Fragments From Floyd

The March 2008 issue of National Geographic has been folded back for weeks now to the article on “The Hunt for the God Particle” and I’ve been reading a paragraph or two every little bit as the mornings allow. It may help us answer the ultimate cosmological question in the title of this post.

Fascinating stuff: that soon, either North America’s Fermilab or Europe’s CERN will create colliding particles that could set off either the most profound discoveries of our existence, or the end of it. Depends on who you believe, who you trust. And it doesn’t really matter because we will climb this mountain because–at least for now–it exists. The risks are slim but oh-so-consequential, the potential gains: cosmic.

Not everybody is bullish on crossing this physics threshold that represents a new and unprecedented step in human history and science. What if it turns out we have more courage and curiosity than wisdom or prudence? Here’s the matter at hand from the NY Times:

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.

“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots,” said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group. The others prefer to remain anonymous, Mr. Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due in January.

Questions about the doomsday scenarios may well come up at CERN on April 6, during a public open house at the LHC. Some researchers have gotten the word to be prepared to talk about microscopic black holes and strangelets if asked. MSNBC

From this massive experiment, profound questions might be answered about why and how the universe was formed and why it continues to exist as we find it billions of years after the origin of time, matter and energy out of nothing–in the beginning.

Wouldn’t it be the ultimate irony if (however unlikely) we destroyed creation in our quest for the God Particle? What a peculiar animal we are, driven, hungry and confident that in making the right tools, we’ll find the universal equation, pluck the ultimate fruit from the Tree of Life, the Universe and Everything.

Wish I was going to be around to see how this Story of human curiosity and genius turns out. Or then again, maybe not.

Stumble it!