A Bigger Bang

Today marks the day when some marvelously expensive underground experiment beneath the French/Swiss border first fires up. The switch on the fabled and costly Large Hadron Collider was finally flipped. I’m hoping it’s one of those big red buttons with the plastic safety cover over it, like in the movies. One that requires two keys and lots of “Preparing to initiate beam, sir.” “Initiate!”

What’s strange is that no one really knows what is going to happen when it does whatever it is supposed to do. Surely lots of tiny stuff will collide with lots of other tiny stuff at fantastic speeds. After that it’s difficult to explain without lots of charts and chalkboards and a healthy helping of layman-izing to get the paying taxpayers onboard. I had some strange dreams about rocket-powered turtles last night and woke with an unexplained headache and a leg that was asleep, maybe these can be blamed on the LHC’s side effects from halfway around the world.

Will this thing find a way to run all of Europe for a week off a teaspoon of dark matter? Will a snapshot of skidding protons eerily resemble the face of Jesus? The more likely outcome will be a few years from now when the physics community has wrung out as many dollars as it could from the holders of the purse strings, and after whatever newly discovered weird subatomic thingies have been cleverly named after their discoverers, an alternative use will be clamored for.

So what do you do with a 17 mile underground tube? The most obvious answer is some sort of futuristic racetrack. One problem with this is where do you put the spectators. A more interesting idea is to put them in the tube themselves, make them part of the action. You thought watching ultimate fighting got your adrenaline pumping? Try dodging superbikes doing two hundred past you inside a deafening 12 foot concrete tunnel. Just stick to the inside and don’t move too suddenly and you should be OK.

Some worrywarts have said that when the thing spins up to a full head of steam and hosts its first subatomic fender bender, there is a slight chance a black hole will be generated, swallowing the Earth, her moon and any itinerant comets unlucky enough to be passing by into oblivion. Though the scale of this event may have grown in the retelling, like the massive catfish General Sherman that Homer nearly landed, it’s at least a possibility. Once again the chance is slight, there’s no need to strip nude and don a placard announcing the proximity of the end just yet. Plus Hawking is rumored to have a cash bet against it, so I’m not sweating. Talk about a win-win for the Doctor, his bookie will be interstellar ashes if the time ever comes to collect. But if you think that this is indeed the end, cash out now and have a good time with my blessing. I hear old man Potter is paying fifty cents on the dollar across town.

Or maybe this has happened before. Maybe the last Big Bang was the result of a previous collider experiment gone slightly wrong. Or quite successfully depending on your viewpoint. Somewhere along the line a designer forgets to carry the one, or a couple fairly important wires get crossed. Before you know it God is looking down from his watch shop, shaking his head as the whole show starts up again. Who does he swear to I wonder?

It was revealed someone stashed a couple of beer bottles inside the guts of the great thing, perhaps in a futile effort to ward off planetary disaster. The brand’s motto claims it will "refresh the parts other beers cannot reach". I swear it’s true. Ironically there is an actual phenomenon in physics known as Beer’s Law which describes the absorption of light in a given medium. For example shining your maglight into a fishtank will have a measurably different effect than doing so into a fishtank full of raspberry Jello. There will be a measurably different effect on the efficiency of your guppies’ gills as well, but that lies in an entirely different field of science to be discussed another day.

Let's raise a glass to science and hope she's kind to us this time.