Atomic Nerds

The sky is falling! The earth will implode! No wait, it’ll become a quasar! No! It’ll go supernova!

To loosely quote, I do not think those words mean what you think they mean.

Once again, it’s everybody’s favorite TEOTWAWKI-generator in the news, our good buddy CERN. Ok, Marko and Ms. Roberta beat me to the punch, and Peter emailed me about this on Saturday trying to get me off my lazy non-posting ass. I blame the dragons. If you’re not preparing for dragons you’re gonna be in deep trouble tomorrow.

So now that my powerful anti-dragon tattoo is complete (go on, I dare you to prove that there is anything other than my tattoo keeping dragons at bay!), let’s take a look at some of the claims reported in the article linked at the top, shall we?

But a handful of scientists believe that the experiment could create a shower of unstable black holes that could ‘eat’ the planet from within, and they are launching last-ditch efforts to halt it in the courts.

Well, the good news is I’ve already covered this one, though I’m still waiting on my $500 check from the luddite brigade. To sum up, the particles they’ll be slamming together in CERN are very very tiny, and even if you used very large “particles,” say, bowling balls, the resultant black hole would be smaller than Professor Otto Rossler’s understanding of physics. Even if there are a lot of them, when they’re small enough to make a single electron look thousands of times larger than Alaska, I’m having a skosh of trouble mustering a full cup of give-a-damn. What else have you got, Prof. Little Rossler?

One of them, Professor Otto Rossler, a retired German chemist, said he feared the experiment may create a devastating quasar – a mass of energy fuelled by black holes – inside the Earth.

Well, points I suppose for recognizing that quasars are elements left over in the universe from the time very near to its creation. Linking the oft-stated goal of studying what the conditions in the universe were right after the big bang and something that formed in the early universe is a big step up compared to the normal drivel we get on the subject. He even managed to link the popular theory that quasars are created from supermassive black holes. Unfortunately, we again encounter a matter of scale. The masses in question for real quasars are around 10^6 through 10^9 solar masses. So at the small end, 1,000,000 x (1.98892 × 10^30)kg. Or, 1,000,000 x 1988920000000000000000000000000kg, which of course equals 1,988,920,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms. No, I’m not going to convert that into pounds. That would be silly. It has been noted (though I don’t have the citation handy) that above a certain number of things (dollars, M&Ms, people, etc) humans cannot adequately grasp quantities. I think it’s safe to say that is an un-graspable number of kilograms. For contrast, the mass of the earth, the obvious source of food for these starving and wildly destructive baby quasars is only 5,974,200,000,000,000,000,000,000kg (or 5.9742×10^24). I’m not sure where the matter to make up the other 12 0s worth of mass will come from. He doesn’t explain. Go figure. Also, the tests will be studying periods much closer to The Beginning than the period in which many quasars formed. It’s only a few billion years of time difference though, no big deal I’m sure.

‘Nothing will happen for at least four years,’ he said. ‘Then someone will spot a light ray coming out of the Indian Ocean during the night and no one will be able to explain it.

‘A few weeks later, we will see a similar beam of particles coming out of the soil on the other side of the planet. Then we will know there is a little quasar inside the planet.’

Oooh, nice trick there Nostradamus. Four years? You really think anybody will remember your little hissy fit in four years? Even allowing for an exponential growth (which is a best-case scenario for his doom n’ gloom), it’s probably going to take those teeny teeny itsy bitsy beyond-nano black holes about four years just to grow large enough to eat an electron. And that’s assuming they don’t fill up and burn out by then (yes, black holes actually can eat themselves to “death” but that’s for another day). Also, just as a side note, if these things do eat enough of the eath to start emitting visible light, that would mean that enough of the planet is gone that we wouldn’t be around to notice it anyway.

Prof Rossler said that as the spinning-top-like quasar devoured the world from within, the two jets emanating from it would grow and catastrophes such as earthquakes and tsunamis would occur at the points they emerged from the Earth.

‘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.’

No, see, I’m pretty sure we’d have some rather non-trivial seismic effects if the holes were able to eat even, say 5% of the mass of the core of the earth. Seismology isn’t my pet science, so I can’t say for sure on this one, but I think it’s a pretty reasonable guess just based on a general How Things Work perspective. Any geologists in the crowd, feel free to correct me as to how much of the earth’s core would have to mysteriously vanish before anyone would notice. Points, however, for noting that the jet alignment would synch up with magnetic north (which is a bit northwest of Baffin Bay at the moment). Yes, I suppose that by the time these emissions would be visible, there would be some tsunami and such near the exit wounds, but I don’t think anyone would be around to care at that point. Assuming the black holes CERN is going to churn out ever get big enough to eat a quark, at least.

Meanwhile Dr Walter Wagner, an American scientist who has been warning about the dangers of particle accelerators for 20 years, is awaiting a ruling on a lawsuit he filed a fortnight ago in his home state of Hawaii.

20 years and still no fallen sky? Good scientists admit when their model is flawed and try to find something better.

He fears the experiments might unwittingly create something he calls a ‘strangelet’ that could result in a fusion reaction that might ultimately turn the Earth into a supernova, or an exploding star.

No. Just plain No. I need to follow this guy around with a shirt that says “No.” Every time he opens his mouth to say something “scientific,” I can just point at my shirt so people around us will get the message. “Natural” fusion, the type that powers stars, is in fact gravity initiated. When you get a big enough cloud of hydrogen together, which will take up an amount of space larger than our monkey-brains can comprehend, over a period of time longer than humans have been alive by a long shot, it will coalesce into a smaller and smaller cloud, and eventually the ideal gas law will mean that the stuff getting compressed at the very center of this cloud will get hotter and hotter and eventually start to fuse together. The process for this to happen with hydrogen, the simplest atom availible and as such number 1 on the periodic table, requires an extraordinary amount of time, pressure, and heat to kick off. In order for fusion to occur with iron, the generally agreed upon majority of the earth’s core, number 26 on the table… well, again let’s just say I’m not terribly concerned.

Now let’s consider a supernova. For a rough analogy of how things work, consider dropping a rubber super ball. It bounces, right? That’s more-or-less a regular nova. The star collapses and then bounces off its core explosion style as the collapse increases the pressure and temperature. For a supernova, consider dropping a stack of three super-balls. The first one to hit bounces into the middle ball, which bounces the first back down, then number two bounces into number 3 and… well, just do it and it’ll make more sense. Anyway, all the layers bounce off each other and in the rebounding up the temperature and pressure at the ultimate core, which long story short, hits crazy-go-nuts temperatures and pressures and blows with a hell of a lot more power than just dropping the one ball. This is way oversimplified, but it’s better than nothing, I hope. Anyway, for earth to supernova, we’d have to have been fusing happily along for quite some time. Enough that the “star” would be about out of fuel. That fuel being fusing iron. Which, as it turns out, only fuses during supernovae in the first place.* So yeah. Not seeing an earthly supernova in our future. Or in the next generation’s future. Or the one after that, for that matter. By the time earth could theoretically supernova, Barack Obama would actually have time to gain some experience and credibility.

Finally though, something good:

But Dr Evans, the leader of the project, who has devoted 14 years of his life to building the vast particle accelerator, is dismissive of the doom-mongers.

In fact, he is so relaxed about the project, he even wears shorts to work.

Damn skippy. And if the physicists around this neck of the woods are any example, he also wears black socks pulled up mid-calf with sandals with that outfit. I’d bet money on it. But once you get so involved with the details of how the universe works, I for one think it’s more than acceptable that you don’t have room left in the noggin for fashion sense, which is over-rated in the first place. Go get ‘em, Doc! He also notes that the most likely “disaster” outcome is that they’ll blow a fuse, or have some similar equipment failure. Amazingly enough, yeah, that’s about the sum of it.

So in conclusion, there is only one thing left to do. And that is to include the beyond awesome science rap, written and performed by Kate McAlpine, who has used CERN to discover the fundamendal awesome particle. I propose it be named a McAlpineon. If there was any justice in the world, Ms. McAlpine would never have to pay for a drink again in her life. Words cannot describe how flat-out-cool this rap is and how happy it makes me.

*again oversimplified, but hey I’m trying to make fun of an idiot with minor injections of real science. If I wanted to be really really accurate about it, I’d go get a physics degree and probably try for a job with CERN and write books and such that people like “Drs.” Rossler and Wagner wouldn’t understand and then we’d be right back where we started. Hey, I think I just worked a causality loop into all this!

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