Pregnancy does some strange things to your anxiety levels. It makes you wonder incessantly what the future holds, and whether the world will be worth living in. The question of whether the Large Hadron Collider will bring an end to the earth or indeed the universe by creating a stable black hole or another big bang has been occupying my mind lately. Here Mike from CERN allays my fears. And well.
Hi Rebecca,
Don't worry - the end isn't nigh! On a sub-atomic scale, the energies of
our protons are pretty high, but in fact they are equivalent to the
energy of a gently moving fly. So on a cosmological scale it's pretty
small, so no chance of us ripping space-time apart.
The second argument is that the universe has some high energy particle
factories (supernova etc.). Particles from these sources (cosmic rays)
have energies a lot higher than those at the LHC, and some of them hit
the molecules of the upper atmosphere all the time, with no problems
observed.
All the best with your new baby.
Mike Lamont
CERN
Hi Rebecca,
Don't worry - the end isn't nigh! On a sub-atomic scale, the energies of
our protons are pretty high, but in fact they are equivalent to the
energy of a gently moving fly. So on a cosmological scale it's pretty
small, so no chance of us ripping space-time apart.
The second argument is that the universe has some high energy particle
factories (supernova etc.). Particles from these sources (cosmic rays)
have energies a lot higher than those at the LHC, and some of them hit
the molecules of the upper atmosphere all the time, with no problems
observed.
All the best with your new baby.
Mike Lamont
CERN
1 comment:
My mother always told me you could find anything, or converse with anybody on the internets.....
-MB
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