2009 is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his "On the Origin of Species." A few years ago I had the privilege and pleasure of shooting videos in the Galapagos Islands for Lindblad Expeditions. There, on Isla Espanola, I encountered Darwin's finches and his theory of adaptive radiation.
Well now, all you folks waiting for the Rapture, modern science might just be hurrying it along. Tomorrow may be the beginning of the end of space and time. The world's largest atom-smasher will fire up.
Fingers Crossed, Physicists Are Ready for Collider to Roll
'At roughly 3:30 a.m. Eastern time, scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, say they will try to send the first beam of protons around a 17-mile-long racetrack known as the Large Hadron Collider, 300 feet underneath the Swiss-French border outside Geneva. ...
The collider, 14 years and $8 billion in the making, is the most expensive scientific experiment to date. ... It is designed to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts — seven times the energy of the next largest machine in the world, Fermilab’s Tevatron — and smash them together....
At stake is a suite of theories called the Standard Model, which explains all of particle physics to date, but which breaks down at the conditions that existed in the earliest moments of the universe. The new collider will eventually reach temperatures and energies equivalent to those at a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
There are many theories about what will happen, including the emergence of a particle known as the Higgs boson, which is hypothesized to endow other particles with mass, or the identity of the mysterious dark matter that provides the invisible scaffolding of galaxies and the cosmos.
But nobody really knows for sure, which is part of the fun, but which has led to a few alarming claims that the collider could spit out a black hole or some other accidental phenomenon that could end the Earth or the universe."
- Dennis Overbye, The New York Times
When the first collisions start in a couple of weeks, the worry is that 'the collider could spit out a black hole or some other accidental phenomenon that could end the Earth or the universe'.
You can read more about it, before all about it is gone, in MSNBC Science Editor Alan Boyle's story 'Discovery or doom? Collider Stirs Debate'.
