**Ask a monkey a physics question thread**

[eberetta1]

It took years of building a big enough particle accelerator to make a high enough energy collision to have any hope of detecting a Higgs boson. The LHC at CERN has accomplished this task. After more years of experimenting, scientists have found a particle with some of the properties that Higgs suggested the Higgs particle should have.

Could this thing accidentally create a black hole on Earth...

[MadMojoMonkey]

Could [the LHC at CERN] accidentally create a black hole on Earth...

Well... I wouldn't say, "accidentally"... more like "hopefully". It would give us the chance to observe Hawking Radiation and award a Nobel before he dies.

The thing about the LHC at CERN is that it's a controlled environment. It's not even close to the highest energy experiments that are conducted on earth. It's just that the other ones are caused by cosmic rays. For those experiments, it's hard to get the detectors in the right place at the right time since we don't know when or where to look. Cosmic rays come predominantly in low energies, but extremely high energy particles have been observed, as much as 50 times more energy than possible at the LHC. These extremely high energy particles hit the Earth ~1 per year per km^2... so you see what I mean about not knowing where or when to look.

Bear in mind that the LHC runs 400 million experiments per second when it's switched on, of which ~100,000 per second will yield "interesting" results... I.e. a particle collision that could have produced a Higgs boson.