Particles collide, Earth survives

Particles collide, Earth survives

Scripps Howard: Well, we’re still here.

Scientists in Switzerland successfully powered up and tested a huge physics experiment called the Large Hadron Collider without any of the consequences — a black hole that swallows the Earth being the most dire — predicted in the wackier reaches of the Internet.

The collider is a 17-mile underground ring of pipes and super-cooled magnets. In the first test, the scientists fired a beam of photons around the collider in a clockwise direction. A few hours later, they fired another beam into the frigid vacuum counterclockwise. The ultimate goal, perhaps a year from now, is to shoot off proton beams at full power, close to the speed of light, in opposite directions and then capture their collisions with cameras shooting millions of frames a second.

Big-ticket project

None of this is cheap or simple. The collider took five years to build and cost $3.8 billion, of which the United States contributed $531 million.

It is interesting that the scientists want to recreate in miniature the split second that followed the Big Bang at the same time that a creationist is running for the nation’s second highest office. Creationists don’t believe in the Big Bang, the massive thunderclap that created the universe, or the age of the universe as determined by the Big Bang, which a NASA Web site, after some abstruse hemming and hawing, puts at 13.7 billion years.

That snapshot could solve certain mysteries, like the existence, now only theoretical, of the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle” considered the basis of all matter, as well as of the antithesis of matter, the so-called “dark matter.”

Since physicists first started smashing atoms, it is the nature of these experiments that the scientists learn much — including how much they don’t know. We look forward to learning their findings next year, assuming, of course, we’re still here.