A Black Hole Could Swallow the Planet

I recently stumbled over some mildly annoying news. It turns out a black hole could swallow our planet. Yes, folks, this is real.

A suit was filed in a federal court to stop the use of the Large Hadron Collider, a massive particle accelerator that some say could mean the end. There is a chance that when used, the LHC will create such intense energies that a black hole will literally appear.

Though, I've got to say, along with being swallowed by the monster from Cloverfield, getting sucked into a black hole would be among the coolest ways to kick the bucket. Now, if you're the worrying type, hopefully you're not also a gambling man (or woman), because the chance of this actually happening is somewhere in the lower trillionths of a percent, give or take a few billionths.

The real questions here are:
1) Can Senator Hillary Clinton afford to stay in the Democratic nomination race now that time may potentially stop?
2) Can Vice President Dick Cheney continue to consume his healthy diet of babies and will he be able to find those weapons of mass destruction inside the black hole?
3) And lastly, does the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle allow for Paris Hilton to be even more worthless?

The answers lie near Geneva, Switzerland. There, the Large Hadron Collider is in its final stages of construction. At 27 Kilometers long, it is the biggest scientific project in the history of mankind. Over the equivalent of $1 billion U.S. dollars has been spent to make this particle accelerator. Half of the world's particle physicists are working on this project.

The New York Times calls the project "The Search for the God Particle." Why the God Particle? Well because it could find a particle that explains so much. You ever wonder what gives something mass? If you ask your professor (or teacher) s/he'll probably tell you, "why, of course, matter gives mass." But this isn't really an answer. Okay, so matter gives mass, but what is mass and what is in mater that gives it mass? Is there an elementary charge, force, or particle associated with it? Why does it-as Einstein told us-warp space-time and create the weakest force, but one of the most influential-gravity. Why exactly is gravity so weak compared to the strong nuclear, weak nuclear, and electromagnetic forces? Why do women find Flava-Flav attractive?

Supposedly, these questions and more can be answered by colliding billions of protons at a rate of billions per second at 99.999% the speed of light. These collisions will create energies similar to those found a trillionth (once again, give or take a few billionths) of a second after the Big Bang. The research is bold, new territory, questioning once science-fiction ideas like extra dimensions, antimatter, and dark energy.

Now throughout this post I've laid many questions and few answers. I hope you'll forgive me. Throughout modern physics history, scientists have searched for the Grand Unified Theory-essentially a theory explaining everything about the cosmos and about matter. There is hope that the Large Hadron Collider will give us the insight to do so.