Will The Large Hadron Collider Lead To The End Of The

World?
"It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" - REM

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and the most powerful particle accelerator ever
built. Its purpose is to enable physicists to carry out high energy experiments. The results of these
experiments, physicists hope, will throw some light on the origins of our universe.

However there are some concerns in the scientific community that these experiments may lead to some
results, which scientists have not bargained for.

Build by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), at a cost of €6.4 billion, the LHC is
located beneath the borders of Switzerland and France at the periphery of Geneva, Switzerland.
Thousands of Physicists from over eighty-five countries collaborated to build this bemoth of an apparatus
contained in a underground circular tunnel with a circumference of 27 kilometres (17 miles) at a depth
ranging from 50 to 175 metres underground.
Particle accelerators, also called atom smashers, are used by physicists in experiments in which
subatomic particles are accelerated close to the speed of the light and crashed head-on in high energy
collusions resulting in a release of matter and energy. The result of these experiments are captured
using special detectors which give scientists insight into the building blocks of matter at its deepest
core.

The Large Hadron Colider will be used to perform the most powerful and unprecedented experiments of
its kind , using energy level far greater than in any previous experiment. In one of the experiments two
opposing beams of Hadrons (protons or lead ions) will be collided at very high energy with the
objective of recreating the condition which existed just after the Big Bang, the point of creation of our
Universe.

Another mission Physicists have for LHC is to produce an elusive elementary particle knows as the
Higgs Boson, also called the God particle, the observation of which would fill the missing link in the
Standard Model of particle physics, the model scientists use to describe how three of the four fundamental
forces of nature, namely electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force, interact
with each other at the subatomic levels.

Physicists also hope to find the missing link between the three fundamental forces and, gravitation, the
fourth fundamental force , in a so called Grand Unification Theory.

However, some voices in the scientific community fear that high energy particle collusions performed
by the LHC may produce some very dangerous phenomena namely micro black holes, strangelets,
vacuum bubbles and magnetic monopoles.

Black Holes are regions of space so dense even particles of light entering in it cannot escape. CERN
scientists admit that the LHC could produce micro black holes on a subatomic scale which would (or
should?) collapse instantly. However some scientists argue that if micro black holes are produced at the
LHC, they might not decay as predicted by CERN could grow exponentially.
Still more dangerous sounding are nuggets of matter made from subatomic particles called strange
matter or Stangelets. Stangelets have the strange property that when a nugget of strange matter comes
in contact with ordinary matter , it change the orginary matter it into strange matter . This is dangerous
because it can give rise to a chain reaction: one strangelet hits an atomic necules, converts it into a
stangelet, which in turn hits another atomic nucleus, changing it into a Strangelet and so on ...

A large majority of the Physicists dismiss these fears. Their common argument is that Nature routinely
produces higher energies than what LHC will produce in cosmic-ray collisions. Cosmic rays are energetic
particles produced in outer space, which frequently pass through earth at very high speeds. The fact that
the Earth is still here after billions of collusions with cosmic rays rules out the possibility that cosmic
rays or the LHC could produce dangerous micro black holes or strangelets.

In a report published in 2003, the LHC Safety Study Group, a group of independent scientists, performed
a safety analysis of the LHC and concluded that there is "no basis for any conceivable threat".

However, because much of the phenomena, good or bad, expected to be produced by the LHC exists
only in the realm of theoretical physics so far , even physicists find it difficult to predict what might
happen when it comes in contact with the physical world.

abhayvohra@gmail.com