The Big Think

From the people-who-don’t-get-it department comes this story about a lawsuit in US court trying to stop the LHC from going online because it might, y’know, destroy the universe. Among other reasons this is a stupid idea is this: the LHC and CERN aren’t even in the US!

Matt has a good summary of the Large Hadron Collider. From his site:

To give some idea of what kind of energy we’re talking about, the everyday energy scales we live at are a few hundred (in energy units of electron volts…don’t worry about that, the relative scale is what matters). The surface of the sun is a few thousand.

LHC is going to get up to about 14,000,000,000,000. That’s impressive, but the highest possible, the Planck scale, is 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 … so we have a ways to go.

But here’s the fun part…like I said, physics changes as energy increases. But, it doesn’t change continuously. Things may look the same for a big range of energy, and as you increase, you don’t see anything new. At other points, however, there may be a HUGE change that happens really suddenly as you increase energy.

And the experimental work we’ve been able to do for a long time now has been in an energy range where theories don’t expect much to change. That is, until now.
The energy range the LHC will get to once they fire it up in a couple of months is just on the other side of where we expect the next big jump to be.

Matt is a good writer and teacher (in addition to being a crack Ratchet and Clank player). Check out his extended explication of the LHC.