#sciencefornoobs

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How  CERN(place where magical stuff happens) could kill us, and why we shouldn’t worry

 If you’re reading the title, you might be wondering what CERN is. For actual noobs, its basically a place where science fiction happens, stuff related to physics consisting of tiny stuff like atoms and even tiny stuff like protons and even tinier stuff like quarks and so on. But for today, we are going to focus on a thing called a particle accelerator. A particle accelerator is pretty much what it sounds like. A particle is a small thing like an atom. Acceleration is increasing speed.

What wikipedia has to say:

 “ A particle accelerator is a machine that uses electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles to very high speeds and energies, and to contain them in well-defined beams.”

So yeah, tiny things go on extremely fast speeds and we can use them for helping the world. For a more simplified way, we shall refer to them as atom crushers for now or AC (just for this blog). Now, there is an estimated 30000+ particle accelerators in the world. But only 1% are machines for research with energies above 1GeV. Basically, a massive amount of kinetic energy. Kinetic energy is just energy possesed by a body in motion. We shall focus on the AC’s with a massive amount of kinetic energy. Now, let’s examine the supposed ways CERN can kill us all

1. Death by tiny stuff

This way revolves around a particle, which we made up, which may or may not exist, known as “strangelets”. They are extremely tiny, tinier than an atom, and a  proton. These strangelets consist of up,down and strange quarks. Quarks are smaller than strangelets. Up quark, Down quark and strange quarks are basically types of quarks, with the up quark being the lightest of all of of them. 

Anyway, these strangelets, could hypothetically, rearrange the matter we know and love to be like them. Which is extremely bad because it could shrink the earth to 100m wide ball. And heres the big drop, AC’s could create mini black holes. And black holes are not good.

2. Instant death

This has to do with “Vacuum”. Not the the Vacuum cleaner, but Vacuum. Imagine a box, filled with nothing, no air, no oxygen, just nothing. That nothing is basically called as Vacuum. And it exists in our universe. Hypothetically, our universe is in a Metastable state. Meaning, that its peaceful unless provoked. In physics terms, something which is stable, provided it is subjected to no more than small disturbances.

But something can provoke it and that something might be an AC which could  drop it to a lower energy state. This lower energy state can create a bubble of the more stable vacuum, which would spread across the entire universe at light speed, wiping everything off. Even atoms.

Why we shouldn’t worry too much:

1. Literally, millions of collisions releasing more energy than an AC happens around us daily, when comic rays collide into our atmosphere. The moon is bombarded with quite a lot of cosmic rays, and is it wiped out? No. We even walked on it! Crashing some tiny particles here on earth and destroying the universe is like stubbing your toe, and the entire populations foot gets cut off.

2. Remember that a black hole’s superior gravity depends on its mass. I mentioned earlier, that strangelets could create Black holes. MINI black holes. Imagine that the earth gets compacted down to 9 milimeters wide,( Quite small) small enough to be a black hole, our moon wouldn’t get sucked in. Our black hole earth, has the same gravitational pull as Normal earth. Gravitational pull of the earth is basically the attraction that the earth exerts on an object An mini black hole would take an estimated three trillion years to reach a kilogram. Moreover, a mini black hole would only exist for 10^(-23) seconds. ( Read: Ten to the twenty three) which is an extremely, extremely, extremely, EXTREMELY short amount of time.

 Before you can say the letter “a”, it would just die. So even if an AC could create black holes, it wouldn’t pose any threat to the us, or the earth, or the universe. And that’s  how CERN could kill us and why we shouldn’t worry about it.