Author: Paul Ratner / Source: Big Think
- Respected astrophysicist Martin Reese has serious misgivings about the Large Hadron collider.
- The collider could destroy us in 3 different ways, warns Reese.
- Despite the dangers, innovation should continue but with caution.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s biggest scientific instrument, is also the planet’s most powerful particle accelerator.
And that makes it a potential danger not just to itself or its immediate surroundings in Switzerland, but to Earth and maybe even our reality itself.This warning comes not from an incorrigible luddite but the influential British astrophysicist Lord Martin Rees, who sees three ways in which the collider could cause a disaster of cosmic proportions.
1. A BLACK HOLE SUCKS US IN
For one, cautions Rees in his new book On The Future: Prospects for Humanity, it’s possible for the experiments conducted at the LHC to form a black hole which would “suck in everything around it”.
2. EARTH GETS SHRUNK
And if apocalypse by way of black holes doesn’t come to pass, it’s also conceivable that Earth could get compressed into a “hyperdense sphere about one hundred metres across,” as writes Lord Rees, the Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge.
That could happen due to the subatomic quarks generated by the Large Hadron Collider, which smashes particles against each other at super-high speeds to study the fallout. The quarks could reassemble themselves into appropriately named (and currently hypothetical) particles called strangelets, which, in turn, could transform everything in their way into a new highly-compressed form of matter. So Earth would become no larger than a football field.
3. SPACETIME GETS RIPPED
There is, unfortunately, a third way towards unimaginable disaster courtesy of the LHC and other particle accelerators like the new one being built in China which would be twice as large and 7 times as powerful as CERN’s. Martin Rees thinks…
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