We’ll die another day!

by Paul Rowland, Wales On Sunday
It was the week the world was supposed to end. Only it didn’t – or at least it hasn’t yet. PAUL ROWLAND explains why we were right to be scared of the Large Hadron Collider – but only to a point...
So the world didn’t end then...
Not quite, no. Meaning that those of us who didn’t spend the first part of Wednesday morning frantically watching our clocks and panicking that we’d forgotten to bid farewell to some loved one were actually in the right.
So to say the Earth didn’t move would be to over-egg the pudding. You’d have struggled to detect so much as a murmur had you even been hiking across a Swiss alpine plateau directly above the vast tunnel where the Large Hadron Collider was activated – overseen by Aberdare-born project manager Dr Lyn Evans, above.
The what?
The Large Hadron Collider. Just one of a brilliant new set of jargon which most of us spent the middle part of the week bandying around as if we had any idea what it meant.
Other great examples include the Higgs Boson particle, quark-gluon plasma, and any combination of protons, neutrons and electrons.
So offices around the country were awash the sentences like: “What CERN are doing, see, is stripping all the electrons off particles so they’ve got naked protons. Then they’re super-cooling them and whacking them through the LHC at light speed, so they’ll all smash into each other, and, hopefully, then they can understand dark matter, the God particle and maybe even the quark-gluon plasma that was around at the dawn of time. It’s obvious, innit.”
Never before have so many people been so blinded with so much science. But science, of course, is terrifying. So it’s no wonder that life-changing events like giving birth, moving house or going about our lives, suddenly took second fiddle to subterranean events in central Europe.
What were we scared about?
In a word, black holes. Or, more precisely, two words. We’ve all seen plenty enough science fiction films to know that getting sucked into a black hole is never a good thing.
At best, you’ll get pulled into a distant and terrifying backwater of the universe, from which you’ll never return and be forced to live out your days surrounded by Ewoks, cyborgs and Klingons. More terrifying still – arguably – is the prospect of instant and horrific death, possibly through being torn limb from limb by a sudden and deadly drop in atmospheric pressure.
Or any other unspecified astro-death that could be meted out by this most terrifying and mysterious of phenomena.
The bottom line is, black holes are bad news when they’re both fictional and millions of light years away from Earth.
When they’re a couple of miles below a country whose most advanced defensive weapon is a multi-tooled penknife, they’re infinitely worse.
So who said we should be worried?
Well, it’s mainly all the fault of one man: retired German chemist Otto Rossler, whose spectacularly emotive image of the world’s destruction was, if nothing else, a top idea for a film.
Turning on the machine, said Herr Rossler, would summon up a devastating quasar – a huge field of energy which would draw its God-forsaken power from a series of black holes (yep, not just one of them, but loads). Deadly jets would then spring from these, creating horrifically terrible weather systems and assorted other natural disasters at the points where the Earth’s surface was punctured. Think the Day After Tomorrow, only much, much worse.
In the great man’s own magnificent words: “The weather will change completely, wiping out life, and very soon the whole planet will be eaten in a magnificent scenario – if you could watch it from the moon. A Biblical Armageddon. Even cloud and fire will form, as it says in the Bible.”
A perfectly sensible, rational and downright realistic scenario. It really is a miracle that only a small proportion of us were ultimately taken in by it.
Another, much more boring protest came from an American scientist called Walter Wagner, who filed a lawsuit in his home state of Hawaii in an attempt to stop the big gadget being switched on. While his conviction is to be admired, most of us can probably think of one or two more enjoyable things to do in a tropical island paradise.
So what were the chances of Armageddon actually happening?
In a nutshell, not that good. While simply presuming things will probably be OK is not exactly a watertight method of dodging disaster, it seems to have worked pretty well on this occasion.
In this instance, most people didn’t feel the need to go out of their way to find some detailed scientific argument to explain why the world wouldn’t end, because, well, it just wouldn’t. Surely.
Most people, with good reason, assumed that if there was any chance the entire planet would be destroyed by a science experiment, it wouldn’t be allowed. Stem cell research and genetically-modified food have had to go through all kinds of hoops and restrictions to get through to where they are now. And last time I checked, slightly enlarged tomatoes carried no risk of causing destruction on a level not seen since the advent of the Death Star.
And for those needing slightly more reassurance than can be gleaned from the “it’ll be fine, surely” school of thought, there were the words of wisdom from none other than the world’s most recognisable scientist, Professor Stephen Hawking.
“The world will not come to an end when the LHC turns on,” he said. “The LHC is absolutely safe.”
And then there were the assurances from members of the team behind the experiment.
As Brian Cox, whose CV takes in both astrophysics and being the drummer in tedious ’90s pop act D:Ream, put it succinctly: “Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t***.”
So why bother with the experiment, if it was even a little bit dangerous?
For a start, there was no acceptance from the team behind the project that it was even a little bit dangerous. So, essentially, they were onto a winner from the start.
The main aim was to isolate the Higgs boson particle, otherwise known as the God particle.
Its very existence has only been theorised. But this unimaginably tiny speck – which has never previously been isolated if it actually exists at all – appears to operate under a different set of rules to any other form of matter.
And if it were to be identified, it could give vital clues to how the universe came into being at a time when everything was so hot that it existed only in the form of the infamous quark-gluon plasma.
Success would go a long way to proving the theory that the universe exists in far more dimensions than we know about – meaning our gravity is being shared by five or six other dimensions.
And that could explain how atoms drifting in and out of dimensions caused the beginning of the universe.
What did we learn?
Nothing yet. But that’s not to say that the potential outcomes aren’t already causing arguments among the scientific community, many of whom have a lot to gain from them. Or else lose.
Prof Hawking kicked off the exchange by claiming the formation of a black hole would be great, because it would prove he’d been right all along, and then he’d win the Nobel Prize. Missing the point a little bit there, Stephen, given that awards ceremonies in Sweden might not be high on the list of priorities in the event of the world ending, but that’s by the by.
Where he overstepped the mark was in suggesting that it would be terribly funny if the Higgs Boson particle turned out not to exist. Not so, said Peter Higgs – the man who first came up with the idea. And in a commendably immature comeback, he accused his rival of being not very good at science. So there.
So are we safe now?
Not quite. The experiment will continue for several weeks, so, in theory, something bad could happen at any point. But that’s the glory of the magnitude of the situation – I can write features like this, poking fun at the doom-mongers, safe in the knowledge that if I’m wrong, there’ll be absolutely no comeback. Result.