Maya Chichen Itza temple pyramid

The kind of progress and scientific discoveries made by the Maya civilization is quite impressive for their time, especially considering their isolation from neighbouring civilizations.

As with many other prehistoric civilizations, the Mayans’ concept of time was cyclical. They built a series of calendars based on naturally occurring cycles observed in the sky, such as a 365-day cycle that approximated the solar year, one to record the lunation periods of the Moon, and even one to track the synodic period — the time a planet takes to assume twice the same position with respect to both the Earth and the Sun — of Venus, which the Mayans managed to measure with surprising accuracy.

All of these calendars can then be synchronized and interlinked with one another, generating further and more extensive cycles. One of such composite calendar, the so-called Mesoamerican long count calendar, forms the basis for the belief that a cataclysm will take place on December 21, 2012, a forecast that mainstream Mayanists consider a misinterpretation.

Maya stucco glyphs in Palenque, Mexico.

According to the Popol Vuh, an important mythological book in the Mayan culture, we are living in the ‘fourth world’. The Popol Vuh describes the first three creations that the gods failed in making and the creation of the successful fourth world where men were placed on Earth. All previous three creations ended on a speficic date in the long count calendar, which will occur again on December 20, 2012, followed by the start of a ‘new era’ on the following day.

By following other clues within the Mayan culture, three experts have come to the conclusion that some worldwide cataclysm — e.g. a pole shift — was predicted by the Maya on the date the new era begins, a view that most experts in Mayan culture don’t agree with.

Sandra Noble, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc., said to this matter:

For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle [...] To render December 21, 2012, as a doomsday or moment of cosmic shifting is a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.

The hype has also been alimented by reports by NASA that sometime between 2010 and 2012 we will very likely experience violent solar storms:

This week researchers announced that a storm is coming–the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one,” she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.

Some believe that, if the storms reveal to be strong enough, they could under the right circumstances black out the electrical grids of a few cities and fry satellites, even though there is no direct danger for humans as the Earth’s magnetic shield will protect us from the worst effects of such storms. Nothing apocalyptic, then.

The structure is a total 27 km in diameter and will enable us to accelerate two fluxes ions and other particles up to 99.99% of the speed of light in the opposite direction and make them collide, then studying the particles that are being created in the process.

Welding the LHC

Through this mechanism, scientists and engineers are able to recreate in a strictly controlled environment the particles and overall conditions that, as far as we know, only existed for a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang and then disappeared forever.

In particular, what physicists hope to unveil is whether the Higgs bosons theorized by the Standard Model — the particle physics theory describing three of the four fundamental forces along with the particle that take part in their interaction — actually exist, or if the entire model has to be adapted to better describe our Universe.

The Higgs bosons, nicknamed the “God particles”, are the only particles theorized in the standard model which haven’t been observed yet: should we succeed in finding them, we would be able to explain how otherwise massless particles can cause matter to have mass by explaining the difference between photons (which are massless) and W/Z bosons (which do have mass).

An answer to this question would, in turn, help us answer other fundamental points with regard to the birth of the Universe itself, including what is the nature of dark matter and dark energy and whether the extra dimensions theorized by the string theory actually exist. As science-fictiony as this sounds, that is nothing but what CERN scientists are going to investigate in the next decades.

There is a possibility (below 1%, according to Stephen Hawking) that high-speed collisions taking place at the LHC could bring to the formation of unstable micro black-holes. While Hawking himself hopes that this will help verify his theories on what has been dubbed the “Hawking radiation”, some have advanced the hypothesis that such black holes could actually be stable and therefore grow in time, eventually leading to the destruction of the Earth as we know it.

The LHC seen from above

Such doomsday scenarios have been scrutinized by a third-party scientist commission in many occasions, eventually leading them to the conclusion that there is no danger in LHC’s experiments, since high-speed reactions like those that are subject to experiment are happening all the time in our Universe without any serious consequences. In particular, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that the micro black holes would be stable and keep growing in time.

Still, the reports weren’t enough to keep crowds of protesters from asking to stop the experiments at LHC, believing the Earth-devouring black hole theory to be true and emphasizing that we don’t know enough about these reactions in the first place to say with certainty that these experiments are completely safe.

Again, I don’t know much at all about quantum mechanics and I’m definitely not in the position to take one side or another on this matter: all I want to say here is that, once again, the media emphasized the part of the story that sold the most… and when you do this kind of misinformation, not telling the whole story to the public, are you really surprised to see protesters asking top scientists to halt a multi-billion dollar experiments to “prevent the doomsday from happening”?