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According to the British physicist Martin Rees, there is a tired and highly discordant theory that powerful particle colliders could destroy the Earth. They do not do it. However, as history has once again been cited as a Google News hit, we deign to demystify it once again.
No, the Large Hadron Collider does not harm human existence, nor will it devour Earth.
The new panic surrounds a quote from the physicist's new book (which we will not link or promote in this post). He claims that the Large Hadron Collider could reduce the planet to a mass of hot matter the size of a football stadium, sucking the planet into a black hole, yadda yadda.
Although a respected astrophysicist, Rees is not affiliated with CERN and is used to making these baseless claims.
The British tabloids, which are often not very famous, have been carried away by history. Google News, which considers these publications as reliable sources for whatever reason, has presented it to readers who may not have known it better.
The Large Hadron Collider is the largest physics experiment in mankind. It is a 26 km ring in Geneva, Switzerland. It collides with protons in order to reach the high energies necessary to search for new theorized particles. It also collides with atomic nuclei to study the behavior of quarks, constituent parts of protons and neutrons.
A physicist with whom I spoke today was not surprised when I sent him one of these articles and explained to me that the thought is completely false.
"What Professor Rees is proposing is indeed impossible and already excluded by the previous generation of accelerators and by the LHC itself. The particles that he predicts would be more likely to be produced at energies below high energies, "said Freya Blekman, a physicist at Vrije Universiteit Brussel who works at the LHC. Gizmodo.
By "more likely," we always refer to the difference between essentially impossible and impossible. But whenever the experience is upgraded, the odds are even more impossible.
These energies are high in terms of particles – the proton normally weighs about 1 giga electron-volt (the energies and masses are equivalent in particle physics). The Higgs boson weighs about 125 times more. The protons of the LHC have masses, and therefore energies, several thousand times higher. But when you think about it on a human scale, you talk about particles with energy, approximately, flying bees.
In addition, these collisions, although resulting from the highest energies ever produced by humans on Earth, are insignificant compared to some of the incredible astrophysical events to which the Earth is subjected. Cosmic rays with a billion times more energy than the LHC beams have been observed slamming on our planet, yet we remain on an Earth that is not a heap of strange matter or a hole black.
"Since the Earth has not disappeared after billions of years of being bombarded by these cosmic rays, we are certain that the LHC, which produces particle collisions in a more controlled environment, does not will not provoke it either, "said Clara Nellist, physicist at the LHC. who works on the ATLAS experiment, said Gizmodo.
The large hadron collider has a safety committee that ensures that its experience does not harm the planet through strangelets, black holes, vacuum bubbles or anything else that concerns you.
And if a black hole came up, it would disintegrate almost instantly through a process called Hawking Radiation. Hawking theorized that black holes lose mass because of the quirks of quantum mechanics occurring right next to their surfaces. A black hole as small as that which could be created during a collision of particles would hardly exist.
I promise that, although physicists are really interested in their research, the vast majority do not worry enough to end life on Earth in search of knowledge. In addition, there are many ways for humans to threaten life on this planet right now, and these are not just fantasies.
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