Advancing particle physics demands we build bigger and badder particle accelerators, but
every time the conversation about the next ultra-mega-super collider comes up some stick
in the mud announces that it could kill us and the whole universe…
But will it?
You probably fall into one or two camps on this subject.
Either you’re like me and you think that smashing some protons into each other head
on at near light speed is just going to create some pretty pictures and obliterated protons,
or you think it’ll create some pretty pictures and obliterate the Earth.
But the quantum world is weird and unintuitive, so let’s all put our assumptions aside for
one second and genuinely examine the supposed ways CERN could kill us all.
One of the stranger ideas revolves around strange matter called strangelets.
Strangelets are hypothetical forms of matter made up of up, down, and strange quarks.
They’re structure would make them more stable than ordinary nuclei.
In the right conditions, they could, hypothetically, rearrange ordinary matter, converting it to
be like itself,* causing a runaway chain reaction that shrinks earth down to a 100 meter wide
ball of strangeness.
A space oddity.
It’s like the subatomic version of ice-nine.
And if you don’t know what ice-nine is, read cat’s cradle.
Vonnegut is an American treasure.
Strangelets were a concern when the world’s second most powerful particle accelerator,
the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in the US, was switched on in the year 2000 so far
there’s still no sign of them.
So that’s encouraging.
Then of course there’s the fear that just won’t go away, the idea that particle colliders
will create a black hole that swallows the Earth.
Well guess what, there’s some truth to this idea.
But a teeeeeeny tiny one.
Physicists have theorized the existence of micro black holes, but they’d be pretty
unimpressive.
First you have to remember that a black hole’s gravity depends on its mass.
If the Earth were suddenly compacted down to just nine millimeters across, small enough
to become a black hole, the moon’s orbit wouldn’t change.
Black hole Earth has the same gravitational pull as vanilla Earth.
So a ultra-small black hole wouldn’t be able to suck much in, and it would take three
trillion years for it to reach the mass of one kilogram.
But the black hole doesn’t have that much time.
Stephen Hawking theorized that black holes decay and give off Hawking radiation.
Even making the most generous assumptions possible, a micro black hole would exist for
all of 10-23 seconds.
So even if a particle accelerator could create black holes, they pose no threat whatsoever.
Finally, it’s been suggested that particle accelerators might not just be the end of
Earth but the entire universe.
The idea is called Vacuum Decay, which postulates that the vacuum our universe exists in is
in a metastable state, meaning it seems like it’s in a stable state, but something could
disrupt it and drop it to a lower, more stable energy state.
If that happens it could create a bubble of the new stable vacuum that spreads across
the universe at light speed, wiping out literally everything, right down to the fundamental
laws of physics.
Some researchers suggest a particle accelerator could be the thing that tips our nice safe
false vacuum over the edge, maybe even by way of micro black holes, so double whammy!
But I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
Actually a good argument against any collider-caused doomsday scenario is all around us.
While smashing particles is an impressive feat for humans, it’s pretty humdrum for
the universe.
Millions of collisions releasing more energy than any particle accelerator happen daily,
just above our heads as cosmic rays collide in our atmosphere.
The moon has been bombarded with cosmic rays for billions of years and it’s still there.
If strangelets or micro black holes or vacuum decay were to kill us all, it probably would
have happened by now.
Smashing some protons here on Earth and destroying the universe is kind of like plugging in your
night light and causing a countrywide blackout.
So there’s no reason not to keep pushing the limits of particle accelerators.
In fact, doing so could reveal new physics that would show our vacuum is stable and strangelets
can’t exist and everything is A-OK.
Or maybe vacuum decay already started in some other part of the universe and it’s on it’s
way here to kill us right now.
We can’t know, what are you going to spend your whole life worrying?
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Did you know there are over 30,000 particle colliders in the world?
Check out this video to find out what they all do.
Ironically the Vacuum Decay hypothesis actually gained some traction because of findings from
the Large Hadron Collider.
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