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."
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday March 27 2008, @07:40PM (#22888704)
re: MBHs
Well gentlemen, I suggest you all stick you head between your legs and kiss you ass goodbye. I'm going to the Andromeda galaxy. Yes, I invented a way to get there. I did it twenty years ago after a vodka binge, actually. Peace, bitches.
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.
Obviously one of the scientists will have wandered into the collider as well. Although his or her superpowers will not be as powerful/deadly/cool as the convict's, their determination, faith in humankind, and good heart will allow them to narrowly win in the end, no matter how badly the odds look to be stacked against them.
They will still have a hard time getting laid, though.
I work for a major Hollywood studio and would like to make a movie based on your plot. It is both refreshing and unique. Can you get me a complete transcript by next Friday?
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.......?
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.
The cosmic-ray argument has been applied to the black-hole and strangelet scenarios as well. If such dangerous things can be created, why haven't they already eaten up Earth, along with other planets, stars or whole galaxies in the billions of years since the universe arose? To answer that question, Sancho and Wagner pose a counterargument: Perhaps cosmic-ray collisions really are creating tiny black holes or strangelets, but those little bits of doomsday zip by too fast to cause any trouble. In the LHC, they say, the bad stuff could hang around long enough to be captured by Earth's gravity and set off a catastrophe.
I've got a counter-counter argument for you: consider the number of cosmic ray hits over billions of years. it would stand to reason that some of them would be in the range of the LHC and would not in fact zip right on by- they would in fact be just as likely to be "captured" as anything produced in the LHC. then there's the fact that a lot of the cosmic ray particles can't zip right on through even at higher energies- there's 8,000 miles of rock and metal between them and the other side if they hit right. if blackholes, monopoles and strangelets are producable and dangerous at these energies, they would have done us in a long time ago because there would be at least a few that wouldn't escape over such a long time span.
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.
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!
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.
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:
We have shown that the relatively late formation time
of Earth implies that life on our planet is highly unlikely
to be annihilated by an exogenous catastrophes during
the next 109 years. In the case of the doomsday scenar-
ios studied in the Brookhaven report [2], our bound also
applies to hypothetical anthropogenic disasters caused
by high-energy particle accelerators (risks 1-3). This holds because the occurrence of exogenous catastrophes,
e.g., resulting from cosmic ray collisions, places an upper
bound on the frequency of their anthropogenic counter-
parts.
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.
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.
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?
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 [wikipedia.org]
I guess it's just the kid in me, but now I want it turned on even more just to see what will really happen.
Maybe they should schedual the first start for one of the predicted end dates ala the Mayans and Egyptans. The Hadron collider builders should also play "It's the End of the World as We Know It" by REM the day it starts.
Maybe they should schedual the first start for one of the predicted end dates ala the Mayans and Egyptans.
I want to see them turn it on too, but that's tempting fate a bit much maybe? So to make sure they can't accidentally cause the Mayan predictions to come true, they'll deliberately activate the machine several days before the end of the Mayan calendar.
Only once they turn it on, as it's powering up, they'll get a phone call from an anthropologist who will tell them that he just discovered that the previous calculations as to the start of the calendar were wrong, and it is in fact THAT VERY DAY that the calendar ends! Oh bitter irony, when your attempt to avoid the prophecy causes it to come true!
You underestimate the Mayans. The few days in between is the time
the black hole takes to gather enough mass to speed up the process.
It will be tiny first, and will grow slowly. Amazing how the Mayans
got it right. I would not know where to start.
Yep, you can't count on the safety of exact dates, as we all learned from Back to the Future III when Doc and Marty figured they were safe going to the dance Saturday because the tombstone Marty saw in 1955 said Doc died on Monday. Then along comes Buford who points a gun a Doc's kidney...:
Buford: "It's a Derringer, Smithy. Small but effective. Last time I used it, the fella took two whole days to die..."
A nuclear safety officer is hardly on the 'inside of' the LHC team.
The article didn't go into the scientific backgrounds of the guys involved, but the job requirements of being a nuclear safety officer is hardly any prerequisite to being able to in any way accurately understanding the quantum chromodynamics, or even quantized general relativity (which nobody can do yet), etc involved in the LHC.
This would be like an airport luggage screener making claims about the aerodynamical stability of a fighter aircraft, or an electrician who can wire up a new 110 AC outlet in your house making claims about transistor-level details of the latest Intel CPU.
While it's possible they might be experts in highly technical fields hugely beyond their job descriptions, it's fairly unlikely.
This doesn't mean that their concerns are necessarily invalid, but they shouldn't be given any more credibility than other non-members of the LHC team.
but the job requirements of being a nuclear safety officer is hardly any prerequisite to being able to in any way accurately understanding the quantum chromodynamics, or even quantized general relativity
No kidding. Have you seen the safety inspector in section 7G?
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday March 27 2008, @06:43PM (#22888170)
Let's look at the credentials of said "nuclear safety officer":
""" 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.
In all fairness to the LHC people, the worst possible outcome is a blackhole that swallows the earth, not the solar system. It's not like there is magic mass available, to make the black-hole earth have more gravity than the earth does and pull in the rest of the solar system. It would just sit there orbiting the sun like the earth does now.
It is not wrong to stop and ask these questions when the cost of failure is potentially a global concern.
Certainly not, and I addressed that in my comment.
It is certainly worthwhile running the calculations to verify such catastrophic events won't occur. Many physicists have already done this. But a non-expert suing the government without anything even remotely resembling evidence is pretty ridiculous.
It's like some of the first rockets. Some skeptics were worried that a sufficiently-strong rocket combustion could ignite all of earth's atmosphere. Sure that's a worry and it was worth running the calculations by full-time expert chemists and physicists to justify whether such an event could occur.
But any non-expert suing a project to cancel it based only on shaky claims? That's a different story.
The rest of it just sounds so bizarre it's unreal.
The exopologic theorem of Flammeus Fortuitus states that civilizations that pursue the Higgs boson eventually produce destructive monopoles, usually just below their own troposphere, which immediately annihilates their planet/moon and nearby planets and/or suns. Each gamma ray burst detected in the universe is, in fact, another such conversion. Fortunately, interstellar space lacks sufficient matter to sustain the conversion and the process stops.
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.
One of the premises of Intelligent Design, as described in "The Privileged Planet" [amazon.com], 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.)
Due diligence may be quite prudent. However, that doesn't mean these guys are not nutcases.
Far higher-energy interaction happen every day as high-energy cosmic rays hit the atmosphere. If these things could happen, they would have already happened and destroyed the Earth long ago.
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.
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.
Big black holes suck up stuff because their gravity overcomes all other forces, but here that can't be the case.
Semantics, pff. Get close enough to that tiny particle, and 1/r^2 is going to win every time.
To argue your main point, though, I think that is one of the reasons (in addition to the Hawking radiation argument) that those microgram 'holes aren't dangerous: to feed in enough mass to make the thing grow would take an incredible density of mass very close to the b'hole's location, and you can't get much of that density on Earth anyway. (Here I'm talking about a sort of "macroscopic" density, not that of nearly-pointlike particles like electrons or neutrons.)
Remember, too, that *energy* has mass -- massive objects have tremendous amounts of energy in the gravitational fields surrounding them, and these fields contribute mass to the "whole hole". It can be shown that when an object reaches such a state that the field energy starts to attract itself more rapidly than it's radiated, _that's_ when an event horizon will form. This can happen at any size. Just because the black hole can't sustain its own growth due to environmental constraints doesn't mean it's not a black hole.
IAAPP-Gravity is weak. VERY weak. This is the basis of the evaporation idea. The rest of space has enough latent energy around to pop particles and anti-particles(in exactly equal numbers) in and out of existence. Near the surface of a black hole Hawking theorized that some such particles would be within the schwarzchild radius and their partners outside. These would cause the black hole to lose energy overall as it radiated away particles. This occurs because the binding energy of some such particles is far greater than gravity AT ANY DISTANCE. Basically r^{-2} does NOT always win, other forces have greater influence at different length scales.
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?
You're right that a micro black hole would have a very weak gravitational field (a nanogram black hole has the same gravitational attraction as a nanogram of ordinary matter). However if the black hole didn't evaporate, it would slowly accumulate mass just from random collisions with nearby atoms. An object that is a singularity (infinite density at core) will have an event horizon. Even though the gravitational field is not strong around a micro black hole, there is still a (very, very small) region where the field gradient is so large that nothing can escape.
For instance if a micro black hole was generated in the LHC but didn't evaporate, it would eventually drift into the sidewall of the collision chamber, and whatever matter it 'touched' (atoms pass beyond the event horizon) would not be able to escape and would add to the mass of the black hole. Slowly by slowly it would grow in size. Because matter is never lost out of the black hole, it would eventually accumulate a huge amount of matter. How exactly the scenario would play (in terms of rate of expansion, etc.) would be interesting to calculate (would it sink down into the earth? would it slowly consume the atmosphere?): but I think it would grow exponentially and ultimately consume the entire Earth.
That's assuming that such a small black hole is actually a stable singularity with an event horizon, and that it cannot evaporate or dissipate in any way. Our best understanding of black holes right now indicates that if they form at all in the LHC (which is itself a dubious notion), they will be so small that they will evaporate very quickly due to Hawking radiation.
The doomsayers worry that our theory of Hawking radiation is somehow wrong. But as others have pointed out, high-energy cosmic rays hit the earth all the time, and we haven't been converted into a black hole yet. So it's either very hard to form micro black holes, or they evaporate very quickly.
For instance if a micro black hole was generated in the LHC but didn't evaporate, it would eventually drift into the sidewall of the collision chamber, and whatever matter it 'touched' (atoms pass beyond the event horizon) would not be able to escape and would add to the mass of the black hole. Slowly by slowly it would grow in size. Because matter is never lost out of the black hole, it would eventually accumulate a huge amount of matter. How exactly the scenario would play (in terms of rate of expansion, etc.) would be interesting to calculate (would it sink down into the earth? would it slowly consume the atmosphere?): but I think it would grow exponentially and ultimately consume the entire Earth.
Even without Hawking radiation, micro black holes are entirely harmless, as they consume matter at too slow a rate to do any damage. Matter is mostly empty space, and gravity is an extremely weak force. Atoms are on the order of 10^-10m apart, whilst the event horizon of your postulated nanogram black hole would be 10^-25m, if I've done my sums right. That's a huge difference in scale, and a black hole so small isn't going to run into other particles with any significant frequency. The Earth would be long gone before a microscopic black hole made any impact.
Some think these black holes may be a normal state of matter;
Physicist Brian Greene has suggested that the electron may be a micro black hole; see black hole electron. [wikipedia.org] Small black holes would look like elementary particles because they would be completely defined by their mass, charge and spin. On this view, the significance of the Planck mass is that it marks a transition where the Hawking semi-classical approximation breaks down, and a fully quantum mechanical description of the system becomes required. Gravitationally dominated "black hole"-like structures might still exist with these lower masses, but the emission of Hawking radiation would be suppressed by quantum effects, just as an electron constantly orbiting [centripetally accelerating around] an atom does not radiate, despite the apparent predictions of classical electrodynamics. Micro black hole [wikipedia.org]
In all seriousness, I do not think they will end the world, but am I supposed to take your 'word' for it, or the word of whatever think tank even?
Nope. Just study physics for the last decade or so as I have. I suggest Weinberg's Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity (1972), although Misner's, Thorne's, and Wheeler's Gravitation (1973) is accessible enough.
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.
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".
THINK OF THE SPACESHIPS (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
Hawking Radiation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hawking Radiation (Score:5, Funny)
re: MBHs
status: urgent
MBHs not dissipating as anticipated. Please advise.
Parent
Re:Hawking Radiation (Score:5, Funny)
Well gentlemen, I suggest you all stick you head between your legs and kiss you ass goodbye. I'm going to the Andromeda galaxy. Yes, I invented a way to get there. I did it twenty years ago after a vodka binge, actually. Peace, bitches.
Parent
Re:Phew, I was worried for a minute but, hey---- (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
They forgot one... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They forgot one... (Score:5, Funny)
They will still have a hard time getting laid, though.
Parent
Re:They forgot one... (Score:5, Funny)
I work for a major Hollywood studio and would like to make a movie based on your plot. It is both refreshing and unique. Can you get me a complete transcript by next Friday?
Parent
ICE-9 anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat's_Cradle [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-nine [wikipedia.org]
I'm just sayin'
Re:ICE-9 anyone? (Score:5, Funny)
And so it turned out that nuclear explosions were perfectly safe after all. :D
Parent
idiots! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:idiots! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
doomsday machine could be a feature not a bug (Score:5, Insightful)
10 year old news... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Within 24 hours, the laboratory issued a rebuttal: the risk of such a catastrophe was essentially zero"
Could this explain the lack of ETs? (Score:5, Funny)
Their Own Damn Fault (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Vade retro, lawyers! (Score:5, Informative)
Last time a bunch of lawyers and politicians tried to legislate the value of pi [wikipedia.org], they got 3.2.
The Risk has Already been Assessed (Score:5, Informative)
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.
implications for SETI (Score:5, Interesting)
On strangelets (Score:5, Insightful)
here's the thing (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Don't laugh.. It could happen! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe they should schedual the first start for one of the predicted end dates ala the Mayans and Egyptans. The Hadron collider builders should also play "It's the End of the World as We Know It" by REM the day it starts.
Parent
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Funny)
I want to see them turn it on too, but that's tempting fate a bit much maybe? So to make sure they can't accidentally cause the Mayan predictions to come true, they'll deliberately activate the machine several days before the end of the Mayan calendar.
Only once they turn it on, as it's powering up, they'll get a phone call from an anthropologist who will tell them that he just discovered that the previous calculations as to the start of the calendar were wrong, and it is in fact THAT VERY DAY that the calendar ends! Oh bitter irony, when your attempt to avoid the prophecy causes it to come true!
Parent
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Funny)
the black hole takes to gather enough mass to speed up the process.
It will be tiny first, and will grow slowly. Amazing how the Mayans
got it right. I would not know where to start.
Buford: "It's a Derringer, Smithy. Small but effective. Last time I used it, the fella took two whole days to die..."
Parent
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
The article didn't go into the scientific backgrounds of the guys involved, but the job requirements of being a nuclear safety officer is hardly any prerequisite to being able to in any way accurately understanding the quantum chromodynamics, or even quantized general relativity (which nobody can do yet), etc involved in the LHC.
This would be like an airport luggage screener making claims about the aerodynamical stability of a fighter aircraft, or an electrician who can wire up a new 110 AC outlet in your house making claims about transistor-level details of the latest Intel CPU.
While it's possible they might be experts in highly technical fields hugely beyond their job descriptions, it's fairly unlikely.
This doesn't mean that their concerns are necessarily invalid, but they shouldn't be given any more credibility than other non-members of the LHC team.
Parent
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Funny)
No kidding. Have you seen the safety inspector in section 7G?
Parent
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Informative)
"""
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.
Parent
Homer Simpson filed a law suit !?!?!? (Score:5, Funny)
I may be wrong here but wasn't Homer a Safety Officer for a nuclear power plant ? What is he doing working at CERN ?
Parent
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Funny)
It would be very amusing for the folks on the ISS though.
Parent
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Informative)
Certainly not, and I addressed that in my comment.
It is certainly worthwhile running the calculations to verify such catastrophic events won't occur. Many physicists have already done this. But a non-expert suing the government without anything even remotely resembling evidence is pretty ridiculous.
It's like some of the first rockets. Some skeptics were worried that a sufficiently-strong rocket combustion could ignite all of earth's atmosphere. Sure that's a worry and it was worth running the calculations by full-time expert chemists and physicists to justify whether such an event could occur.
But any non-expert suing a project to cancel it based only on shaky claims? That's a different story.
Parent
My theory (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
ID is an ally in this case (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Far higher-energy interaction happen every day as high-energy cosmic rays hit the atmosphere. If these things could happen, they would have already happened and destroyed the Earth long ago.
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Re:Are they serious? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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How could a tiny black hole ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly, they have mistaken the catchy name for the definition.
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Re:How could a tiny black hole ... (Score:5, Insightful)
To argue your main point, though, I think that is one of the reasons (in addition to the Hawking radiation argument) that those microgram 'holes aren't dangerous: to feed in enough mass to make the thing grow would take an incredible density of mass very close to the b'hole's location, and you can't get much of that density on Earth anyway. (Here I'm talking about a sort of "macroscopic" density, not that of nearly-pointlike particles like electrons or neutrons.)
Remember, too, that *energy* has mass -- massive objects have tremendous amounts of energy in the gravitational fields surrounding them, and these fields contribute mass to the "whole hole". It can be shown that when an object reaches such a state that the field energy starts to attract itself more rapidly than it's radiated, _that's_ when an event horizon will form. This can happen at any size. Just because the black hole can't sustain its own growth due to environmental constraints doesn't mean it's not a black hole.
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Re:How could a tiny black hole ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:How could a tiny black hole ... (Score:5, Informative)
For instance if a micro black hole was generated in the LHC but didn't evaporate, it would eventually drift into the sidewall of the collision chamber, and whatever matter it 'touched' (atoms pass beyond the event horizon) would not be able to escape and would add to the mass of the black hole. Slowly by slowly it would grow in size. Because matter is never lost out of the black hole, it would eventually accumulate a huge amount of matter. How exactly the scenario would play (in terms of rate of expansion, etc.) would be interesting to calculate (would it sink down into the earth? would it slowly consume the atmosphere?): but I think it would grow exponentially and ultimately consume the entire Earth.
That's assuming that such a small black hole is actually a stable singularity with an event horizon, and that it cannot evaporate or dissipate in any way. Our best understanding of black holes right now indicates that if they form at all in the LHC (which is itself a dubious notion), they will be so small that they will evaporate very quickly due to Hawking radiation.
The doomsayers worry that our theory of Hawking radiation is somehow wrong. But as others have pointed out, high-energy cosmic rays hit the earth all the time, and we haven't been converted into a black hole yet. So it's either very hard to form micro black holes, or they evaporate very quickly.
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Re:How could a tiny black hole ... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:How could a tiny black hole ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Are they serious? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Not this again... (Score:5, Insightful)
Any scientists who say that they know one way or another what will happen are not scientists at all.
Scientific experiments that aren't surrounded by uncertainty and doubt are not much use in removing uncertainty, are they?
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Re:John Titor (Score:5, Funny)
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".
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Re:John Titor (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:John Titor (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:John Titor (Score:5, Funny)
Fucking ravers.
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