Tuesday, September 02, 2008

End of the World Scheduled for September 10th

It seems that Spanish science writer Luis Sancho and Professor Otto Rössler, a chemist at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen are filing suit against the Large Hadron Collider (LHC.)  This article talks about what could go down due to these irresponsible physicists dabbling with the mysteries of the universe.  Do they think they are gods!

These LHC opponents fear that the Earth could be destroyed by vacuum bubbles, magnetic monopoles, microscopic black holes, or strangelets produced by the high-energy proton-proton collisions planned by CERN physicists. Vacuum bubbles have been described as a kind of "cosmic cancer." If it turns out that there is a lower energy state into which the universe could settle, then the LHC might produce "bubbles" of such a state which would then expand, ripping apart the Earth and eventually the entire universe. If magnetic monopoles were produced they might induce protons to decay and thus destroy normal matter. Microscopic black holes might grow by gobbling up the Earth. And strangelets are combinations of quarks that theoretically interact with normal matter and transform it into strange matter.

Vacuum bubbles, magnetic monopoles, and stranglets, Oh My!  Vacuum bubbles, magnetic monopoles, and stranglets, Oh My!  I guess we might have a choice of a kill-the-universe-scenerio with the vacuum bubbles, a black hole that would devour the earth, monopoles that would disintigrate normal matter or everything could turn strange.  

My money is on not finding the Higgs Boson and everyone has to get out their slide-rules and figure out ways to make up for it.  The scenerio where earth would turn into strange matter would be pretty interesting as well but it would probably wipe out humanity.  I guess the Doors song "People are Strange" would then actually apply.   

1 comment:

JTankers said...

Interesting perspective on the Higgs. There is an open source physics project that I find compelling at mass.bigcrash.org that proposes mass is created from the gravitational field generated by an immense (or at lease immensely powerful) vacuum energy.

Just an incomplete idea, but I find it a plausible possible mechanical explaination for momentum.