• Question: About six years ago, I remember there was an experiment under Paris that everyone said would 'end the world'. It involved particles, but that's all I really know. Do you know what that was about? Thanks :)

    Asked by libbyhope to Jackie, Michele, Oliver, Vicky, Yelong on 9 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Jaclyn Bell

      Jaclyn Bell answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      Yeah, this was probably around the time Professor Brian Cox was on TV a lot! So what was all that about?… Scientists were going to switch on a machine called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which is a giant 17 mile long circular tunnel deep underground where particles are accelerated to the speed of light and smash into one another. When the machine was switched back on a few years ago it had been improved so that it ran at a higher energy than before – and so people thought that it would be too powerful and one of the fears was that the LHC could produce black holes, and black holes swallow everything around them – which would mean the end of the world. The media and public picked up on this and made it all sound a bit scary, saying it was going to be “the end of the world”… Brian Cox’s job (since he was a popular scientist on TV at the time – and he is pretty cool cos he was in a band) was to convince everyone that even if black holes were produced they would be at a subatomic level (which is really really small) and so it would collapse almost instantly. Once the LHC was switched back on and the public realised it was safe the panic was over 🙂

    • Photo: Michele Faucci Giannelli

      Michele Faucci Giannelli answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      As far as I know there never was an experiment under Paris. The big underground tunnel you probably heard of is actually in Geneva, Switzerland. It was built in the 80s to host the an accelerator called Large Electron Positron collider (LEP). It is now used to accelerate protons by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Because of the very high energy at which the protons are collided, there were some safety concerns which were dismissed by a simple observation. In Nature there are actually much bigger accelerator which are exploding stars or super novas. During such events particles can be accelerated to energies much higher that those of the LHC and nothing ever happened. Once a year or so, one of these incredibly high energetic particles actually reach Earth and collide with the matter in our atmosphere. This produces an incredible shower of particles which observation is actually the scientific goal of several experiment such as Auger. Since we are still here, there are no risk of colliding protons at the LHC.

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