The toys Santa wouldn't bring me

For the past three months, we should have been living our lives like every moment could be our last. And now we no longer need to.

Physicists in Europe this week announced plans to turn off the Large Hadron Collider for a year, saying the machine is too dangerous to continue operating.

The LHC started gaining infamy about five years ago as a doomsday machine. Housed underground, partly under France, partly under Switzerland, the machine is a huge particle accelerator - a huge magnetic gun. It's run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN.

Remember playing with magnets when you were five or six, using one to repel the other, pushing them around the floor? The physicists at CERN are just big kids, playing with big magnets - over 1,600 magnets, each weighing almost 30 tons.

These are the toys Santa wouldn't bring me.

The magnets are arranged to make a massive particle gun - think of a magnetic train. One magnet turns on to push the train down the track to the next magnet, which pushes it a little further, a little faster, and so on. But the LHC has magnets so big, meant for objects so small, that instead of a 100 mph train, you have a 670 million mph proton-almost the speed of light. The LHC has two beams of these protons, running in opposite directions, at the speed of light, right next to one another.

And then they move closer. And closer. Finally, the beams cross and the protons slam into one another, shredding each other like two Formula One cars playing chicken. This is why it's called the Large Hadron Collider - protons are part of a group of particles called Large Hadrons.

A short digression to discuss how ludicrous light speed is. When anything moves, especially when it's at light speed, time actually slows down, and distance itself gets shorter. It's as though the universe doesn't want anything to move so fast - as though there's a cosmic referee reaching from the Twilight Zone to slow you down. If the train moves at 100 mph, the referee bends time to make it take an hour and a minute. And the referee turns the 100 miles into 99. All of a sudden the train's not going 100 miles an hour, it's going 99 miles an hour, even a little slower. If you've ever wondered about Einstein's Theory of Relativity, this is what it's all about - the cosmic referee. But there's no referee in real life, and no one knows why this slowing down occurs.

And this is partly why the scientists at CERN are busy playing with magnets and smashing protons - when they shatter at that speed, the protons reveal all their guts, all the even smaller particles that are the building blocks of protons. CERN physicists are looking for the Higgs Boson, named after British physicist Peter Ware Higgs, a particle he theorized would give mass to everything in the universe. CERN scientists have calculated what they expect the Higgs' mass and electric charge to be, and if their sensors pick up exactly that information, then they can explain why there is a planet under our feet, why cats have fur, why water is wet and why people are more than wisps of undifferentiated nothingness. We will know why matter is matter.

But to prove this, CERN forgot the Ghostbusters' No. 1 rule: never cross the beams. The reason LHC has been called a doomsday machine is that it creates black holes, gravity-on-steroids objects that can suck up Earth and crush it into a grain of sand and smaller - some infinitesimally small pixel of space.

Gravitation is based on two things: the mass of the two objects involved and the distance between them. Consider how gravity holds you to Earth - you're fairly light in the celestial scheme of things, but Earth is huge, and you're standing right on top of it - mass is big, distance is small, gravity is strong.

On the other hand, the moon, 250 million miles away from Earth, feels much weaker gravity. The moon is big, the Earth is big, but the distance that separates them is really big. It circles the Earth, but the moon never gets completely pulled in.

Now consider two protons in the LHC. They're tiny, the minute of the minute. The smaller the mass of something is, the weaker the gravity. But the smaller the distance, the stronger the gravity. And when they smash into each other, there is effectively no distance between them - zero distance. They occupy the same space. And that means infinitely strong gravitational pull.

And that's how the LHC makes black holes. Every pair of protons smashed together is a black hole. Fortunately, they stay in that state for almost no time at all, exploding into their tiny fragments like bugs on a windshield. Before the black hole sucks up anything around it, it's gone, exploded into quarks and neutrinos and Higgs Bosons.

But what if some mistake happened, some horrible miscalculation, so that the protons stuck together a split second too long? What if they grabbed some more protons around them, and started sucking up the mass, packing it together, getting stronger and stronger gravity, eventually grabbing the whole Earth and crushing us all into an invisible grain of sand orbiting the sun? That's what the doomsayers say about the LHC.

Most physicists assure this event is unlikely. For now, it's a moot point: the LHC is going offline because CERN is worried about the safety of its physicists. Mechanical joints between the magnets need to be strengthened before the accelerator smashes protons at light speed.

Last year, a magnet vaporized from the electricity running through it, blasting the immediate area with heat and sparks. No one was hurt, but the machine was shut down for 14 months for repairs. The collider has been running warm-up experiments for the last three months, and CERN officials are worried such an explosion may happen again. So, in a clear case of mistaken priorities, they won't risk another magnet blast, but are dedicated to the risky business of crushing us all into puny bits.