19 yr old Indian solves black hole mystery

Thursday, 01 April 2010, 22:54 IST   |    35 Comments
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19 yr old Indian solves black hole mystery
Bangalore: Hailing from a small village in Kerala, 19 year old CV Midhun's observation that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment would not cause any harm went unnoticed six months back, because of the apathy of authorities at a premier educational institution, reports PK Surendran of DNA. LHC experiment, which many people speculated would end the world when it was first turned on in 2008, was working fine when it was restarted couple of days back. Midhun, a first-year BSc Physics student from Majlis Arts and Science College in Valancherry, Kerala, measured the energy generated by the cosmic rays emanating from particle collision and comparing it with that of the cosmic rays from the sun. Midhun's theory was based on the fact that the energy of the sun's cosmic rays is much more than that of cosmic rays emanated from particle collision in the LHC used to simulate the Big Bang. His observations not only won him the appreciation of CERN scientists but also an online access to the path-breaking experiment. Midhun is the son of a temple priest in Naduvattom, Kerala doesn't even have a computer but that did not stop him from sending his observations that the LHC was safe to professor M Vijayan of IISc's molecular biophysics unit. Vijayan admitted receiving Midhun's observations and forwarding it to IISc's centre for high energy physics. But after some days, when Midhun enquired about the status of his observations, he was told "We are still verifying it." B Ananathanarayanan, the Chairman of High Energy Physics Department, said he had no clue about Midhun's observation. "When nothing happened after two months, I mailed my observations directly to the scientists at European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN)," Midhun said. "I got a reply from nuclear physicist Abdul Gurdu." What the CERN scientists were impressed about - and which missed the eye of IISc scientists - is Midhun's claim, based on a theory he worked out, that there would be no black holes created when protons collide and that there would be no threat to the world as feared by many.

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