World's Largest Atom Smasher Nears Completion

evanwired writes "The last magnet was put in place this week at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. When the device is completed about a year from now it will be the world's largest particle accelerator, putting scientists in reach of new data and possible answers to questions dominated by theory over observation for the past two decades. Wired News recently visited the installation — awe-inspiring in its scale — as part of an in-depth, three-part series on the collider exploring the engineering, science and politics of high-end theoretical physics in the 21st century."

Re:Black holes

[klaun]

Is this the collider that could possibly create a black hole that would destroy the planet?

I don't think there is really much to worry about.

It's also worth noting that while the collisions in HLC will be on the order of 10^12 electron volts... cosmic ray collisions with the earth on the order of 10^20 electron volts occur on a regular basis. If any Earth consuming blackholes were going to be created... they'd probably have already happened.

Re:Black holes

[PieSquared]

A black hole *might* not actually need to be super massive, it just has to be huge to be seen beyond the solar system. As for the basic physics part, pretty much yes - a few atoms properly smashed could take up 0 space, have an event horizon, and totally block light outside the actual mass... making it a black hole. Such an object could in theory destroy each additional atom it hit, slowly growing as it went back and forth through the earth until the entire earth was a part of it. The problem, though, is threefold. First, black holes emit energy, and a small black hole would probably emit energy faster then it could gain energy, meaning it would die pretty much instantly. (*far* less then a second). Second, if the black hole didn't disappear instantly, it would probably be thrown out of earth orbit by the massive speed of the device. Finally, the black holes would be so small that they wouldn't actually hit protons very often. This sounds odd, but the same thing is true of galaxies... the milky way one day will hit the andromada galaxy, but statistically there will be about 6 collisions of stars before it becomes one stable system. The nucleus of an atom is just so small in comparison to the space the atom takes up due to its electron shell... and of course the event horizon for such a small black hole would be incredibly small (much smaller then the original particles). The belief is that if despite all odds a stable black hole was created and fell into the ground, the sun would go nova before we noticed anything wrong with the earth because of the black hole. In conclusion, a small black hole probably can't exist. Well, at least on the several atoms scale. Even if it can exist (we don't really know for sure that it can't) it won't do any real damage to earth. I guess flinging black holes into space might not be a great idea on the multi-billion year scale, but within the probable lifespan of humanity probably nobody would notice.

Re:Mod Parent Up, Please

[radtea]

High-energy physics has reached a point where the cost-effectiveness of larger particle accelerators is questionable.

One of the things that differentiates science from other areas of human endeavour is that science uses up fields of study. Once upon a time there was a major scientific enterprise involving filling out the peroidic table. New elements were isolated every few years. Eventually, all the blanks were filled in, leaving only a very small number of labs pursuing the trans-uranics.

In traditional nuclear physics there was an industry that lasted for about thirty years, between 1960 and 1990, of measuring the excitation energy, spin and parity of the low-lying levels of all of the isotopes near the line of stability. Graduate students could be reliably churned out by small accelerator labs by simply handing them a nucleus to measure, and the table of isotopes grew from thin to thick. And then it all stopped, because there weren't any more isotopes to measure, and the measurements we had, while not always perfect, were good enough for going on with.

The major strides in particles physics in the late 20th century may be reaching a similar plateau. The triumph of the electro-weak theory, the clear limits on the number of generations of elementary particles, and the likely detection of the Higgs Boson by the LHC may signal a similar ending to one chapter in the scientific enterprise.

This is not to say that particle physics is dead. There are still mysteries--others here have commented on the improbably high energies observed in cosmic ray showers, and there are the various unrelated dark matter problems, some of which suggest exotic particles that are still eluding us, and which may finally prove to be the guide that takes us beyond the standard model.