China is building a particle accelerator that will be twice as large and seven times as powerful as CERN’s LHC and astrophysicist, Martin Rees, famous for his contributions to black hole formation to extragalactic radio sources and the evolution of the universe, thinks that there’s a chance the colliders could cause a “catastrophe that engulfs space itself”.
Contrary to popular perception, the vacuum of space is not an empty void. The vacuum, Rees states, has in it “all the forces and particles that govern the physical world.” And he adds, it’s possible that the vacuum we can observe is in reality “fragile and unstable.”
What means is that when a collider such as CERN’s LHC creates unimaginably concentrated energy by smashing particles together, Rees says, it can create a “phase transition” which would tear asunder the fabric of space,” which cause a cosmic calamity not just a terrestrial one.”
The possibility is that quarks would reassemble themselves into compressed objects called strangelets. That in itself would be harmless. However under some hypotheses a strangelet could, by contagion, convert anything else it encounters into a new form of matter, transforming the entire earth in a hyperdense sphere about one hundred meters across –the size of a soccer field.