The Most Ambitious Experiment Ever
Recently, the Large Hadron Collider fired opposing beams of protons in a record-shattering atom smashup! As National Geographic Magazine describes it: “You smash stuff together and see what other stuff comes out”.
Buried 58 stories below the earth in a tunnel 27 kilometres in circumference is a science experiment that will change humanity forever – one way or another and most of us are unaware of it. The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s most expensive experiment in the history of mankind. The project with costs now exceeding US$ 9 billion is man’s exalted attempt to simulate the BIG BANG occurrence, which scientists believe was responsible for creation. Conceived over 25 years ago, the heart of the project is a device comprising a magnet that generates a magnetic field 100,000 times stronger than that which naturally occurs in the core of the Earth and a 27-kilometer ring of superconducting magnets which propel two beams of particles travelling in opposite directions at close to the speed of light with very high energies before colliding with one another in pipes of ultrahigh vacuum.
If everything goes as planned, this collision will generate reactions which will morph into various types of particles and hopefully, one of these particles will be THE ONE: the God particle, which is also known as Higgs boson, named after physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed its existence more than 40 years ago. The God particle is believed to be the particle of particles, which interacts with other particles to form matter and provides the code for everything else that follows. This elusive God particle is the heart of particle physics theory but it has not been found. The LHC project hopes to change that.
Mankind has embarked on many enviable endeavours but this one begs the question: Then what? National Geographic says of it: “Building a contraption like the LHC to find the Higgs is a bit like embarking on a career as a stand-up comic with the hope that at some point in your career, you’ll happen to blurt out a joke that’s not only side-splittingly funny but also a palindrome” but they are doing it anyway. The LHC project is housed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN beneath the French-Swiss border near Geneva Switzerland and is the collaboration of more than 100 countries, hundreds of laboratories and scientific institutions and more than 10,000 scientists. Is it my imagination or does this project have many similarities with the biblical tower of Babel?
There are many criticisms of the LHC project. First is the issue of its safety but the people running the LHC are not entertaining any discussions about the ‘what if’ scenarios that us non scientific-minded folks might fear. After all, there is already enough talk about the experiment generating a black hole that could cause the earth to ‘totter like a drunken man’ and implode on itself. Other criticisms are along the lines that the millennium development goals are lacking funds for meeting the world’s self-imposed targets to end world hunger, poverty and disease, yet this huge wanker (pardon my ‘French’) of a project is expending humongous resources that might destroy the world others are trying to save in the smash up to end all smash-ups.
I for one would have liked a global referendum on how I would like to die, thank you very much. It’s a tossup, really. Would you rather die from the man-made big bang while you sleep when the moment sneaks upon us like a ‘thief in the night’, by boiling to death under the new sweltering temperatures that are the result of global warming, of cancers yet unknown caused by endless tinkering with food and water sources, or from any other of the man-inflicted ills of the 21st century? The clock ticks as earth reels under the weight of our unbridled gluttony and wanton destruction of all we survey, as we plunder mother nature leaving her bereft of anything that could argue our salvation and madly laugh our way to catastrophe drunk with the wine of our own vain pursuits. Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps science has the answers to the questions that science poses. Perhaps art predicts life and space travel would make it possible for a large proportion of the inhabitants of this planet to escape the coming devastation that we bring upon ourselves (fast forward to the year 2105 as depicted in the movie Wall-E)? Perhaps we all worry for nothing. After all, 10000 scientists cannot be wrong! Similar stories @ Doomsday Theories
