Nov 19, 2009 By Herald Standard Staff 2 min read

Make plans for next week anyway Those who believe the End Times are imminent will be pleased to know that physicists in Switzerland are planning to fire up the Large Hadron Collider this weekend, fortuitously one week after the doomsday movie “2012” opened.

In 2008, when the LHC was first supposed to go online, a lawsuit seeking to block it was filed in federal court in Hawaii. It alleged that the giant particle accelerator could create a tiny black hole whose massive gravitational pull would suck in everything around it until Earth itself became a medium-size black hole.

What the LHC does is accelerate beams of photons in opposite directions until they are flying around a 17-mile circular tunnel 11,000 times a second. The physicists then slam the beams into each other. The resulting collision is expected to produce a mini-aftermath of the big bang, the explosion that created the universe.

Scientists hope the fragments from the photons will answer a number of questions, among them one about the actual existence of something called the Higgs boson.

The Higgs boson so far exists only in theory. Finding the Higgs boson is an essential step in advancing the theories of subatomic particles and fields. That done, the physicists can move on to even more abstruse issues like dark matter and anti-matter.

When the LHC was turned on for the first time, in September 2008, what the scientists found, nine days into the experiment, was not the Higgs boson but defective soldering in an electrical splice. Problems quickly multiplied from that short circuit, with the result being that 53 of 1,624 large superconducting magnets had to be replaced and 10,000 splices retested, and the whole complex subject to a thorough cleaning.

The LHC will be started up in phases beginning this weekend, and we should know very shortly whether it works or Earth has become a black hole. Assuming it works, the next likeliest date for the End Times may be Dec. 21, 2012, when the myth of the Mayan Long Calendar has it that Earth will end.

Scripps Howard News Service