Two nightmare scenarios, two ends of the world. In the
first, there is little warning. For maybe a month there would be no sign that
life was about to come to an abrupt and nasty end for all living things on
Earth.
Then, earthquakes would start unexpectedly, alerting
geologists that something terrible, unimaginable, was amiss.
After a few days, these seismic disturbances would reach
catastrophic proportions.
Cities would be levelled, the oceans would rise and wash in
a series of mega-tsunamis that would attack the world's coasts, killing
millions.
Is the end of the world nigh? Doom-mongers fear the
consequences of scientists replicating the Big Bang
The fact that the earthquakes were striking randomly, not
along well-known geological faultlines, would be proof that something
devastating was afoot.
Finally, the end would come, in a disaster of Biblical
scale. The Earth would literally start to crack up.
Molten lava would wash over the land and the seas would
start to boil.
Mega-hurricanes would level buildings and forests the world
over. Eventually, mountains would crumble as the Earth's crust continued to
disintegrate.
The fabric of the planet itself would start to disappear,
trillions of tonnes of rock, water, air and life sucked into a whirlpool of
unimaginable force.
From space, our blue-and-white home would appear to vanish
down a plughole in a flash of light.
At least in this scenario we would have a little time,
perhaps, to come to terms with the end.
However, a second doomsday scenario is even more terrifying.
There would be no warning at all.
In an instant - about one-twentieth of a second - the entire
Earth would simply vanish from space.
Less than two seconds later, the Moon would follow suit.
Eight minutes later, the Sun would be ripped apart, followed by the rest of the
planets in the solar system and onwards, a wave of destruction caused by a rent
in the fabric of space itself, spreading out from our world at the speed of
light.
Any extra-terrestrials out there would die too, in due
course. And there would be nothing technology could do about it.
Doom? The Large Hadron Collider Atlas detector under
construction
But why should we now be worrying about such possible causes
of Armageddon?
The answer is a gargantuan machine - the largest, most expensive
scientific experiment in history, the 'Large Hadron Collider', to be turned on
next Wednesday.
Although it was designed to answer the fundamental questions
of life, some people have claimed that it could end up destroying the entire
cosmos.
This gigantic 4 billion-plus pound (sterling) atom-smasher has been built
under the Swiss-French border near Geneva, and is the most powerful device ever
built for probing the secrets of the atom and the forces and particles which
make up our Universe.
It is a staggering device, occupying a train-sized tunnel 18
miles long, buried 300ft underground, studded with gigantic, cathedral-sized
ring-shaped detectors where collisions between packets of 'heavy' subatomic
particles, 'hadrons', will take place in the hope that the innermost workings
of matter and energy will be revealed.
The LHC is, arguably, the most impressive machine ever built
by Mankind.
But a few people are convinced that it should never be
turned on. A lawsuit has been lodged at the European Court For Human Rights by
a small group of maverick scientists.
They claim there is a small - but not zero - chance that
when the LHC is activated it will create either a mini-black hole which would
fall into the ground and swallow the Earth from within (scenario one).
Or, even more bizarrely, trigger a catastrophic chain
reaction in the very fabric of space and time itself, which would rip apart the
entire universe like the skin of a bursting balloon (scenario two).
Bizarrely, this group, led by a German chemist called Otto
Rossler, are using the European Convention on human rights to argue that,
should the LHC destroy the entire Universe, it would 'violate the right to life
and right to private family life'.
In fact, since 1994, when the collider was first mooted by
the multi-national European nuclear research organisation (CERN), a small
number of doomsayers have claimed that by replicating the conditions pertaining
at the start of the universe (Big Bang), about 13,700 million years ago, there
would be a small but real risk an unstoppable cataclysm would take place.
This is not a threat taken seriously by the scientists at
CERN. When I visited the place a couple of years ago, to see the collider being
built, any mention of mini-black holes and other risks elicited only raised
eyebrows and shrugs of derision.
The LHC was not designed to destroy the universe, of course,
but to fill in some of the embarrassingly large gaps that still run through our
basic understanding of physics and how the universe works.
It could discover, for instance, what most of the Universe
is actually made of.
The ordinary 'stuff' that we see around us - the atoms and
molecules of water, carbon, iron, oxygen and the rest that make up our bodies,
the planet Earth, the Moon, the other planets, the Sun and all the stars -
actually accounts for only about one part in 25 of the total 'ingredients' of
the cosmos.
Astronomers know that something else, invisible and
mysterious, must pervade every inch of space, its subtle gravity affecting the
movements of the galaxy.
This material - no one really has a clue what it is - has
been dubbed 'dark matter' and it is hoped that the collider just might shed
some light on what it is, perhaps uncovering a new type of particle.
Perhaps more embarrassingly, we don't know what it is that
gives even ordinary matter its mass.
In the 1960s, British physicist Peter Higgs proposed the
existence of a new particle, now known as the 'Higgs Particle', which
effectively lends 'weight' to the stuff of the universe.
So important and fundamental is this hypothetical entity
that it has been dubbed the 'God particle'.
It is hoped that if Higgs is right, the collider could
finally clear up this mystery and, as a result of its super-powerful
collisions, traces of this particle could emerge.
That alone would, in itself, be justification for a large
chunk of that 4 billion pound outlay. By simulating the Big Bang, it is hoped the
LHC will act as a 'universe in a test tube', allowing scientists to examine a
whole suite of exotic subatomic particles and forces and to go some way to
completing the work started by Einstein and the other giants of 20th-century
physics.
So is there really a chance that the scientists have made a
terrible miscalculation and that their new toy could inadvertently kill us all?
Happily, the simple answer is no. CERN's scientists have in
fact commissioned several safety reviews (such as those that have taken place
before other big particle accelerators have been turned on).
All have concluded that there is no measurable risk
whatsoever. Perhaps the best argument against the LHC doomsday scenario is that
cosmic rays - natural high-energy particles from space - smash into the Earth's
atmosphere all the time with far, far more energy than will be generated by
this machine.
If it were possible to create a dangerous black hole by
simply bashing atomic particles together, this would have happened naturally
long ago, and we wouldn't be here to build this particle accelerator in the
first place. So we are safe.
In fact, what the scientists at CERN really fear is not the
end of the world, but that their machine simply isn't big or powerful enough to
uncover anything new - that to probe the deepest secrets of the cosmos they
will have to ask for yet more cash to build something on an even greater scale.
Either that, or their equations are simply wrong and a whole
new approach is needed, despite the billions they have spent.
Not a doomsday for Earth, perhaps, but a catastrophe for
physics.
As for the rest of us, we have to hope that the scientists
have done their sums right - and keep our fingers crossed next Wednesday.
