CERN’s Large Hadron Collider will be activated this Wednesday. The LHC is a 17-mile long underground tunnel near Geneva that houses the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. Scientists use all this doohickery to smash protons together in order to recreate what they think happened during the initial stages of the Big Bang, specifically “the singularity” — the moment just before the Big Band occurred.
While many in the worldwide scientific community seem to be on board with the experiments, “a small group of maverick scientists” are attempting to prevent the LHC from being fired up this Wednesday, fearing that the experiment “could create a devastating black hole” if things don’t go as planned according to the Daily Mail. Thanks to the massive amount of energy created by the LHC’s atom-smashing, if not controlled properly, things could apparently get ugly.
I’m not here to say whether or not the particle acceleration train is going to run off the track and rip a hole in time and space, killing us all. For one thing, who knows if we’d actually die if sucked into a black hole that emanated from just underneath the border between France and Switzerland. Maybe we’d just get sucked gingerly into another dimension where everything is exactly the same except that pants zip from the back.
Whatever the case, maybe take a half day today to get your affairs in order. Then, if nothing happens on Wednesday, it’s not like you just blew off work altogether. Besides, you want to save up your vacation days for the real end of the world, which we all know is coming on December 21, 2012.
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider experiment will be shown live this Wednesday on http://webcast.cern.ch/ at the following times:
7:00 AM UTC
3:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time
2:00 AM Central Daylight Time
1:00 AM Mountain Daylight Time
12:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time