China is building a particle accelerator that will be twice the size and seven times more powerful than CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Martin Rees, known for his contributions to the science of black hole formation, extragalactic radio sources and the evolution of the universe, believes there is a chance this Chinese collider will lead to "a catastrophe that will consume space itself." Contrary to popular belief, the vacuum of space is far from empty. According to Rees, the vacuum contains "all the forces and particles that govern the physical world."
And he adds that there is a possibility that the vacuum that we observe in reality is “fragile and unstable”. This means that when a collider like the LHC creates unimaginably concentrated energy by colliding particles and shattering them, it can create a "phase transition" that will rip the very fabric of spacetime and cause a cosmic disaster, not just Earth.
Collider: Made in China
There is a theory that quarks can be reassembled into compressed objects called "strapels". By themselves, they will be harmless. However, according to some hypotheses, the strapeller can "infect" everything that is nearby and transform it into a new form of matter. The entire Earth would then turn into a superdense sphere about a hundred meters across - the size of a football field.
The building blocks of matter in our Universe were formed in the first 10 microseconds of its existence, as follows from the generally accepted scientific picture of the world. After the Big Bang, which was 13.7 billion years ago, matter consisted mostly of quarks and gluons, two types of elementary particles whose interactions are determined by quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interactions. In the early Universe, these particles moved almost freely in the quark-gluon plasma. Then, during the phase transition, they combined and formed hadrons, and among them the building blocks of atomic nuclei, protons and neutrons.
The highest-energy experiments on the planet in 2018 with the ALICE detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN have produced a substance in which particles and antiparticles coexist in equal quantities with high precision, as in the earliest universe. The team confirms the theoretical predictions that the phase transition between quark-gluon plasma and hadronic matter occurs at a temperature of 156 MeV by analyzing experimental data. This temperature is 120,000 times higher than in the interior of the Sun.
Although there have been many unfounded assumptions since the two yellow dots appeared on the screen of the CERN laboratory, indicating that the protons were activated, CERN has always emphasized that all the work that is being done at the collider is safe and that “nature has done it many times on Earth and other astronomical bodies”.
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The LHC officially stated that "the collider has been working for eight years in search of straplets and has not found anything."
Since its opening in 2008, the LHC has become a world center for particle physics research. In a tunnel nearly 30 kilometers long in circumference and more than 200 meters deep below the surface of the Swiss-French border, the LHC collides and shatters subatomic particles at almost the speed of light and makes breakthrough discoveries, such as the Higgs boson. But fundamental questions about the composition of our universe remain unanswered, and many of the proposed solutions are beyond the reach of the current LHC.
But his successor may succeed - and China is building one.
A Chinese supercollider with a circumference of almost 60 kilometers will be twice the size of the LHC and will be located near the Chinese city of Qinhuangdao at the coastal end of another huge project of the past, the Great Wall of China. The Chinese plan, however, does not rule out competition. There are two more proposals - the Japan International Linear Collider, an electron-positron collider, and the CERN Future Circular Collider, a proton-proton collider, which will be located in Europe. The Chinese monster is due to come into operation by 2055 and will define the limits of physics for the next two generations.
Ilya Khel