Turns out Sarah Palin and her church friends are not the only ones who think the end is near. Some scientists fear the creation of black holes when the Large Hadron Collider is switched on later today:
Travelling at almost the speed of light, the minute particles of matter will slam into each other in an event that boffins hope will be a recreation of the Big Bang—the moment at which the universe was created.As the LHC begins, more than 600,000 computers, part of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (LCG), will be called into action to analyse the results.
The massive amount of data that will be generated by each experiment will take scientists decades to analyse, even with the massive computer network at its disposal.
It’s hoped the LHC will eventually reveal the inner workings of atoms—and almost certainly prove the existence of the “God particle”, the Higgs Boson.
“This accelerator will not only look at the matter around us in more detail, but it’s going to be able to give some significant answers to some big questions like, ‘what is dark matter?’, ‘what happened just after the Big Bang?’ and ‘what are we?’,” University of Melbourne Physics Professor Geoff Taylor said, who is part of the LCG team.
While scientists are excited, there is also plenty of trepidation from people fearing the possible effects of the machine.
A civil lawsuit in the US has called on CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research, the developer of the LHC) to slow the development because of fears black holes could be created.