Take note, the end is nigh!

When I say nigh, I mean it in an archaic sense, as in the end is stingy. I was thinking that the Large Hadron Collider was going to create a massive black hole and suck every living and non-living thing into non-existence at the speed of light. That or Hank Scorpio would emerge from his underground labyrinth to simply terrorize us into giving up our freedoms. It turns out that the Albert Brooks-voiced Simpsons cameo is more likely than a collapse of such magnitude cause by this sophisticated machine.

What exactly is the Large Hadron Collider? Aside from being a huge ass circle of metallic death 300 feet below European soil, it’s a tool for hopefully finding answers as well as new questions to life, the universe, and, well, everything. (I hope Douglas Adams forgives me.) I’m not a theoretical physicist (or an actual physicist! *rim shot* Thank you! I’m here all week!) and I don’t even begin to comprehend the science those nerds in white lab coats are concocting, but I will damn well try to explain it, and how it is important to your life, in less than 1,000 words.

First of all, a hadron is just a nerdy way of talking about protons and neutrons (which make up atoms). Hadrons are made of quarks and gluons, which both sound like alien races from Star Trek. (Yes, I know Quark was a Ferengi, I also know that he was the Principal of Sunnydale High until he was eaten by a large demonic worm.) The Collider attempts to smash up the hadrons to see what’s in there. It’s kind of like a large-scale, multi-billion dollar Will it Blend? only with a possibility of the death of everything.

The truth is, the physicists don’t really know what will happen when the hadrons collide, but they speculate, and they are usually pretty good at the speculatin’. On August 8th, they tested the LHC, and conspiracy buffs were CERTAIN that it would create a black hole that would devour the world.

The scientists plan on going live with the LHC on September 10th. Let’s hope there isn’t some wayward nihilistic scientist brooding about his unrequited love for Vicky in quantum mechanics. He could press a few wrong buttons and poof. Well, if he does, you won’t be able to say I told you so. In fact, it will happen so fast, you will still be thinking about what you ate for breakfast that gave you so much gas when suddenly. . . nothing.

But the scientists at the LHC lab at CERN insist that the black holes they create will be very very small (it is wafer-thin) and last for fractions of a second. Not enough to do any damage except to some dust that might stray into the accelerator. They aren’t even concerned about the black holes, or making black holes, just with the shit the black holes leave behind. Black hole excrement (a rockin’ band out of the LA punk scene) will hopefully show scientists answers to questions about the Big Bang. One of the things they’re searching for is the Higgs particle, which is a clue into how the Universe began and expanded from nothing (absolute nothing) into, well, something. Most likely, they’ll do a thousand or a million of these experiments, which accelerate a hadron at near the speed of light by a series of magnets that bend the path over 17 miles working in tandem with electrical waves that boost the particle, and not find anything but more questions.

Why should we care? Science matters. Even big things that are meaningless to us today could have a tremendous impact in just a few years. Big, meaningless experiments that satisfied nothing but curiosity also begat all sorts of crazy shit like nuclear devices, computers, PDAs, cellphones, iPods, etc. What will this produce? Aside from a nervous populace awaiting their destruction and a mass of Black Hole excrement (I like the way it rolls off the tongue in my mind), a lot of what will result is still unknown. The great thing about the unknown is that it’s only in that state until discovered. It could create a new weapon of mass destruction that sucks the eyes out of enemies before a commander can issue an order, or it might unlock secrets that give the world an endless supply of renewable, clean energy. That is all speculation, (I’m much worse at speculatin’ than the CERNerds) but it’s still much more likely than LHC destroying the world at 299,792,458 m/s.

However, if they turn on the machine and the world does end, I’ll admit I was wrong.

* Saturday came and went and we’re all still alive. . . except those that are dead, but it’s doubtful the test had anything to do with that.