Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times
Part of a detector to study results of proton collisions by a particle accelerator that a federal lawsuit filed in Hawaii seeks to stop.
Posted on 03/30/2008 8:29:16 PM PDT by neverdem
More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.
None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.
Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.
The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.
But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.
Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I think they should be required to post a bond of 10% of the value of the universe for their case to go forward...
It's worth the risk if we can finally get flying cars! And fuel them with food waste and old beer (nothing beats having your own fusion reactor).
I can’t believe they built this thing in HAWAII! What were they thinking? Shouldn’t it be somewhere where they can get cheap land? Like, I dunno, a desert somewhere?
If they don't I will!
I think it is in Switzerland. Geneva is also so home to the Nobel prize. Maybe it would collapse one city.
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I don’t see what the author, Dennis, is worried about. After all, Algore promised a couple of years ago that the Earth could not survive beyond 2016 because the U.S. had not signed on to the Kyoto freight train.
Mr. Sancho, who describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory, lives in Spain, probably in Barcelona, Mr. Wagner said.
I rest my case.
This is actually a very interesting issue.
If you have never read about it, any black hole, no matter how small, in the earth’s gravity field will oscillate back & forth though the earth, gaining mass will each passage, eventually eating up all of it.
Generating one would mean the end of all life.
While I doubt it will happen, it is a sobering thought.
If they don't I will!
destroy earth that is.
Just because a little mistake was made in my first post has no bearing on if mistakes will be made in the future my me or those guys with the neat new toy.
I vote for the dragons!
Stockholm Sweeden is the home of the Nobel Prizes other than the Peace Prize. Oslo, Norway is home of the Nobel Prize for Peace.
CERN is not in Hawaii, it's not even in the US, but rather in France and Switzerland (That's where Geneva is located).. (It crosses under the border).
For that reason, a court in Hawaii, local, state or federal, has no jurisdiction over it.
Not if the black hole has an electric charge. Then you can suspend it with an electrostatic field, and it can't eat anything. However, small black holes *evaporate* rather quickly... like a quick chemical reaction produces a rather nasty bang and other side effects, so would a constrained black hole evaporation. But if it gets "loose" then it will "eat".
Stockholm is where the prizes originated, and are awarded (except Peace = Oslo); and Geneva (numbered accounts) is home to the much of the proceeds! <|;-')
Assuming that’s true then I think I agree with the critics. A small chance of destroying earth vs. more knowledge of theoretical physics. Hmmm. Not a very hard choice in my estimation. These types of experiments, if needed (doubtful) should be done in far space at some point in the future.
Lawsuit: Huge Atom Smasher Could Destroy World
(French/Swiss Hadron Collider)
Fox News | 3-28-08 | Paul Wagenseil
Posted on 03/28/2008 2:52:07 PM EDT by springtime4hillary
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1993231/posts
The accelerator is in Switzerland, they are in the U.S. This is all about publicity for them, but they have no standing so the suit will get tossed.
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