The Earth gets eaten: real or rumor?
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March 22, 2010 • Skye Johnson, Guest Contributor
Filed under 2009-2010
“Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world,” Albert Einstein.
This is a quote that CERN (European organization for nuclear research) remembers and uses everyday. They tinker with various parts of the world, but their primary study is subatomic science.
Their new mechanism is called the ATLAS. It is a large hadron collider that sits on the border of France and Switzerland. This is no small lab experiment, however, as ATLAS is 27 km in length.
A hadron collider uses energy and momentum (about the speed of light) to collide protons or lead ions into each other. Thus, theoretically, creating heat at about 100,000 times the heat of the center of the sun (about 15 million degrees Kelvin or about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit). This is the same reaction that happened with the Big Bang. The instrument used to throw these particles to great speeds is an accelerator. The way they measure and observe the reactions is through a detector that uses waves to measure certain energies.
There is much more than just a few degrees of heat happening here. The fear of some suspicious human beings, and probably some inhuman beings as well, suggest that if this ATLAS experiment were to go wrong (or incredibly right) there may be a risk of the creation of a black hole.
Now of course we have all seen Start Trek, the ingenious writing of Gene Roddenberry, unveiled to the world for at least fifty years. The optimistic side of black holes is that you can say “Beam me up, Scotty” without being a trekkie…well, maybe you shouldn’t.
I interviewed a few of Chugiak High School’s science teachers and they all said the same thing about being able to create a black hole.
Q: What is your view on the ATLAS project at CERN, or the large hadron collider?
A: I think that it is a great idea if it helps us understand more science.
Q: Would you go work on the collider if you could?
A: Yes, I would. I would love to get in on the science they are doing.
Q: Do you think that there is any danger involving black holes?
A: No. If there was any possibility that we could make one, t would evaporate faster
than it could take anything into it.
Q: How much power do we need to make a black hole?
A: If we could find enough power it would take more than the energy of our sun to make a black hole. Even if there was a possibility of a black hole erupting, there would be no way to stabilize it without a machine larger than our earth. The fear of the suspicious does not have to sop the discoveries we are making today.
