Read My Paper, dated 31 March 08, on page A11 and chance upon a piece of article that might be interesting for all those scientific minds and geeks out there. It is said that the physicists in CERN (European Centre for Nuclear Research) is currently experimenting a giant particle accelerator and will begin smashing protons outside Geneva this summer.
Scientists and physicists worldwide have spend 14 years and US$8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC for short, in which the colliding protons will recreate the energy fields that was last seen a second after the big bang. It would allow scientists, physicists and researchers to observe and answer some of the most burning questions of our Universe.
2 physicists, Mr Walter Wagner & Mr Luis Sancho however are skeptical and worried that such a device or experiment might create a black hole which may eventually consume our earth.
According to the hawking's radiation (named after stephen hawking), the heat and entropy of a black hole is non zero and finite. The entropy can be visualized as an "unusable" energy and mathematically speaking, it is inversely proportional to the mass of the black hole. Since in some way, black hole behaves like any other close system that follows the 2nd law of thermodynamics, this unusable energy is constantly increasing.
In lay man term, you can imagine the black hole is a cup of hot cocoa left to cool and over time. The heat which is the "useful" energy would be converted into "unusable" energy as the cocoa cools. In other words, when useful energy decrease, unusable energy increase. This explains why entropy is increasing.
By the virtue of the entropy's inverse relationship with mass, the increase in entropy allows the black hole to lose its mass. Meaning to say, in time to come all black holes would disperse.
Now, since LHC has the potential to create micro black holes and if hawking's theory is correct, then these micro black hole would evaporate so fast that there wouldn't be any harm at all. However, if this theory doesn't stand (since it is not fully tested) and the micro black hole is sucking in more matter than it is losing, then it would grow and eventually consume us all (yes, including our Earth). This is the potential threat number 1.
The 2 professors also theorized that the LHC may have the potential to create something called the "strangelet". This strangelet may be hypothetical since not much is known about it but if it does exist and come into contact with an ordinary mass, it would instantanously convert the nuclei of the atoms from the mass into something called "strange matter". This in turn produces a larger and more stable strangelet, which then may hit another nucleus, converting it to an even larger strange matter. This would spin off a large chain reaction and eventually when all the atoms of Earth are converted, Earth would be reduced to nothing but a hot large lump of strange matter. This is the potential threat number 2.
Having said this, let me still emphasize that the chance of these potential threats becoming a reality is rare. Many physicists in and out of CERN (almost 2000 of them from over 30 countries and hundreds of Universities) have already conducted a variety of studies and played down such fear. Even at this moment, tests and studies are still being conducted just to be sure.
Which way the experiment goes is really debatable but let's just cross our fingers and hope that these physicists and scientists in CERN have done enough homework to ensure this experiment doesn't turn into a major boo boo. I really don't want to be sucked into singularity and stretched into a piece of spaghetti or being converted into a lumpy mass of strange matter.
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