The Banana Peel Project

In my ongoing series of posts on technologies of sight, I have mostly been talking about how supercomputers have begun to play a significant role in how we think about science and simulation. But supercomputers are far from the only tool that have extended our sense of sight into new dimensions. In this fourth post on technologies of sight, I want to describe one way that the most important tool in particle physics–the particle accelerator–also represents a new way of looking at the universe.

In standard English, a particle accelerator pushes atomic or subatomic particles to near the speed of light and slams them together. A measuring instrument then records the resulting explosion by producing a visual image that shows the trajectories through space of the quantum shrapnel. Physicists can then use those trajectories to infer the mass, velocity, and dozens of other properties of the particles produced by the collision:

This image, from CERN (the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire) near Geneva, Switzerland, is the image that researchers got when they shot pions (a subatomic particle) through liquid hydrogen. When the pions collided with the nuclei of hydrogen atoms (protons), they “exploded” in a shower of new particles. Those tiny, charged new particles then careened off through the chamber’s magnetic field, producing those groovy little spirals.

So what else can you do with a particle accelerator? Well, apparently the as-yet-incomplete Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, whose completion has just been postponed, may be able to slam protons together with enough energy that they form a miniature black hole. While this sounds a bit like juggling dynamite, it seems there isn’t much to be feared. While some reasonably well-respected physicists like Stephen Hawking don’t think the black holes will be stable, Chris Lee writes with a good sense of humor that:

On the other hand, Hawking may be wrong and these black holes could be stable, forming a kind of dark matter. In this case, they will sink to the center of the Earth and begin devouring us all at a rate of about one particle every few years.

Given that the math is right, it doesn’t seem that a few black holes falling through the laboratory floor will cause too much damage. Still gives me the willies. (For those of you interested in the cutting edge of black hole theory, check out what folks are saying now about a potential solution to the black hole information loss paradox.)

Anyway, since I’ve gotten in the habit during this series of posting cool simulated images, here’s one more.  If someone can tell me what it is supposed to be, they’ll win a (still undetermined) special prize.