World's Largest Atom Smasher Nears Completion

evanwired writes "The last magnet was put in place this week at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. When the device is completed about a year from now it will be the world's largest particle accelerator, putting scientists in reach of new data and possible answers to questions dominated by theory over observation for the past two decades. Wired News recently visited the installation — awe-inspiring in its scale — as part of an in-depth, three-part series on the collider exploring the engineering, science and politics of high-end theoretical physics in the 21st century."

Comments

Re:Black holes

[Danga]

Is this the collider that could possibly create a black hole that would destroy the planet?

I don't think there is really much to worry about. I have read a few articles on the subject and it seems highly unlikely anything catastrophic could happen if small black holes are created. Here are some quotes from one interesting article http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/060919_b lack_holes.html:

"Stephen Hawking calculated all black holes should emit radiation, and that tiny black holes should lose more mass than they absorb, evaporating within a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, before they could gobble up any significant amount of matter"

and

"Still, let's assume that even if Hawking is a genius, he's wrong, and that such black holes are more stable," Landsberg said. Nearly all of the black holes will be traveling fast enough from the accelerator to escape Earth's gravity. "Even if you produced 10 million black holes a year, only 10 would basically get trapped, orbiting around its center," Landsberg said.

"However, such trapped black holes are so tiny, they could pass through a block of iron the distance from the Earth to the Moon and not hit anything. They would each take about 100 hours to gobble up one proton.

At that rate, even if one did not take into account the fact that each black hole would slow down every time it gobbled up a proton, and thus suck down matter at an even slower rate, "about 100 protons would be destroyed every year by such a black hole, so it would take much more than the age of universe to destroy even one milligram of Earth material," Landsberg concluded. "It's quite hard to destroy the Earth."

So, if Hawking is right we should be safe and even if he is wrong it sounds like we should still be safe. Of course nobody knows for sure which is somewhat scary but I don't think it means we should scrap the whole project in this particular case.

LHC@home

[burrows]

It may be worth noting that some of the design work on this amazing project was actually done by Slashdot readers with no background in particle accelerators. LHC@home is a distributed computing project using the SixTrack program that helps simulate particles' travel in the accelerator to study the stability of their orbits. It has been critical data to the scientists that have been working on the project.