Quote: EllieJP @ September 9 2008, 11:19 AM BST
Can someone explain in simple terms what's happening please? I have no idea why we're apparently going to die...
I'll have a crack at it.
All matter is made up of stuff called atoms. The atoms themselves are made up of other stuff called sub-atomic particles such as electrons, neutrons and so on. Some of these sub-atomic particles are in turn made up of other particles such as quarks and bosons.
To study these particles, scientists whizz them round at nearly the speed of light in a huge magnet thingy then smash them together. This smashing together breaks them down further into the bits they are made of which can be detected on detectors. Mostly these break-down bits only last a tiny fraction of a second.
The bits they break down into are fermions (particles associated with matter) & bosons (particles associated with forces).
At CERN they have built the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which is the most powerful of these huge magnet thingies ever built. It is intended to smash hadrons together (a Hadron is a particle made up of quarks - such as a proton) in the hope of discovering the theoretical Higgs Boson which is thought to be the particle which gives things mass - i.e. it is the particle which is associated with the force of gravity.
Whirling things round and smashing them together with so much energy gives a very, VERY small theoretical possibility that a miniscule black hole would be formed (a black hole is where some matter is squashed down so far it basically breaks space-time). Some people think this black hole could devour the Earth. Most people think that the black hole would evaporate almost instantly due to the radiation they give off.
Oddly, most people seem to be worrying about the tiny chance of a black hole (probably because they've heard of them and they sound all dramatic) instead of the equally tiny but equally valid chance that the experiment will create a rather odd particle called a strangelet.
A strangelet is another particle which is just as theoretical as the Higgs Boson but more scary than the thought of a black hole. Rather than evaporating, a strangelet (if they exist) would turn pretty much everything it touches into the same strange matter, which would also destroy the Earth pretty effectively.
Most people also think this is extremely unlikely to happen.
Massively over-simplified but I hope that gives the sort of gist of it.
F**k me, it's like a clown running across a minefield.
