Update (September 10, 2008): it so happened that many people lost sleep due to lots of misinformation propagated by the TV news channels, at least in India. They painted a magnified doomsday scenario, or what some people call the Armageddon. Our maid and her family were panic stricken when they heard it on the TV that the world was soon going to end — the earth will be split into parts and we will fall into the gap, a few channels had declared. Apparently, many children didn’t have their dinner and couldn’t sleep because of the fear.
I remember something similar happened when I was around 10 years old. This that the world was going to end and I was really scared. So I can really relate to the trauma such news must have caused. At least at that time there were no news channels to constantly hammer the fear into our minds.
Anyway, the experiment has started and I’m still writing this, and you are reading this, and this is a very good indication that we haven’t vanished into the black hole yet (unless of course we are in some parallel time dimension without realizing it).
It is heartening to know that among the 7000 odd scientists engaged with the project, 70 are Indians. Although 70 is not a big number but at least there is some Indian presence there and we are not merely acting as the fear mongers.
This Wired blog has some great information on the CERN project. You must particularly read the grey box, it contains some cool facts about the experiment, in Twitter format. And look at this URL carefully.
The old post follows:
The massive particle accelerator is supposed to get in action tomorrow, that is September 10, 2008, and many believe that by conducting this experiment the scientists involved are going to annihilate the entire world and may be the entire universe. The experiment is supposed to create the exact conditions that existed in the very beginning of the Big Bang.
The experiment will solve many mysteries of the universe and how our world was formed. They aim to arrive at the theory of everything, the unraveling of all the puzzles that have been baffling our great scientific minds, or at least many of them.
So why are people scared, even to the extent of sending death threats to the scientists who are working on this experiment? Some people, and many of them are scientists, believe that this experiment will create tiny black holes that will replicate themselves and consequently they will suck the earth, keep growing bigger and bigger, and eventually it will suck the universe. This tells it is quite an eventful day in the history of the universe. Who could have imagined in the infinite wisdom of our universe that some intelligent life on a tiny planet going around a small star at the edge of the Milky Way would someday collapse the entire universe?
Should we be scared? No, according to the scientists preparing to launch the large Hadron Collider in Geneva. They say that the chances of creating an out-of-control black hole miniscule; such things keep on happening in the universe and nothing drastic happens. Well, you can never be too sure when such massive experiments are involved. What if the world ends tomorrow? Should these scientists be stopped? Frankly, I have no answer.
Whether we survive or vanish, you can see the event live in case you live to tell the tale.
[tags]CERN, particle accelerator, Hadron Collider, end of the world[/tags]
