Posted on 03/29/2008 10:57:09 PM PDT by atomic conspiracy
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The defendants will first have to convince their own lawyers to fight this, rather than recommend a precautionary shut-down. Since lawyers are to physics as cavemen are to spaceflight, that will take some doing. I've got it! Just remind them that there will be no liability suit if the plaintiffs are right. They will sign off right away.
That's one environmental impact statement which would make an interesting read!
On the good side, the time constant for Earth’s destruction
by the microblack hole will be a thousand years.
On the gripping hand, this might be the reason why there
are no apparent Type 2 civilizations.
Does this mean that I may die some day?
This is the way the world ends. This is the way it always has ended, and this is the way it always will end.
The Mayas knew this would happen: 2012! LOL
Well, I was quoting Vonnegut! Or trying to ... Sirens of Titan, I believe.
Wait! No! Slaughterhouse Five, right?
Who knows! Who cares! Tune in next week! Same Fire time, same Fire station ... for Mark Time!
The story is missing some key facts, such as why should the Swiss care what a judge in Hawaii says. Remember, the Swiss can tell you what to do with yourself in 4 official languages.
Goober ping!
Everything You Know is Wrong!!!
So I says, “Supercollider? I just met her!” And then they built the Supercollider. Thank you. You’ve been a great audience.
Well! Seekers! This looks like the end!
Or, is it just the be..........
No. It's the end."
Gregory Benford wrote a fine SF novel on this subject, called “Cosm.”
Well if they are right we’ll never know.
Art Bell and Larry King will host and bore the thing to death.
The cosmic ray background extends to nine orders of magnitude more energetic than the worst the LHC will dish out, and is only six orders of magnitude away from the Planck energy.
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