• Question: When they had the particle collider in sweden were u sacred u were going to die or did u think their colider was going to fail :L

    Asked by testtubelover to Ben, Jony, Katharine, Mark, Peter on 17 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Mark Basham

      Mark Basham answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      Hi testtubelover,

      I wasn’t worried at all, the only thing i was concerned about was that it might not start on time, or be quite as effective as it should have been, but In the end its now running pretty much to specification, and there is some excellent science being worked on.

    • Photo: Ben Still

      Ben Still answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      Do you mean the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)? If so then not at all, let me explain why…

      The energies of particles smashing into each other at the LHC is not a new thing. Every second in the sky above London there is a particle smashing into the atmosphere with energy equal or above that at seen at the LHC. These particles come from many places in the Universe such as the death of massive stars or large magnetic fields – we call them cosmic rays.

      Cosmic rays bombard the Earth equally from all directions and if you think of the size of the entire Earths atmosphere you get 100,000’s of these LHC+ energy particles hitting the Earth each second. The Earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years, so if you multiplied that in seconds by the number of LHC+ energy particles hitting the Earth per second you get massive amount. In fact in total is works out that in the lifetime of the Earth there have already been 100,000 LHC experiments conducted on the Earths atmosphere by Nature.

      So if an LHC experiment was going to destroy the Earth is should have done so by now!

    • Photo: Katharine Schofield

      Katharine Schofield answered on 17 Nov 2011:

      I wasn’t scared I was going to die or anything. I was nervous for the scientists who were there in the control room though, under the full attention of the world’s media. How’s that for pressure?

    • Photo: Peter Williams

      Peter Williams answered on 17 Nov 2011:

      Even though the individual particles colliding have an incredibly large energy, on our macroscopic scale the total amount of energy is about the same as a gnat in flight. So no scariness there!

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