The end of the world may really be nigh. This time. Yep, Nostradamus said 2012, but there's always someone out there who wants to pass the post first.
So it was with the Large Hadron Collider, which one science geek dubbed (and this is slightly paraphrased) "the mighty particle-punishing subterranean 27km supercooled magnetic doughnut", which accelerates subatomic particles to near light speed before smashing them against each other and into dead-ends. Like it was with Y2K, the end of the world as we know it has been and gone, again - even as the wickedly cynical people spread panic that the LHC would cause Earth to be sucked into a black hole of its own making. But when the CERN techno-junkies turned it on, nothing much happened.
Taking 15 years and $9 billion to build, the grand turn-on last September was a big turn-off for PR types used to pulsing spectacle. For instead of turning everyone on the planet into mulch within nanoseconds - and returning the spirit of Great Aunt Sally to boot - the giant accelerator, buried deep under the Franco-Swiss border, didn't much manage to smash up many particles at all, after its super-conducting magnets mysteriously lost their ability to operate at the required energy levels.
While that fix looks to be still some way away (read mid-year next year, maybe), the rehabilitation of LHC has now flown ever further out the window, for reasons even stranger than the thoughts that crossed Alec Irwin's mind over the bolt that crippled Koeberg. In the latest bout of LHC downtime, CERN's best reckoning is that on the 5 November a bird or plane dropped a piece of baguette (in keeping with the Francophone surroundings) onto some electrical machinery above ground. This made sections of the super-machine significantly overheat to -265.15 deg C (which is rather terribly, terribly cold), despite some super-cooling liquid-helium acting as a refrigerant.
What is surprising is that some spy camera at the facility hasn't recorded some manual labourer dropping crumbs from his lunch-time brie-and-pickle sandwiches, and that CERN is blaming humanity's feathered friends (the airplane theory is pretty much out of orbit). Knowing how sensitive such facilities are - whether CERN, Los Alamos or Moonbase Alpha - this will have the securocrats tearing at their hair, while idled and frustrated scientists will wonder how long they will remain becalmed.
Like with Koeberg's mysterious bolt, an uncontrolled shutdown of the LHC could be potentially crippling, as each beam of hadrons is said to have as much energy as an aircraft carrier at full speed. If the ship suddenly stops, the pent up energy is the equivalent of the vessel hitting an iceberg. So whether or not it was a bird or a plane, one must hope that the LHC story doesn’t have the Titanic’s ending
By Mark Allix
Read more: Times Online, New York Times, Melkbos
The purpose is for pure scientific reasons to discover new particles for which there is no as yet known use for in addition to a whole pack of other particles which have no known practical uses. If the Higgs boson is found it would still require an even bigger potentially more dangerous machine to put it to work if a use could be found for it.
The current standing of particle physics is that no new particle with any form of useful application has been discovered in the last seventy years. Actually William Prout suggested that all atoms are made of hydrogen atoms as far back as 1815 so make that nearly two hundred. Officially credit is given to the 1919 Rutherford scintillation experiment. Electricity goes back much further and its anti-particle discovered in 1932.
Discovering that the smaller Fermilab TeVatron was sucking in massive electron like particles from outside the collision beam has been the first major new discovery in particle physics for the last 35 years. The experiment to test the unknown with whatever risk is there just as much to disprove current physics theory as it is to add some new particle to the wish list.
Plans are already underway to build even larger more powerful experimental colliders and CERN has applied as have other countries. Providing an experiment is survivable it is given a number and then repeated. Opponents of the process that could see the production of a micro black hole per second or around 500,000 micro black holes a week at full production simply ask is it safe to attempt such unknowns when the risk is to the entire population of the planet.