LHC, pt. 3

Ever wondered what would happen if you were stuck inside the LHC when the beam was fired? Wonder no more:

So it was in 1978 that when the proton beam entered Anatoli Bugorski's skull it measured about 200,000 rads, and when it exited, having collided with the inside of his head, it weighed in at about 300,000 rads. Bugorski, a 36-year-old researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, was checking a piece of accelerator equipment that had malfunctioned - as had, apparently, the several safety mechanisms. Leaning over the piece of equipment, Bugorski stuck his head in the space through which the beam passes on its way from one part of the accelerator tube to the next and saw a flash brighter than a thousand suns. He felt no pain.

From what we know about radiation, about 500 to 600 rads is enough to kill a person (though we don't know of anyone else who has been exposed to radiation in the form of a proton beam moving at about the speed of sound). The left side of his face swollen beyond recognition, Bugorski was taken to a clinic in Moscow so that doctors could observe his death over the following two to three weeks.

Over the next few days, skin on the back of his head and on his face just next to his left nostril peeled away to reveal the path the beam had burned through the skin, the skull, and the brain tissue. The inside of his head continued to burn away: all the nerves on the left were gone in two years, paralyzing that side of his face. Still, not only did Bugorski not die, but he remained a normally functioning human being, capable even of continuing in science. For the first dozen years, the only real evidence that something had gone neurologically awry were occasional petit mal seizures; over the last few years Bugorski has also had six grand mals. The dividing line of his life goes down the middle of his face: the right side has aged, while the left froze 19 years ago. When he concentrates, he wrinkles only half his forehead.

Here's a handy New York Times interactive feature on exactly what the LHC does and what it's looking for.

For citizens against the LHC, take action here! Run By Walter L. Wagner, a biologist-turned-physicist who protested the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York when it went online back around the turn of the century.

Possible doomsday scenarios created by the LHC (which Wagner also thought would have been the outcome of the RHIC's experiements) as outlined by the folks at Neatorama:

Micro black hole: Basically it's a region in space where gravity is so powerful that nothing, not even light, can escape. Planet-eating black holes are created when massive stars collapse on itself (and by massive, we mean massive - even our Sun isn't big enough to create a black hole if it collapsed. You'd need 10 times the mass of the Sun.)

There is a remote possibility that micro black holes can be created in the collisions at the LHC. These black holes are small: about 10^-35 m across (the so-called Planck Length) and puny in mass (less than a speck of dust). These black holes would evaporate in 10^-42 seconds in a blast of Hawking radiation. Even black holes with the mass of Mt. Everest would have a radius of about 10^-15 m across. It would have trouble "eating" a proton, much less the entire planet. (Source: Pickover, C. (1997) Black Holes: A Traveler's Guide)

Strangelets: These are strange matters that, like the Ice-nine in Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, would turn all matters it touched into strange matters and eventually all of the planet will be transmuted into strangelets.

The problem with strangelet doomsday scenario, besides being very bizarre, is that no one has ever seen a strangelet. It remains a hypothetical particle. Previous particle accelerators that operated at lower energy than the LHC were actually better candidates to producing strangelets, and so far, we're still here.

Magnetic monopoles: These are hypothetical particles with a single magnetic charge (hence the name) - either a north pole or a south pole, but not both. Magnetic monopoles "eat proton."

Actually, physicists have been looking for magnetic monopoles for a long time - and so far they've never found it. By calculations, magnetic monopoles are actually too heavy to be produced at the LHC.

Vacuum bubble: It is actually a very interesting idea in quantum field theory. It states that life, the universe and everything aren't the most stable configuration possible. Perturbations caused by the LHC could tip it into the more stable state (called the vacuum bubble) and all of us "pop" out of existence.

On an unrelated SkyNet-watch note, "[s]cientists have created the first 'humanoid' robot that can mimic the facial expressions and lip movements of a human being" just by watching its subject. HH! Start saving for that M4 SOPMOD now, though jump at the chance to pick up an M-14 with the ol' 7.62mm rounds -- the increased stopping power should prove useful.