Smashing stuff!

Does exactly what it says on the tin. Today i'm going to waffle on a bit about the geeks and fanatics at CERN - they are like moles and they live in a hole. But no ordinary hole this, 17 miles long and circular it houses the world's largest particle accelerator. Capable of accelerating natures building blocks to significant fractions of the speed of light its purpose, in keeping with the human tradition, is to smash things up to see how they work. In particular we are looking for the Higgs boson, an elusive theoretical particle that will make or break several theories pertaining to the genesis of our own universe. I don't pretend to know what a boson is (some sort of tiny cow maybe) and I don't know how we will see it in the ruins of super energetic sub atomic collisons but I have heard, on the grapevine, that we are crossing into some dangerous territory that could have existential repercussions not only for our own species but for the planet itself. The worry is that the massive amounts of energy released in these collisions is sufficient to create tiny black holes and wormholes. The idea of creating a wormhole or black hole certainly seems to be straying into the realms of sci fi but the possibility is worrying enough for a group of scientists to launch a court case aiming at the suspension of the programme at CERN. The researchers at CERN do not dispute the claim that black holes and wormholes are a potential product of their experiments, however they do claim that if such phenomena were propagated they would last for only a tiny fraction of a second, disappearing out of existence just as quickly as they appeared. It has been estimated that once the accelerator is fully ramped up it could produce up to 1 black hole per second. Those contesting the court case argue that the potential risks of creating these cannot be known, in essence initiating a game of Russian roulette with our planet in the hot seat.

Another fantastical possibility concerns the aforementioned wormholes - generally accepted as theoretically possible these little beauties lay open the door to time travel no less! Spacetime has been explained to me in numerous ways over the years and although some parts of it I can grasp I have never been able to internalise the understanding in the same way i can for other phenomena - gravity for instance. Things fall - easy. Spacetime, and more particularly the curvature of spacetime has no such 2 word explanation. Apparently the passage of time slows in the vicinty of any object with mass. The greater the mass the greater the distortion in spacetime. Wormholes are speculated to occur when the mass is so great that spacetime effectively doubles over on itself. If you have a flat sheet of paper representing time instead of travelling the whole length of the sheet to arrive at the other end you can simply take the short cut where the ends meet when the paper is folded. Instantaneous. Hence time travel. The theory stipulates that time travel is possible only back as far as the point in time where the first time travel machine was made. Since CERN may unintentionally be producing the first ever time machine it is possible that we may have visitors from the future arriving some time in the middle of September! The possibility is thought to be only theoretical however due to the instability and subatomic scale of the wormholes theorised. Pretty fucking cool though.

CERN embodies the dilemnas modern science will begin to face on an ever more regular basis in the years ahead. In order to achieve the step changes and paradigm shifts the human race survives on it is no longer possible to risk only the life of 1 french chemist or a group of uninformed test subjects - as the risk/reward mechanic stretches exponentially upwards the stake demanded from the house for a spin of the wheel becomes eye wateringly large. Even if the odds are stacked heavily in our favour when does it become too big a risk to take at any odds? I think we are the cosmic casinos compulsive gambler - we will talk ourselves into spinning the wheel even when the odds become far less favourable than in the CERN case and eventually the house will cash our chips. Until then benvenido time travellers and let it roll!