What if a wormhole ripped open in the sky or the ground and our planet was met with
an inter-dimensional doomsday scenario reminiscent of stranger things unless
the government is housing a bunch of super human elevens somewhere in a desert bunker
we might be pretty screwed how would we face the perils of the
upside down cern's 27 kilometer large hadron collider whips elemental particles around at
super high speeds and then crashes them into each other with such force that they rip apart
it's helping us understand how the quantum world works and allowing us to find new forms of matter
but could particle accelerators like the LHC also rip apart the very fabric of our universe
the Large Hadron Collider is a modern marvel it's the world's largest scientific instrument it's
helping us figure out what exactly is going on with the matter we're made of and how it behaves
at the tiniest scales in most energized states but does using it pose a threat to our existence
british astrophysicist martin reese has warned that large particle accelerators like
the one at cern could potentially create some pretty crazy apocalyptic scenarios
there are basically three ways our life as we know it would cease to exist
if something went horribly wrong with the large hadron collider or similar technologies
the first worry that rhys has is that these massive particle accelerators can create things
called strangelets strange lights are hypothetical particles that if they come into contact with the
matter on our planet could condense it to the size of a soccer field how would this
work first we have to understand what matters made of all atoms are made of corks there are six type
of quarks that we know of the up quark down quark charm cork top court bottom quark and strange cork
of these only the up and down quarks have masses that actually make up the matter as we know it
on earth the rest decay very quickly into other stuff but back in the 1970s physicists wanted to
play with the idea of what would happen if atoms were subjected to super extreme pressures and
energies in their models atoms were pressurized to the point where their protons and neutrons burst
apart into quarks under even more pressure the up and down quarks could condense and some could turn
into stable heavier strange quarks if stability is reached then you get strange matter this matter
could proliferate as strangelets or pieces of strange matter if this happens then strangelites
would basically spread through the universe like a virus all other matter these viral particles
come into contact with would be attracted to the stability and mass of strangelets and immediately
convert to its highly compressed state this means that if a strangelet hit the earth our planet
would condense to the size of an asteroid if a strangely hit the sun it would condense into a
strange star and earth would freeze strangelets would essentially float through the universe
turning everything they came into contact with strange all matter would eventually become strange
matter our universe would be a literal episode of stranger things so should we worry that the
experiments going on at the large hadron collider could produce an upside down-esque universe of
strange matter the folks at cern say don't worry the large hadron collider is not nearly powerful
enough to produce the environments necessary for quarks to morph into stable strange matter
one report noted that it was about as likely as making an ice cube in a furnace if strangelets and
strange matter are physically possible their most likely generator would be neutron stars neutron
stars are the densest things in the universe other than black holes the pressure within these stars
is so high that they could be ripping apart atoms and turning up and down quarks into strange quarks
eventually the strange matter created would consume the neutron star turning it into
a strange star but a strange star would just continue being strange floating around by itself
not infecting anything else however if two strange stars collided they would inject strangelets into
the universe and they would speed along through space stranger find anything they touched
the second theory is that a large particle accelerator could create a massive black hole that
would suck up our earth and possibly the entire solar system there's a lot we don't know about
black holes but physicists have a pretty good idea that they're created when enough mass and
energy is condensed into a small enough amount of space the black holes that we've observed
in our universe were created after massive stars collapsed at the end of their lives
there's the possibility that when tiny particles smash into each other like they do in cern's large
hadron collider they could actually create little tiny black holes not a huge earth-eating one
physicists theorized that this would be possible if there were more than three dimensions complex
mathematical models based on string theories say that at certain super high energies these
little black holes could form in six or even ten dimensional space these dimensions if they exist
are curled into tiny loops within the space we already know exists string theory posits the
existence of gravitons or hypothetical force carriers for gravity gravity is currently
not incorporated into the standard model of particle physics and its force is left out of
the math and observations that go on at a micro level finding gravitons could help bridge the gap
between the standard model and the quantum realm these particles as well as other particles like
photons and bosons are not single point particles but instead minuscule ribbons of energy or strings
that vibrate in different ways string theory's equations are dense but they're extremely elegant
and more importantly extremely consistent these ribbons are curled up into tiny balls of space
less than 10 to the minus 33 centimeters wide however the strings themselves and these tiny
coils of inter-dimensional space are far too small to be measured by anything like the large hadron
collider 10 million billion times smaller than anything the particle accelerator can detect
so if there are tiny black holes being torn through inter-dimensional space as particles
crash into each other should we be worried well probably not the earth is actually bombarded every
day by particles that collide with the atmosphere at energies more than a hundred million times
greater than what can be produced at the large hadron collider it's possible these
little guys are already here around us but we just haven't been able to observe them yet
and if they're here they clearly haven't managed to engulf our planet yet also these tiny black
holes would be super unstable and if they do exist they would exist for a time so brief that we could
barely even call it time their decay time as perceived in our own three-dimensional world
would be 10 to the power of negative 83 seconds for physics to have any meaning
or use to us at all the smallest time we can use is about 10 to the power of negative 43 seconds
the third problem that could arise from all those particles colliding at cern is that it could
potentially rip open space-time itself according to rhys the vacuum of space that we normally
think of as empty is actually full of more stuff than we realize and it might be quite fragile in
theory a powerful enough particle accelerator could potentially tear apart space itself by
creating something called a phase transition phase transitions happen all the time they happen when
water changes to ice or steam they happen when atoms ionize or lose one of their electrons
these transitions are very common the claim that a man-made instrument could tear apart the fabric
of the universe has been pretty solidly refuted however there are forces at work so far beyond
the capacity we have to recreate things like the birth and death of stars quasars that shine
brighter than entire galaxies and supermassive black holes exist at energy scales that we
couldn't possibly hope to achieve through building something like a large particle accelerator
we might not need to be so worried about particle accelerators ending the universe as we know it
at least not at the scales they're built to now maybe in the future if we build one across the
entire diameter of the earth or the sun we'd have problems it's also important to note that
even martin reese has been quoted saying these apocalyptic scenarios are very very unlikely to
happen for now for now what the large hadron collider is doing though is discovering new
particles it's helping us understand the quantum world and possibly recreate the very formation
of our universe it may help us figure out what dark matter is and whether or not there really
are any observable extra dimensions it's been up and running again for a few months after a few
years hiatus during that time it was tweaked and improved now that it's back up physicists at cern
have already discovered three new particles well they're not really particles so much as they are
combinations of them they're called pentaquarks and tetra quarks normally matters we know it
is made up of a combination of three quarks the proton for example contains two up quarks and one
down quark but recently thanks to particle accelerators researchers have been finding
penta and tetra quarks particles with four and five quark configurations after the most recent
run at the large hadron collider scientists found three new types of these particles
they're often called exotic particles and they barely exist they pop in and out of existence
within a hundred thousandth of a billionth of a billionth of a second but their brief stint
in space and time may help us figure out what happened at the very beginning of the big bang
as more and more of these things are observed scientists can begin putting together a sort of
periodic table for exotic particles and lead to a better understanding of the very micro level
forces that affect the very fabric of existence so the large hadron collider may not end the
universe as we know it but it may help us figure out how it came to be like this in the first place