LHC blue-screens the world
Posted in Ego, Humor, Physics, Science on September 9th, 2008 by leodirac – 2 Comments
I’ve been thinking about writing this post for quite a while, and I figured tonight might be my last chance. Plenty of people have been worrying about how the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could destroy the planet by creating small black-holes that might suck in the entire earth. As the good folks at CERN re-assure us, everything is fine. I pretty much believe this. That is to say, I’m pretty sure LHC will not destroy all life as we know it. Pretty sure. Otherwise, we’ve all got a few more hours to live.
So long as my buddy Stephen Hawking’s theories about black holes are true, we’re fine. They’ll dissipate by themselves and will not suck in the planet. But to be clear, we are testing this theory. (I just heard a scientist on the radio trip all over himself as he tried to spurt out a believable
"there really is no chance these black-holes will devour the entire
earth.")
Last year I wrote about a then-briefly-popular idea that all the world we see is actually a computer simulation. (Pointless personal anecdaote — I had this idea in grade-school and tried to marry it with special relativity’s universal speed-limit in terms of a primitively digitized simulation where exceeding the speed of light would cause objects to skip pixels during a single time step. Anyway.) It’s all as if our whole universe is a game of The Sims on some hyper-intelligent alien teenager’s computer. In a fairly religious way, this idea is unrefutable. It’s like a virtual machine trying to hack its host operating system. Can’t do it.
Some theories of simulated worlds hold that what we experience is a simplification of real physical laws. If this is true, high-energy experiments like LHC could probe the limits of these simplifications. It could cause an exception to get thrown in the simulation code. Us clever scientists set up some extremely complex scenario that caused one of the simulation’s assumptions to fail. What happens when the simulation crashes? Maybe it’s a dialog box saying "Abort, Retry, Ignore." Maybe it’s a universe-scale Blue screen of death. Teenager’s response? Maybe Abort. How different is that from our whole planet getting sucked into a black hole?
Don’t panic.