![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
If you've been reading the papers, watching TV, going online or, indeed, had any contact at all with the outside world recently, you'll know that they started up the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERN today.
Quite apart from having a name just begging for the unfortunate typo I only just caught in the parenthesis, it's resulted in massive speculation by people who didn't pass physics at school. "It'll make strangelets that'll eat the planet!" "It'll create black holes that will swallow us all!"
It won't, of course. But I was thinking.
If it did create a black hole that swallowed the Earth... how would we know?
I mean, the theory is that when you're sucked into a black hole, you get (as viewed by a strong-stomached outside observer) compressed and stretched and eventually turn into a ghost image locked in time. Or something. But your local frame of reference - the spacetime around you - is being compressed and distorted and time-locked as well.
In other words, the LHC might have created a black hole that sucked in the entire planet, and we might never know. Who knows, I might right now be four thousand miles tall and have a waist measurement of four micrometres, but since everything around me - including the fabric of spacetime - is subject to the same distortion I wouldn't be able to tell.
For what it's worth, I'm feeling quite well. A bit of a sniffle, so it seems even being hideously contorted and killed to death by a gravitational anomaly can't cure the common cold, but other than that...
Oh yes. My point is this:
If the LHC works and doesn't cause any hideousness, then all we get out of it is knowledge, no harm is done, and all is well.
If it creates strangelets that eat the whole world, then we all die and don't know about it, and all is well.
If it creates a black hole that sucks the planet in, then we're still here and breathing, just really really thin and close together, but we can't tell, so all is well.
In other words, anything that can go wrong will go so terribly wrong that we wouldn't know about it, and so whatever happens, all is well.
Oh, and am I the only one who always has to think twice to not read "eschatological" as "scatological"? It's an unfortunate mixup, where you can tread in dog muck and bring about the end of existence as we know it.
Quite apart from having a name just begging for the unfortunate typo I only just caught in the parenthesis, it's resulted in massive speculation by people who didn't pass physics at school. "It'll make strangelets that'll eat the planet!" "It'll create black holes that will swallow us all!"
It won't, of course. But I was thinking.
If it did create a black hole that swallowed the Earth... how would we know?
I mean, the theory is that when you're sucked into a black hole, you get (as viewed by a strong-stomached outside observer) compressed and stretched and eventually turn into a ghost image locked in time. Or something. But your local frame of reference - the spacetime around you - is being compressed and distorted and time-locked as well.
In other words, the LHC might have created a black hole that sucked in the entire planet, and we might never know. Who knows, I might right now be four thousand miles tall and have a waist measurement of four micrometres, but since everything around me - including the fabric of spacetime - is subject to the same distortion I wouldn't be able to tell.
For what it's worth, I'm feeling quite well. A bit of a sniffle, so it seems even being hideously contorted and killed to death by a gravitational anomaly can't cure the common cold, but other than that...
Oh yes. My point is this:
If the LHC works and doesn't cause any hideousness, then all we get out of it is knowledge, no harm is done, and all is well.
If it creates strangelets that eat the whole world, then we all die and don't know about it, and all is well.
If it creates a black hole that sucks the planet in, then we're still here and breathing, just really really thin and close together, but we can't tell, so all is well.
In other words, anything that can go wrong will go so terribly wrong that we wouldn't know about it, and so whatever happens, all is well.
Oh, and am I the only one who always has to think twice to not read "eschatological" as "scatological"? It's an unfortunate mixup, where you can tread in dog muck and bring about the end of existence as we know it.
