I went to visit Alice on Sunday. There was a big special open house day that apparently 50,000 other people took part in too. See, there's this 27 km tunnel -- you might have heard of it recently because some people think its going to destroy the earth, or at least Hawaii -- because the LHC particle accelerator in the tunnel is used to speed particles up to just below the speed of light, and crash them into each other. Then there are these big "detectors" at the crash sites, which measure for different things. Alice is one of them, and hopes to measure the smashing of large ions (hence the name... A Large Ion Collision Experiment) i.e. lead nuclei and to be able to recreate quark-gluon plasma. Quark-gluon plasma (not to be confused with quark-gluon plasma, which is probably much tastier) is what existed in the tiny fractions-of-a-second before matter was created after the big bang. So, according to the German CERN intern who was ahead of us in line to get tickets, if anything is going to create a black hole (or a dragon, see article) it's going to be the Alice experiment.
Neat, huh?
(Why would it create a black hole? Well, you see, when a star dies, its matter cools and condenses, becoming smaller. It has such a huge amount of gravity that all the atoms get squished closer together than normal and occasionally the atoms collapse into each other and the protons and the electrons start to touch and cancel each other out and then you get a neutrons-only playground but then those keep collapsing and you get ... "nothing" -- mostly because the gravitational pull is so strong, that you can't figure out what's in there and come back out and tell NASA. So... some people think maybe if you crash two nuclei together at just below the speed of light then conditions would be right to create a black hole, though ... it's only two nuclei, not an entire star's worth and, you know, we're still on earth and not in space and it would be subject to earth's conditions, so see, it's all very unlikely.)
SCIENCE!
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3 comments:
I was going to say:
"It's normal for a girl your age to begin experimenting with doomsday devices, but generally not at the dinner table."
Instead I think I go with:
"I'm sure NASA is developing a cunning plan to slam a probe, satellite, or telescope into a black hole to see what sound it makes. Also, Hawaii has several islands that no one goes to. It'll probably only destroy one of those."
:) I thought it was a pretty good post for a literature PhD, myself.
Ahem, this seems to be a fine dinner table discussion. Much better than many in fact. Unless you are pondering the philosophical attachment of the Red Socks and the Phillies.
Actually I believe the fiendish thingie (see Beatles Movie II) would be aimed at um, Tierra del Fuego.
mom
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