3...2...1....Contact

We have all seen the movie Contact or know what it is about. However, just tonight I was told of a more jaw dropping event that is about to happen. Most people don't remember the dates but August 6 and 9, 1945 will always be remembered by approximatly 1 in 18 people that we either interact with throughtout the day or pass by on the street. That date was the day that our own President Harry S. Trueman ordered the "Little Boy" to be dropped on Hiroshima. We all know the impact that made on the world.

Well that was only the beginning. Three days after Hiroshima, the Japanese willingly did not give up it's battle. Then came the bomb on the morning of August 9, 1945 where a U.S. B-29 Superfortress Bockscar, flown by the crew of 393rd Squadron commander Major Charles W. Sweeney, carried the nuclear bomb code-named "Fat Man". Where did it hit......anybody have a guess. If you guessed Nagasaki you are right. The plane was low on fuel and the cloud cover was very horrible and the mission was almost called off but with a few second window they dropped Fat Man. This plutonium filled bomb was detonated at 469 meters above the earth's floor. Hence, a blast that yielded an equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT. This resulted in the second live combat nuclear destruction with an astounding TOTAL destruction zone of just over two miles, and that does not inclued the aftermath. Where am I going with this you may ask. Well, in just three days our world will conduct a test that may supersede these explostions that may unknowningly top Little Boy and Fat Man to somewhere say......close to infinity. If you don't know what made these bombs so useful it is called either nuclear fusion which is the process by which multiple like-charged atomic nuclei join together to form a heavier nucleus. The second way these bombs can carve such a destructive (even more so than fusion) path is called nuclear fission. Nuclear fission is the splitting of the nucleus of an atom into parts (lighter nuclei) often producing free neutrons and other smaller nuclei, which may eventually produce photons (in the form of gamma rays). So what would you say if we were to split a photon? This will all be unveiled starting on Wednesday. Dr. Lyn Evans (the third from the left) is in charge of building the giant atom smasher buried underground at Cern – the European Centre for Nuclear Research – in Switzerland. Dr. Lyn Evans is the mastermind of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In the test — taking place 300ft underground near the French-Swiss border — atomic particles, inside the LHC, will be fired in opposite directions along a 17-mile tunnel at mind-boggling speeds. When I say mind boggling speeds, I mean speeds within a fraction of the speed of light. So what is going to happen when they fire these atomic particles, or photons, on Wednesday. Well nothing! This would be a boring story if that were the end. However, when Dr. Lyn Evans starts the machine up on Wednesday are we just looking to see if we can get the atomic particles to make it around the 17 mile tunnel and shut it down? Nope! This wonderful, in it's own way, experimentation will keep the lab running. You may ask yourself.....for how long? Well the intention of the Dr. Evans and his Scientists is to attempt to recreate conditions in the first billionths of a second after the Big Bang start of the universe. Why would this concern us? Well to simulate the creation of the universe you would have both fusion and fission working together to create matter. However, when this matter evolves into something that we can see we end up with one of many things, but for this example I will use our Star. Yes the star that the nine...wait 10 planets are revolving around. Will our star last forever? Dustin, don't give it away for every body else. Nope...our star will soon die. When our star dies it will become either a black dwarf, neutron star, or black hole, depending on how massive it is, in which we don't even know the exact weight of our star. We will likely not see a black hole but we will surely see a black dwarf or a neutron star. Don't worry....if our star dies it will expand way past Jupiter before it implodes into a speck of a high light producing mass and we will all be burnt up and toasted like an OU tailgate party. OK...OK...Back to the LHC. With these atomic particles spinning in opposite directions they will eventually hit each other. When this happens they will split and we all know what that does. It produces energy. So now more particles are spinning in opposite directions. So when they flip the switch on Wednesday will we all submit ourselves to an earth destroying black hole. No. The scientists predict that they will not see results for approximatly four years. I will end my post with this.
Tom Feilden, a top science expert in the world stated on BBC Radio 4’s Today show.

He said: “Don’t panic. The world is not going to end on Wednesday.
The Collider almost certainly WILL produce microscopic black holes, perhaps at a rate as high as one every second. But these will be so small and unstable that they will vanish as quickly as they form."

Hmmmm...Yes, I will take the number 3 with large fries and a couple black holes on the side please.