A little Ben told me that there's actually a website you can visit to check if the LHC has destroyed the world yet. Keep yourself updated! Click HERE, HERE and HERE to visit.
Early this week something happened up in France/Swisscheeserland that was bound to shock, excite, made you scareded, or potentially bore, but mostly excite everyone in the world. Yup, they turned on the LHC on Tuesday. Didn't do anything spectacular or smash things up at really high speeds, just turned it on.
Well, the main reason I'm so happy that they invented the LHC machine-collider-dude-thing is because it's could screw a lot of things up! Yeah, selfish, I know.
Some complicated looking part in the LHC. Well, don't ask me what it is!
Quite basically, the LHC is the Large Hadron Collider. They don't collide 'Large Hadrons' in a Collider, they just collide Hadrons in a 'Large Collider'. Confusing, I know. They make little particles fly around happily at speeds nearly reaching the speed of light (which is superbly fast, mind you), until they collide into each other and they're not so happy anymore. Then they kinda blow up and the little bits and pieces fly all over the place. Then they look at the little bits and say things like 'Ahah! This squiggly line proves that the Higgs boson exists!' and then they'll go publish it in the papers and get lots of money for it. That's the essential theory of it, lah.
Right, anyway, some people are worried that the LHC will make little black holes things that will magically expand in size and gobble the world up. Fear #1 - The world gets totally screwed.
Besides that, the current model of the atom, called the Standard Model, might also get screwed if we find out that the Higgs boson doesn't acutally exist. But if it does exist then that might prove the Standard Model, but not necessarily. But if they can't find it, then they'll have to rethink almost everything about the current atomic model. Or if we find something totally weird in the BANG BANG experiments, the model might be totally disproven altogether. It's all very confusing, but let's forget that now and let ourselves get deluded by the 'appeal to authority' fallacy (that means we believe whatever the scientists say because they claim to be smart-pants-scientists). So Fear #2 - The Standard Model gets screwed.
DIE lah.
So really, if the world meets it's calamatystic fate because some little hadrons beat each other up, I won't have to sit for my exams!
If the Standard Model of the atom is proven (at best) wrong or (at worst) partially incorrect and therefore dude for numerous revisions, hopefully the IB Organization will understand this and take out that part of our syllabus from the exams!
The world loses, but hey! IB students worldwide would rejoice.
Alrighty, back to trying to study.
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