The European Organization for Nuclear Research’s Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, recently completed outside of Geneva, is scheduled to circulate a beam through the entire 27 kilometer circumference for the first time on September 10th, 2008. The purpose of this collider is to accelerate isolated hadrons of atoms and smash them together and produce the Higgs boson which could explain how elementary particles acquire properties such as mass and also how and why gravity works, which scientist are still scratching their heads about. I’m not totally sure what that means or how they can do it, but I do know that aside from the Higgs boson, other expected uses for the giant collider are to make new particles, models, and states such as supersymmetric particles, compositeness, extra dimensions, strangelets, micro black holes and magnetic monopoles.

Now, starting with Supersymetric particles; from what I can gather from Wikipedia and other nerd sites, Supersymetry theory states that for every particle we know about, there is a sister particle. So, like Wario is to Mario, the superpartner to the electron is the selectron, to the quark is the squark, and from the photon is the photino, which sounds like a Latin lounge singer.

As for compositeness and extra dimensions, attempting to describe them for me is like cooking steak with my eyeballs. I am not a physicist, and the online descriptions of them make my brain bleed. But as for strangelets and micro black holes, that’s where things get spooky.

A strangelet is a combination of an up, down, and strange quark. A quark being the smallest particles ever detected and these make up all matter. Now, some people think that if this accelerator can produce a strangelet, it will fuse with the nuclei of ordinary matter and convert it into strange matter, which in tern would start a domino rally effect. This means that the entire Earth could convert into a “strange star”, which would be a hot, glowing lump of strange matter. However scientist call this scenario “far fetched” which is mildly reassuring. I hope it doesn’t do that.

Finally, as for creating a micro black hole, which is a dense object that pulls in all light and matter into a compacted singularity and possibly even out of existence, that is also a possibility. The thought of this makes me picture myself sitting in a coffee shop, looking out the window and suddenly seeing a car or a house being whisked through the sky followed by the city, then myself, as everyone and everything on the planet is pulled along forests or through the earth itself at hypersonic speeds until we all reach Geneva with no time to even buy a souvenir pocket knife.

So, being sucked into a black hole would be a negative thing. However, Perimeter Institute physicist Cliff Burgess states in an interview with CBC’s Paul Jay, ‘it is almost certainly true that if it produces those black holes, they are going to evaporate very quickly.’ Burgess adds, ‘They might be a couple hundred times more heavy than a proton, but way less than fractions of a gram. And at that size limit, we expect them to evaporate extremely quickly through a process called Hawking radiation [which is a theoretical decaying process thought up by Stephen Hawking].’ Also, if these tiny black holes do not decay as predicted, it is also theorized that the rate of absorption would be so slow that it would take one billion years before it became a threat to the Earth. Phew! What a relief.

So, that’s just a heads up. I guess we’ll see what happens when the first high-energy collisions are planned to take place after the LHC is officially unveiled, on 21 October 2008.