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Large Hadron Collider Sparks 'Doomsday' Lawsuit
smooth wombat writes "In what can only be considered a bizarre court case, a former nuclear safety officer and others are suing the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation and CERN to stop the use of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) until its safety is reassessed. The plaintiffs cite three possible 'doomsday' scenarios which might occur if the LHC becomes operational: the creation of microscopic black holes which would grow and swallow matter, the creation of strangelets which, if they touch other matter, would convert that matter into strangelets or the creation of magnetic monopoles which could start a chain reaction and convert atoms to other forms of matter. CERN will hold a public open house meeting on April 6 with word having been spread to some researchers to be prepared to answer questions on microscopic black holes and strangelets if asked."
Are they serious? They make it sound like a Pandora's Box that could destroy the whole planet, or solar system.
The rest of it just sounds so bizarre it's unreal. The fact that it is people on the inside saying it is somewhat concerning. I don't even know what to think, but those "headlines" are truly spectacular.
Captain Zapp Brannigan: We'll just set a new course for that empty region over there, near that blackish, holeish thing.
xkcd
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
portal storms incoming?
I smell FUD. It says in the article that most scientists dismiss the whole doomsday machine theory.
I make websites and stuff. Buy one.
So what if it creates microscopic black holes? They'd dissipate in a fraction of a second. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/solarsystem/2006_mag_recon.html
I havent seen any massive blackholes emerge and gobble up the sun or solar system. How the hell would the puny LHC be able to do it?
The jerks suing are just trying to make a name for themselves.
Hold on, haven't we been bombarded by even higher energy particles from space for billions of years now without us, or for that matter the world (as in the rest of all visible matter) turning into a black hole?
What happens if an escaping convict accidentally wanders into the collider, gains super powers, and tries to take over the world?
The microscopic black hole thing is passably plausible, although any such tiny black holes are far more likely to evaporate almost instantly than launch into a positive feedback state.
The magnetic monopole creation is almost surely complete bunk, as (so far as I know) no one has ever detected signs of such a thing (nor is anyone certain that such a beast can exist). On the other hand, Dirac showed that the existence of even a single magnetic monopole, somewhere in the universe might explain charge quantization. The converse, however, may not hold.
Well -they were afraid when they detonated the first above ground nuke as well -thought they might torch the atmosphere, but they did it anyway -better dead than.......?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat's_Cradle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-nine
I'm just sayin'
there's never any attempt at understanding the physics of any of this, it's just a nice way to scare people who don't know any better. never mind the fact that cosmic rays hit the atmosphere all the time with at least the amount of energy the LHC is going for- you'd think that over billions of years if there was ever a time for strangelets and blackholes to kill us all it would have happened by now.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I think we can all agree that even if it does end the world it would be an even greater crime to build a machine that big and then not turn it on. I would rather be converted into strangelets than living in THAT world.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16322014.700-a-black-hole-ate-my-planet.html
"Within 24 hours, the laboratory issued a rebuttal: the risk of such a catastrophe was essentially zero"
Just to preface this; I'm a 3ed year undergrad student in physics on track to get a PhD in high energy physics. That being said, I spoke with my professor about this, he explained to me that the formation of world swallowing black holes is so small is negligible. He explained to me (if I remember correctly) that high energy cosmic rays have been bombarding the Earth for billions of years, at much higher energies than the LHC could ever produce. If these world-ending things were to form they would have already, long before humans were around and we wouldn't be here to study these fascinating phenomenon.
Will they be distributing them at the open house meeting? Perhaps that will calm those worried about the doomsday scenarios.
Could this explain why we haven't found the universe teeming with extra terrestrial life? Every civilization becomes more and more advanced, then starts doing more and more powerful experiments, and thinks, "the chance of destroying our planet is really slight... we're perfectly safe going ahead with this." Then, poof!
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
As you sow so shall you reap.
After reading the tenth or twentieth scientific article that interviewed people working on the LHC, that includes some wild speculation about remote possibilities that might come to pass when it comes online... this surprises me not at all. I understand being a bit sensationalist to make a more entertaining article. I understand hyping the potential a bit to help keep that government funding coming in. Still, black holes, strangelets, cascading subatomic events, time travelers finding the earliest point to return to... it was a bit much. Maybe you get promoted in experimental physics by making waves and smoking pot with the boss. The you want your name in a magazine so you spin some half-assed idea as though it was a real possibility. The only problem is, some people listened and are now worried.
This is why the Manhattan project was top-secret: two out of six physicists think it might destroy the planet... okay those are good odds, let's try it.
Well then it's a good thing I didn't get my information FROM Wikipedia, but instead just linked to it since it's a convenient resource and the information contained on that article agrees with my previous knowledge of Hawking Radiation.
Last time a bunch of lawyers and politicians tried to legislate the value of pi, they got 3.2.
WOuldn't it suck to discover that, in the end, Hawking is just some lame robot sent from the futur to enlighten us?
Futur Scientist 1: "We should send back a robot!"
Futur Scientist 2: "Hrm. it'll take years to develop a convincing one!"
Futur Scientist 3: "Let's get to it!!"
Futur Janitor: "Hey... why dont you make him look like a crip? You could then use that IBM 5100 chip on the floor as a voice box."
Futur Scientists: "Smart ass".
I remember hearing the same kind of dooms day predictions about RHIC at Brookhaven national labs. Also it was said that some scientists predicted the first atomic bomb would ignite the atmosphere destroying the planet. At any rate none of those doomsday predictions occurred and RHIC has been operating since 2000.
That's natural and this is man made.
Deleted
How could a tiny black hole engender a positive feedback loop? I'm not even speaking of Hawking's radiation here; but how would a few g big blackhole do anything? Its mass being tiny, it's not going to have much gravity at all, so it's not going to attract anything to grow. At most will behave like a heavy particle. Big black holes suck up stuff because their gravity overcomes all other forces, but here that can't be the case.
Clearly, they have mistaken the catchy name for the definition.
While this is the first I've heard of lawsuits, the subject of a possible catastrophe due to a new particle accelerator is not a new idea. This has actually been a cycle that's happened a couple of times, IIRC, usually when someone mentions the possibility of black holes (or even AdS-CFT black hole analogues) being created in a new particle accelerator. Scientists have actually thought about this and published a number of papers on the topic. Here are two that came up easily via Google Scholar:
The latter is freely available on the arXiv. From the conclusion:
In short, similar events occur naturally due to highly energetic cosmic rays, so, even if we assume we know almost nothing about the physics of the hypothetical catastrophic event, we can infer from teh fact we're still here that such a catastrophe is very unlikely. Based on this conclusion, and the fairly wide acceptance of that conclusion amongst experts, I think it's safe to say this lawsuit is without merit.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
It's been done http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrice_Upon_a_Time before...
oh, man, I hate to be the one to tell you, but we're all going to die without seeing DNF regardless.... sorry
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
So, was he sent back to warn us about our impending loss of the letter 'e'?
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
gorg will be rubbing two sticks together next wednesday. He hopes to create a sustainable heat source.
Mrog, who new gorg as a child, is trying to stop it claiming this 'fire' may ravage the cave.
Next up, a balanced report on why the wheel should be avoid at all cost due to it's risk.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
THIS is what happens when you turn it on!
P.S. Xkcd may be super-awesome, but this post is in no way meant to endorse the irradiating of little birds or helicopters...
Frankly, when I hear such statements, I feel like I'm being told in a condascending way to "don't worry about it, we know what we're doing!" I don't know what "essentially zero" really means... What could happen in that 0.00000000000000000001% of "cases"? I'm guessing these 2 guys do know something of real concern...
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
This is old news, came up during the design phase of the LHC. I heard a simple common sense based answer:
If high energy particle accelerators could create particles that could destroy the Earth, then you would see this effect all over the universe. Why, you ask? Because there are natural accelerators everywhere, many of energy much higher than anything we could hope to build on the Earth's surface
Maybe the rarity of intelligent life in the universe does not owe to infrequent arisal. What if the structure of the universe contains a built-in pitfall: the scientific understanding required to build large colliders is far less than that required to anticipate the lethal consequences their operation. Thus, progression of scientific understanding among all technically advanced species leads to self-extermination.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Without 'e' you cannot have enlightenment.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This theory provides a compelling explanation for why, despite the inevitability provided by immense timescales, we have yet to observe alien visitors; the physics of our universe tends to eliminate those species that investigate the sort of physics that lead to interstellar spacecraft. Thus, the only long-lived species one may expect to discover in the universe are those that do not employ high energy physics which, naturally, precludes all efforts at detection.
It is also possible that I've been working on makefiles for too many hours and no longer merit your attention. You are to be forgiven; you didn't know that when you started reading.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
If a strangelet chain reaction were possible, then it wouldn't stop at earth, right? So why haven't we detected any strangelet stars? Heck if one of them went nova, we should be seeing strangelet galaxies, no?
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
The studies I talked about in the parent make almost no assumption about what the catastrophe might be or how it would work. If you want to get into the physics of the specific things people are worried about, then there are even more reasons to think it's not a significant danger. There was a report about the possible disaster scenarios for RHIC that should mostly apply to the LHC, and here's a paper discussing the possibilities for the LHC. Finally, it looks like Wikipedia has a pretty decent discussion with references.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Not this collection of morons again. They wandered about the high energy physics landscape nattering on about 'black hole signatures' after the Brookhaven collider made what *appears* to be quark gluon plasma. As I understand it, there is a fellow who is just bad at math and wants to keep his grant money coming.
Fortunately, court documents have probably not spelled the word properly. You see, for the US Government, "Nukular" is the legal spelling of the word. And the documents will be tossed out.
I may be wrong here but wasn't Homer a Safety Officer for a nuclear power plant ? What is he doing working at CERN ?
That's what my old roommate used to say.
Fucking ravers.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Last I heard, there was still great debate among top scientists as to the nature of existing black holes. You must not have heard too recently, then. Very few physicists (here I'm taking physicists as proxies for your "scientists") doubt General Relativity (its competing theories give much the same predictions) to any degree, and one of GR's beautiful predictions is that of the existence of black holes. We've witnessed gravitational lensing, time dilation effects, and many of the other predictions of GR; galactic jets and galactic dynamics point rather conclusively to the existence of black holes. Call me a bit skeptical, but I think I'll wait to see what happens instead of predicting. Good! You're following the precise credo of science, which is that experimental results trump all hypothesizing. However, don't carry empirical skepticism to the extreme of philosophical skepticism. Otherwise, you'll stop breathing for an hour to see whether, just because it's seemed necessary thus far, it might not be from now on. Besides, if the LHC doesn't produce black holes, or we can't detect them, or whatever, will in no way invalidate the possibility of their existence.
Try searching Google Scholar for "large hardon collider." You might be surprised.
these are all mythical objects
1) Microscopic black holes require a matter density higher than elementary particles possess. Ergo, once the microscopic black hole tries to swallow an elementary particle, the elementary particle swallows it, making it no longer a black hole, but just part of the particle's matter, with a true radius larger than its schwarzchild radius. Black Hole Down.
2) Strangelets? Don't exist. Don't even have a decent theoretical underpinning. You might as well be worried about the production of caloric or magic.
3) Magnetic monopoles also don't exist. Magnetism is a description of the curvature of electric flux. Imagining a magnetic monopole is like imagining a left with no right, or an up with no down.
And, honestly, these people have no sense of adventure. The universe will end some day. Why be so arrogant as to insist that it be after you die, solo, from something less interesting?
I found this on Wikipedia (so it must be true). "What came later to be known as "The Black Mesa Incident" was triggered by a seemingly innocuous and routine experiment into teleportation. As part of the Anomalous Materials team in Sector C of the facility, research associate Gordon Freeman introduced a crystalline specimen..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mesa_Research_Facility
snip: In 1933, Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd had proposed that if any neutron-driven process released more neutrons than those required to start it, an expanding nuclear chain reaction might result. Chain reactions were familiar as a phenomenon from chemistry (where they typically caused explosions and other run-away reactions), but Szilárd was proposing them for a nuclear reaction, for the first time. However, Szilárd had proposed to look for such reactions in the lighter atoms, and nothing of the sort was found. Upon experimentation shortly after the uranium fission discovery, Szilárd found that the fission of uranium released two or more neutrons on average, and immediately realized that a nuclear chain reaction by this mechanism was possible in theory. Szilárd kept this secret at first because he feared its use as a weapon by fascist governments. He convinced others to do so, but identical results were soon published by the Joliot-Curie group, to his great dismay.
If there was any likelyhood of civilisations wiping themselves from existance with the creation of microscopic black holes, then you would expect the universe to be full of black holes where each subsequent civilisation had extinguished itself.
Now take a look into the night sky... How many black holes do you see?
None!
So obviously, this is completely safe...
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
I am going to wait for the porn version of this experiment.
The DVD will be called:
Large Hardon Experiment Goes Interracial!
Creates black holes and fills them with loads of quarks!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
We have no idea whether the laws of physics will remain constant from one second to the next, let alone what the outcome of a given experiment will be. However, the popular consensus is that things will carry on much as they were. For things we don't understand, we look to experts. Most of those experts work at CERN, and unlike the Manhattan project, it isn't classified - wouldn't you expect one of those thousands of people to make some sort of noise if they thought there was a risk of something going wrong?
xterm -n 8
One of the premises of Intelligent Design, as described in "The Privileged Planet", is that God/whatever not only planned for intelligent beings, but planned for them to explore their universe. The book talks about our ideal placement in the milky way for observation, yet with sufficient protection from gamma bursts, the fortuitous placement of the moon allowing solar eclipses to reveal the corona, etc. A Bible passage would be Proverbs, "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, and the glory of kings to search out a matter." Part of trusting God in this viewpoint is assuming that, barring deliberate or negligent self destruction, the next discovery won't destroy us. Although each advance in physics brings more and more dangerous knowledge to light, we will be able cope technically. (Moral failings are another matter.)
This is quite misrepresenting the situation: they have very, very good ideas of what will happen, but they've been unable to test some of the crucial border cases for lack of a giant supercollider. It's not as if they're just building a machine with no idea of what will happen. (If they didn't have any idea of what would happen, they wouldn't have enough information to properly build the machine or detectors.)
Not being believed is hardly a qualification for being right.
Uh... if this was possible, our planet would never have existed. Cosmic rays whack our atmosphere all the time with far more energy than the LHC could hope to generate. Even if this causes a momentary microscopic black hole, it obviously doesn't matter, since we're still here.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
How many scientists actually believe in Hawking Radiation? Has it been ever observed? Has this hypothesis been verified experimentally in any way?
Is Hawking Radiation anything beyond a neat mathematical conjecture based on a demonstrably flawed theory of quantum mechanics? Not like Hawking hasn't admitted to being wrong before, you know...
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Such a dissaster would go a long way in explaining the Fermi Paradox. We don't run into aliens because they all destroy themselves soon after they form.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
I just finished reading Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman, great book, excellent sf. The central plot hinges on a similar idea:
SPOILER AHEAD
There's a giant accelerator being built around Jupiter, that will simulate the first .01 second of the universe... only the central characters figure out that it won't be just a simulation, but a new one, expanding and overwriting this part of this one.
There are end-of-world religious nuts who find that out and strive to make sure it happens. Much mayhem and a touch of soldier cyberpunk. Fun stuff and excellent speculation, especially the other part about what it's liked to be jacked in with other people.
Damn those pesky terrorists
"""
Walter Wagner graduated UC Berkeley with a Minor in Physics, and a Major in Biology. Later, he discovered a novel particle in a balloon-borne cosmic ray detector, initially identified as a magnetic monopole. Though its identity remains uncertain, it is definitely not within the standard repertoire of known particles. After a three-year break from science to attend law school, Dr. Wagner resumed work in Physics and Biology at the US Veterans Administration Medical Center in San Francisco, working in Nuclear Medicine and Health Physics. He then embarked on teaching Science and Mathematics, from grade school to college. Dr. Wagner developed a botanical garden in Hawaii, and continues involvement with several professional associations, including Health Physics Society and Society of Nuclear Medicine.
"""
So, this is a guy who discovered a magnetic monopole (which would theoretically tear the universe apart, right?) and works at a VA med center? He only has a minor in physics? The "nuclear safety blah blah" in this case means nuclear medicine, as in the guy who makes sure no one mishandles the radioactive dye they use at every hospital in the US.
Some expert. Now give us yours: What qualifies you to judge this mans' credentials?
You can't take the sky from me...
"Vice Admiral William P. Blandy addressed nervous people about the effects a nuclear bomb would have with the following quote:
The bomb will not start a chain reaction in the water, converting it all to gas and letting all the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom. It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity. I am not an atomic playboy!"
http://atomicplayboy.net/colophon/ is where I was able to find the quote, btw
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
I notice from TFA the lawsuit has been filed in Hawaii, as CERN is in Europe surely even a succesful lawsuit could simply be ignored?
I was under the impression that whilst the US has helped develop the LHC it doesn't actually own it and as such has no control over deciding whether it's allowed to start and stop. Is there something vital the US still brings to the project that could be used to prevent the project starting should the lawsuit be a success?
I was going to make a comment about how it seems typically American to try and create a lawsuit to shut down something they have no right to try and shutdown (see things like the recent Wikileaks domain fiasco) but in all honesty I'm not sure abuse of the court system is really much less in many European countries now, the only difference being the European countries at least tend to make the sensible judgement on the case even if the case itself is idiotic. With again for example the Wikileaks case the judgement was just simply stupid and the fact the judge had to backtrack so quickly only emphasised the level of idiocy that can occur in some courts. At least cases like this were thrown out in British courts for example:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7243656.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7292657.stm
Hopefully (un)common sense will similarly prevail and save the day.
Hey, this is Slashdot. It's called "The X Window System", or "X11", or "X11R7.1" if you're up to date, and enlightenment is merely a fancy window manager that looks so fucking awesome... oh, wow, it really does look awesome. Goddamn, I fucking love everything when it boots up.
Said professor Pthogh, waving his tentacle at the viewtank, "is your only warning that within its orbit lies a planetary mass black hole. These are the greatest finds you can hope for in your quest for relics of alien intelligence. Eventually this invisible beast will de-orbit and devour its parent star, becoming indistinguishable from the billions of other sun-massed black holes in the universe. Until then it serves as a marker that an intelligent race grew up here, lived, learned, and died.
Within or near the stellar system that is home to one of these, relics of a civilization are always found. They litter the surface of airless moons; they orbit the star independently; probes are often found heading out of the system. We have found several thousand so far.
Those of you in Sacred Studies program will learn further of the terrible experiments that cause this phenomena. Speculation by the population in general on the subject is, er, discouraged."
"This one though is special though." Professor Pthogh looked again at the tank, his voice taking a more somber tone. "This one is ours."
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere routinely have higher energy than anything the LHC can achieve. So if high-energy particle collisions are going to produce strangelets and black holes, we've already been doomed for around four billion years.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
God created all life, ET's included, 6,000 years ago. The light just hasn't had enough time to reach us from the nearest neighbor. Give it another few hundred years.
(for the humor impaired, I am joking)
I dunno, maybe in another universe there is another me who didn't read the title as "the large hardon collider".
Everything is possible. The impossible just takes longer.
I'm disabling ads until because I choose not to reward redesigns that are less usable than "view source".
What about the suns cosmic rays impacting the atmosphere are happening in a much less matter dense environment than that of the surface of the earth? Could it be that a micro black hole is much less likely to evaporate in the presence more more matter?
I don't believe you, I'm here for a seat on the secret spaceship.
I don't undMC^2rstand what you'rMC^2 trying to say...
But those ISS dudes are going to be pissed that, whilst they were once astronauts, the closest they can get to being CERN scientists is being Nuclear Safety Officers ... damn!