A top boffin at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) says
that the titanic machine may possibly create or discover previously
unimagined scientific phenomena, or "unknown unknowns" - for instance "an
extra dimension".
"Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through
it," said Sergio Bertolucci, who is Director for Research and Scientific
Computing at CERN, briefing reporters including the Reg at CERN HQ earlier
this week.
The LHC, built inside a 27-km circular subterranean tunnel deep beneath the
Franco-Swiss border outside Geneva, functions like a sort of orbital
motorway for extremely high-speed hadrons - typically either protons or lead
ions.
The differences are, firstly, that the streams of particles are moving at
velocities within a whisker of light speed - such that each stream has as
much energy in it as a normal car going at 1000mph. Secondly, the beams are
arranged in such fashion that the two streams swerve through one another
occasionally, which naturally results in huge numbers of incredibly violent
head-on collisions.
These collisions are sufficiently violent that they are expected to briefly
create conditions similar to those obtaining countless aeons ago, not long
after the Big Bang, when the entire universe was still inconceivably small -
it was smaller than a proton for quite some time, seemingly, still with all
the stuff that nowadays makes up all the supra-enormity of space and
galaxies and so forth packed in somehow.
Naturally, some extremely strange phenomena are to be expected when one
mangles the very fabric of space-time itself in this fashion. Various
eccentric nutballs have claimed that this would doom humanity in one fashion
or another; perhaps converting the entire Earth, everything on it and
possibly the rest of the universe too into "strangelet soup", monopole
mulligatawny or some other sort of frightful sub-particulate blancmange or
custard.
It has also been suggested that cack-handed boffins at the LHC might
inadvertently call into being a miniature black hole and carelessly drop
this into the centre of the Earth, rather irritatingly causing the planet to
implode. It's certainly to be hoped that the button marked "Call Black Hole
Into Being" on the control board has some kind of flip-down cover over it.
Obviously all that's utter rubbish. But some boffins have speculated that
black holes might alternatively act as spacewarp wormhole portals into
alternate universes, or something. This would seem to chime with
Bertolucci's remarks this week on hyperdimensional "doors" out of which
might come unspecified "somethings".
