lazy lazy lazy me & the end of the world

Lazy lazy lazy me
I'm a lazy son of a gun



Sorry I've been away so long. I wish I had a good excuse for my absense, but the fact is that I am a profoundly lazy person. As Walter Brennan as Will Sonnet in the '60s western series "The Guns of Will Sonnet" would have said, "No brag; just fact."



I am not sorry that the world did not end this week when the Eurogeeks at CERN turned on the Large Hadron Collider for the first time. I have too much unfinished business--I need at least 30 days' notice before I would be comfortable with the eschaton. I've gotta say though that I was a little disappointed that there wasn't a little something, maybe a small pucker like the scar of a bullet wound, there in the Alps on the France-Switzerland border where this science fair experiment run amok is located.



What am I on about? Well, you may have heard folks saying that, since this device is believed by some physicists to be capable of creating itty bitty black holes, maybe, just maybe a chain reaction would occur, the ultimate result of which would be that the universe, like the legendary hoopoe bird, would spiral ever inward on itself until it disappeared--poof!--up its own asshole. If this has happened, I haven't noticed. Maybe your experience has been different.



Really, I never was ever able to work up any optimism that a Trans-Europe Fundament was going to appear, though I would have surely gone to see it if it had. The problem is that people have a misguided notion of what black holes are. As Pope Benedict would surely tell us, It's all about mass. The kinds of black holes we read about and see in sci-fi movies are the result of the collapse of really massive things--objects far more massive than, say, our Sun, or even former president William Howard Taft. These celestial black holes were born huge--cosmic glandular cases whose gravitational fields are so robust that nothing, including light, can escape them. The black holes which may even now may be being created in the new collider are not nearly so formidable. In fact, they are about as massive as one (1) molecule of hydrogen (keeping in mind that hydrogen atoms, like nuns and hookers, prefer to travel in pairs). No matter how tightly you scrunch two hydrogen nuclei together, which is what this device does, their mass is the same as it was before the scrunching. And two hydrogen nuclei, no matter how buff, just don'thave the gravity to suck up Switzerland (and I say thank goodness--where would we go for our cheese, chocolate, cuckoo clocks and no-tell banking?) Much less the whole freakin' universe.

Now, I can imagine you thinking, "Couldn't you say the same thing about the big black holes? Their mass wouldn't increase either, and yet they are reputed to have a voracious appetite." Well, I think that's right. Free-range black holes (and I claim to have made up that designation to differentiate the ones out there in nature from the lab-made ones) will pretty much gobble up anything that falls within their event horizon, an invisible sphere which may be millions of miles in diameter. It's the same thing with the b.h's from the L.H.C., except that their event horizon would be smaller than a hydrogen atom; so small that it is unlikely that anything will ever come close enough to be subsumed.

"Wait a minute wait a minute--what is an event horizon?" is what I imagine you saying now. To which I rspond, "Jeez, if I knew you were going to be so picky I would never have brought this up." Sigh. OK. Only stars a lot bigger than the sun can become black holes. A guy named Schwartzschild, working with Einstein's equations, figured out how massive a star would have to be before it would end its existance by collapsing on itself, leaving behind a volume of space from which nothing could escape. Although the star itself would just keep collapsing forever, forming a singularity which (more or less) takes up no space at all, the borderline left behind, though smaller in volume than the star was before it collapsed, still describes a big big place. That borderline,is the event horizon, or suck zone. It was actually there all along, but while the star was shining, it was deep inside. By the way, Schwartzschild is German for "black shield". Heavy, huh? I don't care if you want to know about what a singularity is. What do I look like, Wikipedia? But the point is, big mass, big suck zone; small...small. So, no end of the world this week.

When I started this, I had a really pithy way to tie it all in to the coming election (something about not believing everything that sounds plausible when you first hear it), but I think that's enough for one day. I'll try to be more communicative here in future. Sigh. Used to be, when you had a radio show, you could do the whole thing on the radio. This internet stuff is interactive and fun, but it could get to be a lot of work. Listen to Randoradio. Think about the difference between what people say and the truth. Register and vote. Comment if you want.