Ring of Magnets

Have you read about the CERN Large Hadron Collider (code name: LHC)? It's $531 million ring of supercooled magnets 17 miles in circumference straddling the French and Swiss border 330 feet underground. The ring is attached to huge barrel-shaped detectors (essentially gigantic digital cameras weighing thousands of tons each that can take millions of snapshots a second. Each year the detectors will generate 15 petabytes of data, the equivalent of a stack of CDs 12 miles tall. What happens in this ring of magnets you ask? Beams of protons whip around the 17 mile track 11,000 times a second in opposite directions. And SMASH into each other. What happens then? Depends which scientists you ask. The ones in the video below believe we'll discover the secrets of the universe, invisible matter, new dimensions. Other legitimate scientists think it'll spawn a black hole that will swallow the earth. They'll admit it's a long shot, one in 50 million chance, but argue it's the same odds as winning the lottery. Which...happens. I believe we'll discover Tang 2.0.

I am intrigued to see what happens. But even more so, it makes me wonder how we have the ability to build a machine that not-crazy scientists believe has the power to suck us all into an invisible hole YET, we can't build a car that runs on anything besides gas. Or a device that can replace my pancreas. Or a better way to apply sunscreen. We're a month from creating tiny black holes and entering new dimensions but years from seemingly simple breakthroughs that could actually change a lot of peoples' lives. What a crazy world we live in.