A Reprieve?

I'm not an end times millenialist ultraconservative Revelation-reading apocalypse-expecting person by any stretch of the imagination, but I have to admit that even I've been a little bit worried about the possibility of all life in the universe ending as a result of the experiments that CERN was planning to do with its Large Hadron Collider. That's why I found myself a little bit relieved to find that major experiments with the collider have been put on hold until spring. I was really looking forward to this Christmas!

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, the Large Hadron Collider is--in simple terms--the world's largest (and most expensive) science fair project, created by the world's smartest (and best financed) science geeks. It's an 8 billion dollar tunnel (That's right, "billion" with a "b") that runs underground in France and Switzerland. All told the tunnel is about 17 miles in circumference.

The scientists plan to collide two beams of protons into one another in an attempt to simulate the Big Bang. Yes, THAT Big Bang. Luckily for us, a defect has forced the experiment to be put on hold until the spring of next year.

As I said, I'm not one who easily panics. I went to bed on December 31 of 1999 confident that the world would still exist the next day, despite worries of Y2K, and I just smirk at people who tell me that this event or that is proof that we are living in the "End Times."

Maybe what makes this end of the world scenario a little scarier for me is that I understand it so little. The Y2K scare probably didn't bother me because I knew enough about computers, had helped the district technicians install Y2K "fixes" on software at the high school, that I understood what the problem was and how it had been fixed. And I see Revelation as a non-literal book, a vision, meant to give hope to first century Christians, and not as a literal book describing what's really going to happen on the last day of the planet's existence, so I don't put a lot of stock in dire Apocalyptic prophecies.

But particle physics? I'm sorry, but my brain just doesn't get it. I can handle atoms and protons and electrons and neutrons, but my brain just sort of melts down after that. I remember watching an episode of Nova a few years ago hosted by theoretical physicist Brian Greene and entitled "The Elegant Universe." The show tried to make quantum physics easy to understand. It dummied it down so much, in fact, that at times the episode seemed condescending. Despite that oversimplified explanation (or maybe because of that) I still found myself unable to really grasp the concepts. My brain just couldn't hold the ideas (And it wasn't Greene's presentation, either, that was holding me back. I remember having the same problem 13 years ago when I read a book called The Physics of Star Trek, which attempted to use Star Trek as a medium for teaching theoretical physics. Couldn't get it then, either).

So the old saying is that what we are afraid of what we don't understand. I guess I'm living proof. I don't really know what a micro-black hole is, but I'm pretty sure I don't want it to be the end of me.