I’m sure you heard through the ol’grapevine that the Swedes were creating a black hole in an underground labortory this week. For those who didn’t get the memo: it’s true. No, I’m not just presenting the plot to some James Bond movie as fact. This is what real humans thought would be a keen idea, creating a black hole in some bunker. What’s the worst that could happen? I’ll give you a hint, it starts with “Eradication” and ends with “of the human race”. B-I-N-G-O. Bingo, my man. You guessed it. Creating a black hole would kill everyone.
Or so we thought! Its turns out that all that funding and decades of work finally paid off! Bonus: Earth isn’t extinct! Talk about a win-win! You can check out the success story here. The claim is that this atom-smasher will be able to “create post big-bang conditions”. What is a post big-bang condition? I would think anything that happened after the big-bang, ie: everything. So I’m not sure if the atom-smasher plans on creating a black hole or a soft pretzel. I believe that both are post big-bang though. Let’s stick with the black hole idea, its much more….how do you say?….foreboding.
What really strikes me about this article (aside from the initial “pheew!”) is how unsure all the scientists conducting the experiment are. Let’s take a look at the quotes:
“Oh, we made it through!”
“First of all, I didn’t believe it”
“Oh, wow, it actually worked!”
“Things can go wrong at any time”
Those are the physists!?! They sound like they just put a CD in a microwave without burning down their apartment. Or they chewed tinfoil without having to go to the hospital. If I’m not mistaken an atom-smasher might smash atoms. Last time I remember people smashing atoms a whole city had its skin melted off. Let’s say I went out in my backyard and threw a bucket of knives in the air, then looked up wide-eyed with my tongue sticking out. None of the knives stab me. It worked!!! Science!!!
Update: Oops. They have accelerated one particle, but the black hole will potentially happen only in the coming weeks when they collide particles. Also they’ll be colliding the particles 7-8 times faster than they are testing now. Conclusion: we didn’t die today, awesome.
Have a stress-free rest of the month guys!
For those who prefer music to news.
