Dat is ook onmogelijk, want hij vergaat volgende maand al!:
May 2008 - the end of the world as we know it?
Not because of the 100 Year Party, although that is fast approaching too, just three months away. No there is a real chance for the first time in history, although admittedly a vanishingly small one, that something else of huge import for life on this planet will happen in May. That is the month when some of the world’s cleverest people at CERN plan to switch on the Large Hadron Collider and who can know exactly what will happen next? The giant machine, buried in the glacial moraine at the end of Lake Geneva sprawls into two countries. It consists of a series of immense super-conducting magnets, which will hold two beams of particles in a perfect circle. Tiny bits of matter will then be accelerated, spinning in opposite directions until they reach a significant fraction of the speed of light. Then, their paths will be made to cross and boom, several things should happen. May be new, even more exotic forms of matter will be discovered in the resulting debris. Perhaps even the holy grail of subatomic physics, the infamous Higgs Boson, a particle which is thought to be the origin of all mass.
Of course, even though the energies of individual particles are small, amounting to little more than the force of a flying mosquito, taken together, this adds up to a particle beam which packs the same punch as 150 kilos of TNT. The risk does not come from a conventional explosion, however, which would only wreck some very expensive equipment deep underground. There is a very small chance that the experiment might create a minuscule black hole, which if created, should evaporate away its mass through Hawking Radiation. But if ever our understanding is awry then a black hole with a longer life expectancy would sink to the centre of the Earth and progressively swallow the planet. Other very small possibilities are that the machine will create a warp in time which would allow an invasion from the future, some of whom might even be our own distant offspring. What an awful thought. We have invited everyone from the family to our party,but not the as yet unborn.
So if ever there was a good time to organize a huge bash, it is May 2008.
May 2008 - the end of the world as we know it?
Not because of the 100 Year Party, although that is fast approaching too, just three months away. No there is a real chance for the first time in history, although admittedly a vanishingly small one, that something else of huge import for life on this planet will happen in May. That is the month when some of the world’s cleverest people at CERN plan to switch on the Large Hadron Collider and who can know exactly what will happen next? The giant machine, buried in the glacial moraine at the end of Lake Geneva sprawls into two countries. It consists of a series of immense super-conducting magnets, which will hold two beams of particles in a perfect circle. Tiny bits of matter will then be accelerated, spinning in opposite directions until they reach a significant fraction of the speed of light. Then, their paths will be made to cross and boom, several things should happen. May be new, even more exotic forms of matter will be discovered in the resulting debris. Perhaps even the holy grail of subatomic physics, the infamous Higgs Boson, a particle which is thought to be the origin of all mass.
Of course, even though the energies of individual particles are small, amounting to little more than the force of a flying mosquito, taken together, this adds up to a particle beam which packs the same punch as 150 kilos of TNT. The risk does not come from a conventional explosion, however, which would only wreck some very expensive equipment deep underground. There is a very small chance that the experiment might create a minuscule black hole, which if created, should evaporate away its mass through Hawking Radiation. But if ever our understanding is awry then a black hole with a longer life expectancy would sink to the centre of the Earth and progressively swallow the planet. Other very small possibilities are that the machine will create a warp in time which would allow an invasion from the future, some of whom might even be our own distant offspring. What an awful thought. We have invited everyone from the family to our party,but not the as yet unborn.
So if ever there was a good time to organize a huge bash, it is May 2008.
Bericht laatst bijgewerkt: 17-04-2008 14:38
