So, remember last summer, about late August/early September when every nerdy science-type of guy was bugging out? They were either in fear or awe of what had been built below the French-Swiss-Italian frontier: the Large Hadron Collider, what was seemingly one of the greatest engineering and scientific achievements mankind has ever produced. And then it broke after running for 12, count ‘em, 12 seconds.

I was in both fear and awe. A micro black hole in the Earth’s atmosphere is a fair trade in my book for the Higgs boson and dark matter.

The Large Hadron Collider: 27 kilometers in circumference, conducting the ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, ALICE, TOTEM, and LHCf experiments all during its stay as the Large Hadron Collider. It’ll take 10 GJ of energy stored in the magnets to accelerate the particles from 450 GeV to 7 TeV so that results can be taken and our God Particle can be discovered.

But wait – what the hell does any of this mean anyway? I mean, it sounds really impressive, but do who really knows what this stuff means? Well, let’s break this down, shall we?

A joule is a unit of energy named after the British physicist James Prescott Joule. It is typically applied to work. Say we have a medium-sized apple (about 1 kg in mass) and we want to move it a meter – which for all intents in purposes is roughly a yard – and we want to move this apple this meter in one second. The energy expended in this action is 1 J of work. So, 10 GJ is therefore the amount of work necessary to move a mass of 10 x 10^9 kg one meter in one second. So, about 10,000,000,000 apples, if they’re contained in a weightless basket.

However, we’re again faced with a ridiculously hard thing to imagine. So that’s about the mass of Halley’s Comet, which is 3.14×10^14. Forget the extra four orders of magnitude, it’ll work. So, to move Halley’s Comet 1 meter in 1 second it takes the amount of cruising magnetic force in the LHC.

I keep saying LHC, but I haven’t really explained what a hadron is. A hadron is a class of subatomic particles, divided into two main classes: baryons and mesons. Basically, hadrons are protons and neutrons. Which is what the LHC fires: streams of protons with Halley’s Comet-moving levels of force.

Well this is all just fine and dandy – but about 90% of the people I’ve told about this ridiculous machine have asked me:

“Why?”

I have an answer, and they all have to do with the experiments. There are 3 major experiments that CERN is conducting using the LHC – one to isolate the Higgs boson particle, one to analyze dark matter, and one to investigate the possibilities of alternate dimensions of time and space.

Well that sounds cool…I think. I mean, people know what quarks are for the most part – the subatomic particles that make up subatomic particles. But bosons? What the hell are those?

Well, bosons are another class of subatomic particles. (It seems that subatomic particles are like those Russian stacking dolls – for a while we think that that’s all folks, and then we look with more accurate equipment and oops, we found a few more!) As opposed to fermions, they regulate forces between bodies. There are 5 observed bosons:

y – the Photon

g – the Gluon

W

and

Z

(The latter two regulate the Electroweak interaction)

There is a fifth boson…a perfect boson…guarded by the Mondoshawans and their earthbound priests…

Okay, maybe not. But it is termed the God Particle for a reason.

The Higgs Boson is what makes the difference between a massless particle and one with mass. Ergo, if the Higgs Boson exists, it is the particle that gives matter its mass.

Whoa.

And when I say whoa, I mean whooooooa.

CERN’s dealing with some heavy stuff. And there’s more. Through the ATLAS experiment (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS), the CERN scientists will be investigating not only the Higgs Mechanism, but the existence of alternate dimensions of space.

The other general detector in the LHC is the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS, which will also study the Higgs Boson but will also try to investigate the nature of dark matter, which is another concept the majority of people don’t understand so well. I mean, I’ve heard people confuse dark matter with antimatter, and I’ve shaken my head sadly at that.

The difference is that we know antimatter exists. We just think that dark matter exists.

Personally, I’m pretty sure it exists. I mean, what else would be up there, taking up our space and being invisible? Seriously – the universe is thought to consist of only 4% visible matter and energy.

4%! Not one, not two, not three, but four!

So what’s the other 96%? Twenty-two of it is dark matter. The other seventy-four is thought to be dark energy, which permeates all space and is thought to account for the expansion of the universe. Dark energy is thought to come in two flavors, the cosmological constant, which permeates all space and maintains the same uniform density, and the quintessence, whose density changes in relation to time and space and would therefore expand the universe.  I think this is another whoa moment.

Whoa.

I mean, this would be the culmination of cosmological thought, explaining the reasons behind Red Shift and, more importantly, the reasons the Big Bang occurred. My head is spinning as I write this.

Of course, there’s a certain amount of risk involved in trying to study dark matter and the origins of the universe experimentally. Such as micro black holes, which were first theorized by Stephen Hawking. If you saw Star Trek…yeah. That’s about it. A micro black hole could, with a 1 in 10,000,000 chance, get trapped in the Earth’s core or atmosphere, and…well, let’s just say that you, me, and everybody else in the world are going to be occupying the same point in space for a while, and then our matter’ll be ejected to form our wittle bwack hole’s accretion disk.

Eep.

Another safety precaution is the strangelet scenario. Strangelets are made of strange matter, which is made up of strange quarks. And it had strange properties. The strangelet scenario dictates that is strange matter were created, it would create an out of control fusion process that would convert all the planet’s matter into strange matter. Now, I may be strange, but I’m nowhere near that strange.

However, the strangelet production scenario is less likely than the micro black hole scenario. The production of strangelet’s starts to drop off at higher energies, and as we know, the LHC uses a phenomenal amount. The fusion of strangelets only occurs at comparatively low temperatures to those that will be experienced during runs of the LHC, so we’re safe there too.

So take off your tin foil hats, folks, and revel in the plain fact: we may (or may not) be on the verge of the most exciting scientific discoveries in history.

Omg.