It's the end of the world as we know it (maybe)...

According to this countdown clock, we have a little more than 24 days left before the possible end of the world as we know it. That will be when the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland will go online and crash subatomic particles together using an underground 17-mile ring of magnets in hopes of creating similar conditions that existed just after the Big Bang that created the universe.

If this sounds familiar, it might be because the United States was building a similar project just south of Dallas. The Superconducting Super Collider, unfortunately, ran way over budget and Congress ended up mothballing the entire project after spending over $4 billion already. It now sits empty, occassionally being used as a glorified storage facility or a place for military training exercises. Talk about pork barrel spending.

The collision of these hadron particles is supposed to allow astrophysicists to unlock other unknown mysteries of science that my feeble Cheeto-filled brain doesn't quite understand. But from what I've gleaned, it will either support all the theorized principles of physics or completely dismantle them. HC? Well, maybe I'll wait until the collider is online before I continue to say "physics!"

Two other possibilities exist, too. Nothing at all could happen, and scientists will be left with the most expensive non-working science experiment of all time (which reminds me of that seemingly great tennis ball launcher I built with Fandango back in high school physics class that ended up shooting the ball a measly foot or two). The other theory is that the reaction could be catastrophic. From The New Yorker:

Worries about the end of the planet have shadowed nearly every high-energy experiment. Such concerns were given a boost by Scientific American—presumably inadvertently—in 1999. That summer, the magazine ran a letter to the editor about Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, then nearing completion. The letter suggested that the Brookhaven collider might produce a “mini black hole” that would be drawn toward the center of the earth, thus “devouring the entire planet within minutes.” Frank Wilczek, a physicist who would later win a Nobel Prize, wrote a response for the magazine. Wilczek dismissed the idea of mini black holes devouring the earth, but went on to raise a new possibility: the collider could produce strangelets, a form of matter that some think might exist at the center of neutron stars. In that case, he observed, “one might be concerned about an ‘ice-9’-type transition,” wherein all surrounding matter could be converted into strangelets and the world as we know it would vanish.

Now the majority of scientists have dismissed the idea of mini blackholes and stranglets as a product of the collider project as hogwash. Still, I might be a little extra nice to my sweetie that day before they push the button.