the case of a stable micro black hole that gradually eats away at the earth, we may not know about it for months, years, or much longer.  So it could be a long, long time before we conclusively know the answer to the big question: Will the LHC kill us all?  If it's any comfort to you, I've got $500 that says it doesn't.

Welcome to the jungle.