“We know through astro-physical observations that the universe is made up not just of standard matter but also of dark matter. But sending a person would be another thing. The CERN Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland is expected to generate one mini-black hole per second, a potential source of wormholes through which physicists could try to send quantum-sized particles. Can the hadron collider create a wormhole? Cosmic rays – particles produced by events in outer space – collide with particles in the Earth’s atmosphere at much greater energies than those of the LHC. Although powerful for an accelerator, the energy reached in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is modest by nature’s standards. Given the amount of energy that Nature has stored in the matter of your body, your detonation would change the course of history and kill millions, leaving no trace of you except in the photons of energy that escape into space and the vibrations and heat captured by the planet. What happens if the Hadron Collider blown up? Eventually, some time later, any object at rest - no matter how far away from the event horizon it initially was - will cross that horizon and encounter the central singularity. If a black hole were to form from the Earth itself, it would create an event horizon just 1.7 centimeters in diameter. What would happen if a black hole hit Earth? However, some theories suggest that the formation of tiny ‘quantum’ black holes may be possible. The LHC will not generate black holes in the cosmological sense. They announced their discovery in July 2012. That honor went to physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27-kilometer-long atom smasher at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. It saw hints of the Higgs boson but never actually discovered the particle. The Higgs boson was proposed in 1964 by Peter Higgs, François Englert, and four other theorists to explain why certain particles have mass. The Higgs boson is the fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field, a field that gives mass to other fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks. It took nearly half a century and a multi-billion dollar particle accelerator to do it. The story goes that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman referred to the Higgs as the “Goddamn Particle.” The nickname was meant to poke fun at how difficult it was to detect the particle. Preons What is smallest subatomic particle?Įlectrons Why do they call it the God particle? Electrons are bound to an atom’s nucleus by electromagnetism. It was the first Standard Model particle ever discovered. The electron is, as far as we know, one of the fundamental, indivisible building blocks of the universe. What is the smallest thing in the universe? Can you see a quark?ĭue to a phenomenon known as color confinement, quarks are never directly observed or found in isolation they can be found only within hadrons, such as baryons (of which protons and neutrons are examples), and mesons. Preons are hypothetical particles smaller than leptons and quarks that leptons and quarks are made out of. The proton consists of two up quarks and one down quark, which gives it a total charge of +e. These are the up quark, with a charge of +23e, and the down quark, which has a charge of −13e. Only two types of quark are necessary to build protons and neutrons, the constituents of atomic nuclei. 27 Did Simpsons predict the God particle?.26 How can God particle destroy universe?.20 Can the hadron collider create a wormhole?.19 How dangerous is the Hadron Collider?.18 What happens if the Hadron Collider blown up?.17 What would happen if a black hole hit Earth?.13 Why do they call it the God particle?.12 What is smallest subatomic particle?.10 What is the smallest thing in the universe?.4 What are the charges in an up and a down quark?.3 How does an up quark become a down quark?.
2 Is a down quark heavier than an up quark?.