my sister loves talking about this thing. i think it's pretty much bogus, but this guy filed a lawsuit against it:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,342854,00.html

Lawsuit: Huge Atom Smasher Could Destroy World

Stop the scientists before they destroy us all!

That's what a Hawaii man with a background in nuclear physics is asking a court to do.

Walter F. Wagner and his colleague Luis Sancho have filed a federal lawsuit seeking to stop work on the Large Hadron Collider, a gigantic atom smasher on the Franco-Swiss border that's set to start operations in May.

Physicists hope its incredible energies will form briefly-lived new particles that could shed light on the origins of the universe, among other marvels.

The plaintiffs' concerns? That the LHC could accidentally create strange new particles that would instantly transform any matter they touched, engulfing the Earth, or, even worse, make a rapidly expanding black hole that could consume the entire planet.

"[T]he compression of the two atoms colliding together at nearly light speed will cause an irreversible implosion, forming a miniature version of a giant black hole," reads the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Honolulu.

"[A]ny matter coming into contact with it would fall into it and never be able to escape. Eventually, all of earth would fall into such growing micro-black-hole, converting earth into a medium-sized black hole, around which would continue to orbit the moon, satellites, the ISS, etc."

Named as defendants are the U.S. Department of Energy, the venerable DOE-owned Fermilab particle-accelerator facility outside Chicago, the "Center for Nuclear Energy Research (CERN)" and the National Science Foundation.

(CERN's full name is actually the European Organization for Nuclear Research; "CERN" is the French acronym for an earlier name.)

The lawsuit wants the LHC's opening to be delayed for several months so that outside experts can read the facility's internal safety review, which was to have been completed by Jan. 1 of this year but does not appear to have been released.

Wagner has even put up a Web site at http://www.lhcdefense.org/ detailing his concerns.

Not included among the documents is Wagner's own indictment last month on identity-theft charges tied to an ongoing legal battle over a botanical garden on the Big Island of Hawaii, but you can read about that here.

Most physicists say Wagner's worries are unfounded. Micro black holes would evaporate nearly instantly instead of combining to form larger ones, they say, and the "strangelet" particles he frets would freeze the world would in fact fall apart quickly.

Wagner's own background is a bit fuzzy. He claims to have minored in physics at U.C. Berkeley, gone to law school, taught elementary-school science and worked in nuclear medicine at health facilities — but he doesn't appear to have an advanced degree in science.

Sancho's qualifications are even murkier, but the lawsuit identifies him as a Spanish citizen residing in the U.S., even if his presence makes the entire case a bit, um, quixotic.

Fears that atom smashers will destroy the world have been around for decades and seem to come to the fore every time a new well-publicized facility comes online.

But no particle accelerator has ever come close to the power of the Large Hadron Collider.

Bullshit from attention whores.

People once said that a hydrogen bomb would set the atmosphere on fire.

How cool would that be as a way to snuff it as a species? Way better than any drawn out destruction of our environment that leads us to Easter Island-like chaos.

"Did you hear about earth?"
"No. What?"
"Blew themselves the fuck up!"
"Woah. Kick ass."

Before I even read this, I've gotta say....

HAHAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHA!

On the other hand, what if that actually happened? That would be a true OLO moment.

Would have time for an "OLO"?

I think the guy's got a point. Sure it seems stupid to us now that people thought the hydrogen bomb would set the atmosphere on fire, but what if something catastrophic like that had happened? Scientists tried to sweep the radiation reports coming from Japan under the rug for years as well. The point is that horrible, unknown consequences are very possible, especially in dealing with new science that we may not have a full grasp of. I'm not saying they should be shut down, but if this lawsuit leads to more safety procautions for the project, I can't see that being a bad thing.

Thats fine and good, but those pushing for certain precautions should have an idea of what they're talking about. A minor doesn't account for much, as I'm fairly confident I could get a minor in German and not be any where near close to speaking it fluently.

Anyway, there are a couple problems with what the article says. I didn't read his website and it may expand on this, but anyway:

First of all, atom smashers don't actually smash "atoms" together. Hadrons are quarks, which make up protons, neutrons, and electrons. That is what they smash together, not atoms, which would more than likely fly right by each other without actually hitting. Furthermore, the energy required to accelerate entire atoms to that speed is far beyond current technology.

Secondly, to address simple_schoolboys question, yes we would have time for an OLO moment. If a black hole formed out of two "atoms", it would have the gravitational attraction of those two atoms. Not a whole lot, as you can imagine. The event horizon of this black hole would likely be so small as to almost never touch anything, except for random massless particles like neutrinos or photons. I mean, I have no idea the actual rate a black hole that small would grow if it were on Earth, I doubt anyone could calculate that accurately, but I imagine it would take millions of years for it to consume the planet.

The last thing that doesn't really make sense is he seems to be proposing two different things. A black hole forming is one thing, but a super-particle is another. I'm assuming he is talking about the tachyon, which theoretically and mathematically speaking would seriously fuck up the physical world if it were to exist, since a tachyon has negative mass and allows for probabilities greater than 1 and less than 0. Tachyon's have nothing to do with black holes forming, as far as I know. I have no idea how anyone expects a tachyon would form from this experiment, though the experts who address it obviously think it is nonsense.

Safety precautions have really nothing to do with this at all.

Any kind of safety issue that could result from a particle accelerator like this would be concerned with things like radiation leaks or any kind of accident that is possible with extremely high capacity electrical systems. The energy required to run the thing could probably take out the entire place if something crazy were to happen, but that is about it. They aren't dealing with fusion, fission, or any other sort of sustained nuclear reaction.

None of that shit has anything to do with the lawsuit. What this guy is talking about, if it happened, would happen completely independent of any safety precautions anyway. In fact, if the dude is right, more safety precautions are more likely to end the world, because in order for that to happen the lab would have to operate properly - or no atom smashy at all.

Interesting. I obviously don't really know what I'm talking about here, I just worry that scientists are sometimes so eager to find out something that they don't think about the consequences. Hence, the atom bomb. But I realize this is nowhere near that.

Not necessarily true. I read a piece by some quantum physicist (maybe I'll have to try and find it) where he actually outlined all the risks associated with the hadron collider. The risk of black holes isn't dangerous if we're just talking about one MBH (mini black hole), but the concern is the rate at which the collider generates them. He outlined the possible rate at which they would be generated, how many of them would escape into space, and how many it would take to cause a problem (the ones that don't escape will be drawn to the center of the earth, accumulate, and diminish the forces counteracting the earth's inward pressure). Worst case, it could collapse the earth within ten years.

Other dangers are stranglets and monopoles, if I remember correctly.

Basically, it needs more study. Of course the likelihood of catastrophy is minimal, but it's just poor risk management to do something with possibly annihilistic consequences with little understanding of the probability of those consequences (or any tangible benefit from the experiment for that matter).

That makes a lot more sense. I knew there had to be something more than that silly article.
*

"They're waiting for you in the test chamber, Gordon."



"Stupid Type 13 planet."




The first reference is easy. The second one is not.

So many posts and nobody's called it the "hardon collider" yet. Fail.

Professor Frank Close, Professor of Physics at Oxford University, on the possibility of dangerous stranglets:

"The chance of this happening is like you winning the major prize on the lottery 3 weeks in succession; the problem is that people believe it is possible to win the lottery 3 weeks in succession."

by the way, in no way do i understand black holes or stranglets or how they would devour earth.

I don't understand strangelets either, but the black holes are simpler.

Basically, a normal object has gravitational pull inwards, as well as external forces outwards to counteract them, so on the surface, there is no net force, and there is equilibrium. A black hole is different, as there is gravitational pull, but no outward force to counteract it. If a mini black hole is created and it doesn't have enough velocity to escape the earth's atmosphere, it will then be pulled to the center of the earth due to the earth's gravitational force. This will increased that force toward the center of the earth, without increasing the forces counteracting it. Get enough of these, and the earth collapses in on itself.

Think of a structure. There is gravitational pull sucking it towards the ground, but it has structural forces counteracting it, so it doesn't fall down. If you remove those forces, kaboom.

wow, that was a very good description. thank you.

The strangelet theory is pretty simple in its implications as well.

A strangelet is just a cousin of protons and neutrons that happens to have a special, super-massive quark its cousins don't. Normal particles require a huge amount of energy to turn into a strangelet, such that it doesn't happen on earth. The supporters of this theory believe that a strangelet formed by these ultra-high-energy colliders would have a negative charge. Negatively charged strangelet from super-collider flies right into a positively charged nucleus, turning that nucleus strange, and now you have a bigger, more stable strangelet. Big strangelet has babies and turns into master death star strangelet, which turns the earth into a gigantic strange nucleus.

If the strangelet theory were true, then it would indeed consume the entire earth, but evidence has shown it to be very unlikely.