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Don't Panic: How to Know When the Large Hadron Collider Spells Your Doom


I've never let the fact that I only squeaked through by the skin of my teeth in my high school and college physics classes ever prevent me from being a huge fan of that area of study. As anyone who has even a passing fancy of physics knows, the Large Hadron Collider was turned on just a bit ago, and while the Earth has yet to implode, we might not be out of the woods yet.

The device, know as the LHC by folks in the know, is the world's largest particle accelerator complex and it's designed to collide opposing beams of protons. All the major reports I've read say something to the effect of "the consensus around physics circles is that we're going to be ok," but where things start getting scary is when you dig down and find stuff like Wikipedia article on the "Safety of the Large Hadron Collider":

"A major concern amongst CERN opponents is that any micro black holes produced by the LHC particle collisions [...] According to the standard calculations are harmless because they would quickly decay by Hawking radiation [... but] Otto Rössler believes that micro black holes created in the LHC could grow exponentially."

You read too far into it, and you start to get the feeling your congressman gets when he hears about child predators on MySpace: fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Thankfully, we have Twitter, the first place to turn in any disaster. It's not really a fear that the world's going to end - we all know it will at some point. That doesn't mean I wouldn't much rather know when I need to bend over and kiss my ass goodbye than have a black hole walk up, tap me on the shoulder, and quietly announce that my planet has been scheduled for demolition to clear a path for a galactic byway.

Monitoring Twitter for the following hashtags and searches produce more up to the second coverage than you can shake a stick at: LHC, #lhc, CERN, #doomsday, and The Large Hadron (note: "the Large Hardon" will produce significantly different results).

Similarly, searching FriendFeed will give you many of the same results with the added color commentary the service is known for.

Update: I'm seeing a number of Tweets that saying that the test loops have been completed successfully, and based on conversations I've had with Stan in the last few minutes, Europe still appears to exist. We may live through this thing.

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