Russ Humphreys' Perspective On

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... the LHC proton accelerator:

The large hadron collider: will a black hole swallow us?

by Russ Humphreys

Published: 12 September 2008(GMT+10)

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland fired its first shot last Wednesday (September 10, 2008). Contrary to some peoples’ worries, it doesn’t appear to have made a black hole that is swallowing up the earth. The needless worries were generated by science publicity that

1. it would reproduce a small-scale piece of the alleged Big Bang, and
2. the Big Bang piece might make a tiny—but hungry—black hole.

The truth is not as cataclysmic as that, but still interesting to us science groupies. The LHC, operated by the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN)1 is designed to fling small bunches of protons (a type of “hadron” or heavier elementary particle) at each other at speeds close to that of light. When the accelerator gets up to its full capacity, in about a year, each proton will have a record-breaking 7 trillion electron-volts (TeV) of energy. For comparison, the atoms in your body bounce around each with one-fortieth of an electron-volt.

Trillions of electron-volts is indeed a lot of energy for man to pack into a tiny particle, but God does it all the time, in cosmic rays that strike the earth continually. My doctoral dissertation studied cosmic ray protons with 10 TeV energies striking a block of graphite (consisting of carbon atoms) atop a mountain in Colorado. When the LHC eventually begins clashing two proton beams in opposite directions, the collisions will produce the same results as a 200,000 TeV cosmic-ray proton slamming into a stationary nucleus. To date, nobody has noticed any little black holes stemming from those not-infrequent very high energy cosmic rays, certainly not earth-gobbling black holes!

Such collisions are fascinating to physicists because they probe the nature of matter at very small scales. The LHC will explore particle forces at distances about one-thousandth the diameter of a proton. When the two protons collide, they will produce a tiny ball of extremely hot, dense “plasma” made up of the constituents of protons, “quarks” and “gluons.”

The great temperature of the ball of plasma, over a billion degrees Celsius, should rip (as happens at lower energies) many tiny but massive particles out of the fabric of space itself. (Not to worry—God has made the ‘fabric’ able to repair itself when things cool down.) The distribution of these secondary particles tells physicists how the forces between particles work. Experimenters may even find the elusive particle known as the ‘Higgs boson,2 ’ which I (and a few other physicists) could interpret as the main constituent of the fabric of space itself. So though the Big Bang is science fiction, the tiny bang the LHC will make should tell us lots of fascinating new things about the basic stuff of the cosmos God has created. In the long run, it can’t help but glorify Him.

LINK.

well, I was wondering what religious figures or creationists would think about the experiment, if they would think to be a waste of time, mostly because it is related to the big bang, and the origin of mass.

That's the kind of dogma that worries me. When it comes to the impacts of technology, there are other lots of anti-Noahs out there arguing that humans are insignificant and the Earth God made is so tough that nothing we can do will mess things up .... no reason to assume that is true because it sounds good. I have no idea if making black holes in France is ok because they will certainly break up instead of growing, but if I did have an opinion on that, I would try to make it based on science and the precautionary principle, not faith that everything will turn out ok.