6 Days Until My Novel is Finished…Or the World Ends

Large Hadron Collider quadrupole magnets for directing proton beams to interact. These superconducting quadrupole electromagnetas were made in Fermilab. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today I put on the finishing touches.  It’s been a rough road this month as I said goodbye to all of these quirky, interesting characters, many of whom I have come to love…even the villains…especially the villains.  Wish me luck as I finalize everything for the Friday release on the 21st…unless the world ends and then who cares, right?

Way the World Ends #6: Strange Matter

This one is one of my favorite scenarios because it is something in science that is so misunderstood by the general public and only theorized by scientists that we writers could write tons of science fiction about it and never run out of material.  Basically, strange matter are “various types of quarks, elementary particles and fundamental constituents of matter, [that are] potentially unstable” (Waxingapocalyptic.com)  The concern that arises, of which astrophysicists say there is no real worry, is that these strange matter particles generated by the Large Hadron Collider in Bern, Switzerland could possibly create either miniature black holes that could become larger ones or rip the fabric of space-time and cause other strange things to happen.

When I hear scientists speak and read articles about these types of things, I wonder exactly how much we really know about them and remember that science is a process of finding things out, of looking at what we can observe about the natural world and using our amazing capacity to reason to make sense of it.  I also realize that science has been wrong about as many times as it has been right.  Strange matter and quantum physics are right on the cusp of what we really understand about our universe.

The worst case scenario would be that in firing up the Large Hadron Collider, scientists at first do not see any large scale ramifications, but then they trigger some type of miniature black hole that does not stop growing or they rip a hole in the fabric of space time that causes an alternate reality to bleed through into our universe like what happened in Stephen King’s The Mist.  That story still intrigues me, and the film wasn’t half bad, but one should read the story to get the full scope of what might happen if an alternate universe intruded on our own.

If we listen to the scientists in charge of the Large Hadron Collider, they say it is completely safe, that there really is no danger, but then our tropes of science fiction, working on the fears of our well read little minds, place doubt into our confidence in the scholarly pursuits of humankind and wonder indeed what might happen.