If all goes well, the Large Hadron Collider will soon be smashing subatomic particles together as they travel near the speed of light around the 16.8 mile circumference of the world's most complicated machine. Scientists hope the Large Hadron Collider will give us more information of what the universe was like mere fractions of a second after the Big Bang. Journalists hope writing about the Large Hadron Collider won't result in an embarrassingly juvenile typo. And misguided people around the globe hope it won't create a black hole that will swallow us all.
Let's get that last one out of the way first: The LHC isn't going to create a black hole that will destroy the Earth and spaghettify us. That's a real term by the way. Spaghettification refers to the stretching of objects as they encounter intense gravitational fields. Who said cosmologists didn't have a sense of humor?
Scientists are quick to point out that such fears are misplaced. The collisions that will happen in the LHC -- assuming it ever works -- happen in the universe all the time. The LHC will create these events in a controlled environment and allow us to observe and measure them. If a black hole were to form from the experiments it would exist for less than a second before collapsing in on itself.
Some scientists hope that experiments at the LHC will provide evidence of the Higgs Boson particle. Have you ever wondered why matter has mass? It's okay if you haven't -- scientists have done it for you. We don't have an answer for that question. The best we can manage is a theoretical particle we call the Higgs Boson. We don't even know if such a particle exists. The LHC may give us the next clue we need to answer a fundamental question about the nature of the universe itself. That's pretty cool!
All of this is moot if the machine never gets going. Engineers at the LHC have had to deal with some big problems. The LHC was supposed to go online in 2008 but an improperly spliced cable and a helium leak shut it down for a year. Last month, the LHC faced another daunting foe: a piece of bread. Apparently a baguette clogged up part of the LHC. Fortunately, the brave men and women at CERN were able to dispose of this Enemy of Science.
And what about the theory that the Higgs Boson itself is traveling from the future to sabotage the LHC? I have a question for you. Which is more likely: The world's most advanced and complicated machine, composed of thousands of parts from dozens of manufacturers, should experience a few hiccups before it works properly or a theoretical particle that may not even exist somehow has sentience, the ability to travel through time and a grudge against the LHC? I think Occam's Razor will guide you to the right answer (Note: it's probably the first one).
Learn more over at HowStuffWorks.com:
How the Large Hadron Collider Works
How Black Holes Work
How the Big Bang Theory Works
Photo credits: Fabrice Coffrini, AFP, Getty Images
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