Back Yard Black Holes

I found out today that if you have a spare $10 billion laying around you can make your very own black hole. The LHC (large Hadron Collider), located near Geneva, Switzerland, is a machine designed to send a stream of protons around a big circle at ever increasing speeds in opposite directions, and then smash them in to each other. It's like a infinitesimally small version of demolition derby, but it costs about 10,000,000 times as much. That's okay, because the Swiss have lots of money and little else to do; what with all that snow and those big mountains everywhere. 

Seriously, the reason for going to such great expense to smash things you can't see is to try to detect a specific particle that could reveal the mysterious things we see out in the farthest reaches of outer space. It's a little dew-hickey  called the Higgs boson. Some have deemed it the "God Particle" because they believe it is fundamental to all of the matter that we see today. Scientists at CERN (which stands for European Organization for Nuclear Research, don't ask how) fired this baby up to see if they could prove themselves right about the existence of such a particle. The theoretical  sub-atomic particle is said to exist because it is the only thing that makes sense. I'm not sure if it is going to answer questions, or create more of them. Either way it will be interesting to find out what conditions may have been like a few billionths of a second after the Big Bang. 

Smashing protons together is cool and all, but what is really amazing is what it took to build this thing. You can't just go around smashing protons any old place because when you do, you wind up with temperatures about 100,000 times hotter than the sun. And when you get those protons really zooming, and I mean zooming (99,99% of the speed of light) you need a track they will stay on. In fact, when the protons are at full speed they will go around the 17 miles of track 11,245 times per second (Al Unser Jr. eat your heart out).  And to do that you need lots of super cooled magnets, and by cool I mean cold (-271.3º Celsius, or 456.34ºF). Brrrr. They use liquid helium. Imagine what your voice would sound like on that. 

Many are worried that when the LHC starts directing the two opposing streams of protons into each other that a small black hole (watch for the tin foil hat) will be created . But the problem with this worry is that a black hole requires a lot of mass to sustain its light-sucking gravity, and without that initial mass a black hole can't form - theoretically speaking. But you know how it goes, when ever anyone builds something new or figures out a new way of doing anything, there will always be those who think it's crazy. I think that if they do create a black hole and it does swallow the earth that we wouldn't have any clue it even happened because it would happen, in our perception of time,  instantly.