I remember back to September last year and the first beam at the LHC (shortly prior to the mishap which led to a liquid Helium leak).
The media was in full swing with scare stories about the LHC being a doomsday machine destined to destroy the universe.
Statistically speaking they weren’t wrong, but the probability of the LHC destroying the Earth by whatever means is astoundingly small. In fact, the cosmic rays which collide with protons in the atmosphere posess much higher energies than the LHC will achieve and we are all still here after countless numbers of these collisions.
Still, I thought it’d be fun to present a list of (bad) things that may happen at the LHC (despite the extremely low odds).
1. The heavy ion collisions used in the ALICE experiment produce a very high density plasma which collapses into a black hole, which then grows and grows and destroys the Earth and the Solar System.
2. High energy proton-proton collisions produce strangelets which convert all matter on Earth into more strangelets, leaving a big ball of strangelets.
3. The extreme conditions produced in the LHC opens up a wormhole, which allows an evil genius from the future to come back in time and enslave the world population.
4. Pink flying monkeys appear in the ATLAS control room and evaporate people with their eyes.
5. The LHC breaks again, but NOT TO WORRY, Chuck Norris is hired to smash protons together by hand.
6. Time stops. Like the ULTIMATE Bernard’s Watch.
Some of these are more likely than others (Personally I am leaning towards number 5), but all are quite frankly absurd.
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What WILL happen at the LHC is that science will take a huge step forwards and yet more holes in our collective knowledge will be filled, perhaps the Higgs boson will make a special guest appearance, perhaps Supersymmetry will show up, perhaps it will be something completely unexpected. Either way it will be momentous.
