Without a Traceroute

CERN’s new high-energy particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), went live yesterday. The $10 billion, 17-mile long particle accelerator has been 15 years in the making. Obviously, this is a major achievement for particle physics, and represents a serious commitment to “Big Science” and pure research. However, looking at the media coverage of the Large Hadron Collider, you would think that the only important question to be answered is whether the LHC will cause the end of the world.

There are at least two or three ways that the particle accelerator could maybe bring about the end of all life on earth. It might create a black hole that swallows up the earth, it could create strangelets, that would transform any regular matter into strange matter. It could create vacuum bubbles, or magnetic monopoles, with similar universe-destroying potential.

My last couchsurfing host was a high school physics teacher (his name is Otto Kool, so he’s literally Mr. Kool to his students), and he joked rather darkly that if the LHC wiped out humanity, it would seem “a fitting end to the human endeavor,” to destroy everything in an attempt to understand everything. Others were less sanguine about the prospect of ending all everything everywhere, at least two separate lawsuits were filed in attempt to stop scientists from switching the thing on. Fifty-four percent of respondents to an online AOL survey said that operating the LHC was “not worth the risk,” and of course AOL users are well-known for their expertise in the risks and rewards of high-energy particle physics.

In any case, the true risk of any of the various doomsday scenarios is so small as to be insignificant. The Earth is bombarded daily by cosmic rays, at similar energy levels to those produced by the LHC. This has been going on trillions of time a day for at least a couple billion years now, and the Earth hasn’t been destroyed yet.

Like much of science, observing the actual process is rather boring, and it’s only the conclusions and added knowledge that are really exciting. Here you can see a video of the control room observing the results of the first beams sent around the accelerator:

For more entertaining look, you can check out the LHC rap:

And just because the universe hasn’t been ended by the LHC yet, doesn’t mean it won’t be in the future. For those of you who want to keep up-to-date with the LHC’s world-destroying potential, you can check out hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com, which I think would be funnier if it actually implemented some sort of earth-destruction test mechanism.

So congratulations to the team at CERN. Try to keep up the not-killing-us-all. On a side note, I do feel sort of sad for Fermilab, the site of the Tevatron (a way cooler name than LHC), formerly the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator. Perhaps their bruised ego led them to stamp “Fermilab” in giant lettering on the sides of the magnets they contributed to the LHC.

Sorry I haven’t posted in the last few days, I haven’t really been doing anything particularly cool. Tonight I’m going down to Amsterdam to meet with some hackers there, so hopefully that will be interesting.