Summer 2008: End of the World?

[A] giant particle accelerator […] will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer [that some think] 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.

[...]

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.”

  NYTimes

Or, as we know it here at YWA, Dick Cheney’s heart.

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 not to go ahead.

The lawsuit, filed March 21 in Federal District Court, in Honolulu, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environmental assessment.

That really doesn’t seem so unreasonable a request to me. After all, nobody bothered to try to determine how to dispose of nuclear waste when they went forth to create nuclear reactors, and look at the problems that’s created, which sadly, nobody ever talks about. We’ll just store those “spent” rods until science comes up with the answer. We’re pretty good at rushing in to something without a good plan to get out. And so far, that approach has proved to be problematic.

CERN is a European entity, and so probably isn’t beholden to any lawsuit in Hawaii, but also named in the suit are the federal Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and the National Science Foundation.

[A] restraining order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helps to supply and maintain the accelerator’s massive superconducting magnets, would shut down the project anyway.

[...]

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.

  

If they’re still around to sift, that is.

Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

Fire it up, boys. This I want to see.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.