Posted on 03/30/2008 8:29:16 PM PDT by neverdem
More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country cant afford their mortgages and in some places now they cant 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 worlds 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 ...
Yeah, it is sobering. Sort of a Pac-Man.
Sure, capturing the black hole if it has a charge, is possible, however, I don't think any provisions are being made for capture. And, we don't really know if a black hole produced will have a charge, or at least a charge large enough to capture it.
Once it gets loose, it will grow too massive to be captured, plus I don't even think we would be able to find it. It will be moving around underground -- good luck with an after-the-fact capture.
The problem with "evaporation" is that no one has ever seen it happen. Sure, it is theoretically predicted, but I bet that over 99% of all theories have been proven wrong by experiment.
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