The world will end soon
So I don't know anything about physics. To be honest, I think it's mostly bullshit. But I have some news for you all: THE PHYSICISTS ARE OUT TO DESTROY THE PLANET.
The Large Hadron Collider. Physicists from all over the world have been building a huge machine, a particle collider, under Geneva for the past 10 years. The point: to watch the universe be created over and over again.
That's a pretty cool idea, I admit it. Let's solve some of the mysteries of the universe. Let's get some physical evidence so that physicists can stop bullshitting all the time. And it looks really cool
BUT: this thing has the potential to create BLACK HOLES. And other things such as strangelets, vacuum bubbles, and other things that will DESTROY THE PLANET and which I had to look up on wikipedia.
So why is this allowed to happen? Why is there a machine out there, set to run next month, that could create BLACK HOLES and suck up our planet and everything we know? I think it's because no one understands physics. The evil physicists just talk in equations and quarks and photons and the rest of the planet just stares and nods and let's the LHC be built
But don't be fooled: the world could end sometime in the next year. No degree of self-sufficiency or preparation can save you. Even the most apocalypse-minded of us, with our knife and gun collections, years of jarred food in the basement and sand-lined foundations, could be doomed.
The first particle collisions should occur in October.. so let's just hold each other for that entire month, ok? I'm very legitimately freaked out
From this Slate article: http://www.slate.com/id/2194503
ReplyDeleteBrian Cox, a University of Manchester physicist who works on the Large Hadron Collider, responded to the doomsday argument in an interview posted June 26 by O'Reilly Media. I will give him the last word:
You read on the web, well, what happens if these black holes fly straight through the planet before they have a chance to eat it? Whereas the one that the LHC could [create would] just sit there and perhaps sink to the center of the earth? It turns out that when you do the calculation the black holes are so small that even if they didn't decay and they just sat there they wouldn't come close enough to any matter—because matter is basically empty space—to dissolve and to [inaudible] the matter and to grow so they wouldn't do any damage. Okay; why don't you ignore that? Well the final piece of wonderful evidence which confines these idiots to the bin is that you look up into the sky and you see white walls—some neutron stars—very, very dense stars. Cosmic rays are hitting those with energy greater than those seen at the LHC so if you can make black holes, black holes will be created on that surface. It turns out that they're nuclear dense, these stars, so the black holes are not going to fly through there; they're going to sit there and they're going to eat away and they're going to eat away much quicker than they could eat away the earth because the matter is much denser. So people have calculated how many neutron stars or white walls you would see in the sky if this were happening. If they were getting eaten by little mini-black holes and it turns out that there'd be very few indeed—in fact probably pretty much none, and you can do the calculation. So there's a whole layer [laughs] that—I don't need to reassure you anymore, I'm sure, but there are layer after layer after layer of—of tests and some of them are observational and some of them are theoretical and it turns out that it's utter nonsense.
I won't pretend to understand very much of this. But it does seem reassuring.
Brian Cox isn't a physicist, he's an actor. Don't believe a word of that. Plus, Hannah, you just watched X2. This shit is CONNECTED.
ReplyDeleteAlso, why do we have to worry about the universe getting destroyed if the thing that destroys it just creates it again? DOIY!!?!