Daily Mail
October 2, 2018
Professor Lord Martin Rees has revealed the ‘worst case scenario’ for particle accelerators – and they could mean the end of Earth as we know it.
He warns that if things went wrong, they could result in a black hole being formed, or the Earth being turned into a ‘hyperdense sphere’ measuring just 330 feet across—the length of just two football fields.
Particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider shoot particles at incredibly high speeds, smash them together, and observe the fallout.
While they have led to massive breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe, they also carry a high risk, Rees says in his new book ‘On The Future: Prospects for Humanity’.
‘Maybe a black hole could form, and then suck in everything around it,’ he writes, according to the Telegraph.
‘The second scary possibility is that the quarks would reassemble themselves into compressed objects called strangelets.’
‘That in itself would be harmless.
- A d v e r t i s e m e n t
‘However under some hypotheses a strangelet could, by contagion, convert anything else it encounters into a new form of matter, transforming the entire earth in a hyperdense sphere about one hundred metres across.’
This article was posted: Tuesday, October 2, 2018 at 5:33 am
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