You may have noticed the news that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has broken it’s own record for particle energy – with a massive 3.5 TeV. Now that sounds impressive – that’ll be 3 500 000 000 000 electron-volts. However, you may not be aware that an electron volt is not an especially large unit of energy – about 0.000 000 000 000 000 00016 Joules. And any good physicist will tell you that a Joule is about the amount of energy needed to lift a litre of orange juice by 10 cm. That makes energy of a proton in the LHC about 0.000 052 Joules. Doesn’t sound a lot, but to a proton it’s enough to make it move pretty close to the speed of light.
Here at S & N & NC headquarters, we have our own accelerator - the Large Canine Collider (LCC). This basically consists of 2 Rottweilers and the dining room table. When their play fighting gets a bit too much for us, we release them into the collider and round and round they go.
Now a Rottweiler has a mass of about 35 kg. Running at, say, 3 m/s, that gives it kinetic energy of about 162 Joules - I make that about 3 million times more than in the LHC. Impressed? You should be. Even when the LHC is fully up to speed, it's energy will be twice what it is now, not a patch on the LCC.
This means that we should consider other differences between the LHC and the LCC.
The Location
The LHC can only be found in one place - on the Swiss/French border. However, a LCC can be constructed anywhere there are 2 large canines and a table or similar.
The Name
The LHC is so named on account of it's size - a circular tunnel 17 miles long. The hadrons themselves are not large (and the protons and anti-protons that they use are light as hadrons go) .
However, the LCC comes with much more flexible naming. The name can apply to large canines in a large room, large canines in a small room or small canines in a large room. Only if one were to use small dogs in a small room would we have to rename it the Small Canine Collider.
The Purpose
Great claims have been made for the LHC -that we will see back to the Big Bang, that we will discover the God Particle (Higgs Boson) and learn much more about Life, The Universe and Everything than we already know from the number 42.
The truth is a bit simpler. It will produce a bit more information about the behaviour of matter in similar high temperature conditions as existed shortly after the Big Bang. Future, bigger colliders will see an even earlier state of the universe, but we'll consume all the resources on our planet before we come even vaguely close to the Big Bang. Similarly, discovery of the Higgs Boson will confirm theories of physics, following a long tradition of predicting the existence of particles then saving up a very long time to do the experiments that will produce them. However, such an outcome cannot be guaranteed.
The LCC is designed to leave your canines happy and tired, which it achieves pretty much every time.
Cost
The LHC cost billions to build. If you already have 2 canines and a table, the budget for the LCC is nothing.
Good times to collide
The LHC is not use much in the winter as the electricity in Switzerland is required for more prosaic tasks, like cooking and heating. The LCC can be turned on whenever your dogs have the energy.
Bad times to collide
The LHC is so expensive that it is not really a good idea to turn it on during a global economic downturn, in a world worried about global warming or when Switzerland might be about to win the World Cup in extra time (an overload at the LHC will probably blow Switzerland's fuse).
The LCC can be used at any time, unless you have neighbours who might object to the noise at 4 in the morning.
Conclusion
It seems to me that the LCC is more energetic, flexible and reliable than the LHC. I urge the science ministers of the world to investigate it further.
