I swear. Who dreams of particle accelerators?

I’ve had this recurring dream of running around the inside of a particle accelerator, usually involving trips into alternate dimensions. I mean, is this supergeeky or what?

The largest supercollider built thus far is the Large Hadron Collider on the border of Switzerland and France.

I keep dreaming about the tunnels, though.

The LHC hopes to find particles hitherto undetected, but predicted by current theories, specifically the Higgs boson. Other questions that are hoped to be answered are whether or not supersymmetry is true, and whether or not we can detect the extra dimensions required for string theory to be valid.

Some people have speculated about possible disasters caused by activating the LHC. These scenarios seem pretty unlikely, considering that cosmic rays with 20 million times the energy that will be generated by the LHC constantly bombard the Earth and we’ve never seen any of these effects. But they’re pretty interesting ideas:

• generation of a stable micro black-hole: if Stephen Hawking is wrong, and black holes don’t evaporate, then a micro black-hole would eventually turn the Earth into Swiss cheese as it rotates.
• triggering a transition to a different quantum mechanical vacuum energy level: if the current theories regarding inflation are true, this would essentially mean generating a Big Bang. In practical terms, we’d probably be vaporized, but what effect it would have on the universe at large is quite unknown.

A decade ago, I remember reading a short-story piece about the abandoned Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, which was going to be even bigger than the LHC. The denouement of the story was the creation of a stable black hole and the resulting destruction of Earth.