Posted on 09/10/2008 4:59:38 AM PDT by gallaxyglue
Physics Experiment Won’t Destroy Earth Well, that’s a relief. After a long safety review, physicists have declared that the enormous atom smasher that’s expected to go online this fall won’t create tiny black holes that will “eat” our planet. So that’s one less thing to worry about.
The Large Hadron Collider, which is being built near Geneva, Switzerland, will do things with subatomic particles that humans have never done before, causing some people to worry that scientists might be unwittingly building a doomsday devise. The $8 billion machine is designed to accelerate protons, the building blocks of ordinary matter, to energies of 7 trillion electron volts and then bang them together to produce tiny primordial fireballs, miniature versions of the Big Bang. Physicists will comb the detritus from those fireballs in search of forces and particles and even new laws of nature that might have prevailed during the first trillionth of a second of time [The New York Times].
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is building the particle accelerator, and is therefore responsible for making sure it won’t wipe out the planet. While the agency’s scientists have conducted numerous safety audits, some skeptics have maintained that researchers can’t predict what will happen when they flip the switch.
In March, two men filed a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii asking that the construction be halted until CERN produced a new safety report and environmental assessment. The plaintiffs say that CERN’s researchers 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” [The New York Times]. The lawsuit is unlikely to stop the experiment, however, as experts say the federal court doesn’t have jurisdiction over an international agency based in Europe.
The new safety report examines the possibility that the particle collisions could create microscopic black holes, a hypothesis based on the weird physics of string theory. But the report states that even if black holes are created when the particles smash into each other (a phenomenon that the report says is “not expected in theory”), they will pose “no risk of any significance whatsoever.”
The report’s argument follows the basic line used in past reports: Even the most energetic collisions planned for the [Large Hadron Collider] are far less powerful than cosmic-ray collisions that have been going on for billions of years. “Nature has already generated on Earth as many collisions as about a million LHC experiments – and the planet still exists,” CERN said [MSNBC].
Nature has already generated on Earth as many collisions as about a million LHC experiments – and the planet still exists.
.. but we'll all be about 1/64th of an inch tall and still have our current weight.
Al Gore said the earth will be on fire in less than ten years so it doesn’t matter if this destroys the earth.
A white hole?
These guys aren’t in Dallas County are they? ‘Cause you can’t say ‘black hole’ in Dallas County.
Elsewhere, advanced automated alien technologies have deployed elimination squadrons to protect the galaxy from naturally occurring hadron interactions, because of their unforeseen unstabilizing effects which no intelligent being would ever desire to replicate.
Sit down Bill Clinton, they said black HOLES not ho’s.
After a long safety review, physicists have declared that the enormous atom smasher that's expected to go online this fall won't create tiny black holes that will "eat" our planet. ......... The $8 billion machine is designed to accelerate protons ...
But I think these two statements are VERY correlated! The machine is worth $8 BILLION! Of course it is going to be declared safe regardless if it is or isn't.
This will no more destroy the world any more than the original nuke experiments would have a sun burning over the desert until the entire atmosphere was consumed...
Many women would accept that, just to be able to fit into a smaller size of jeans.
“Physics Experiment Won’t Destroy Earth”
....I will be happy to arrange a reasonable fee for insuring against the liability, in case they are wrong - say, 0.5% of the value of the asset in question.
in 1969, when Robert R. Wilson was in the hot seat testifying before the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Sen. John Pastore demanded to know how a multimillion-dollar particle accelerator improved the security of the country. Wilson said the experimental physics machine had “nothing at all” to do with security, and the senator persisted.
“It has only to do,” Wilson told the lawmakers, “with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.”
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