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."

THINK OF THE SPACESHIPS

Captain Zapp Brannigan: We'll just set a new course for that empty region over there, near that blackish, holeish thing.

Obligatory

xkcd [xkcd.com]

Hawking Radiation

So what if it creates microscopic black holes? They'd dissipate in a fraction of a second. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation [wikipedia.org]

Re:Phew, I was worried for a minute but, hey----

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.

They forgot one...

What happens if an escaping convict accidentally wanders into the collider, gains super powers, and tries to take over the world?

Re:They forgot one...

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.

ICE-9 anyone?

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 [wikipedia.org]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-nine [wikipedia.org]

I'm just sayin'

Re:ICE-9 anyone?

"Well -they were afraid when they detonated the first above ground nuke as well -thought they might torch the atmosphere..."

And so it turned out that nuclear explosions were perfectly safe after all. :D

idiots!

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.

Re:idiots!

you mean this?:

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.

doomsday machine could be a feature not a bug

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.

10 year old news...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16322014.700-a-black-hole-ate-my-planet.html [newscientist.com]

"Within 24 hours, the laboratory issued a rebuttal: the risk of such a catastrophe was essentially zero"

Could this explain the lack of ETs?

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!

Their Own Damn Fault

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!

Trial judges and lawyers shouldn't be allowed to dabble in scientific questions. Leave the deciding of risks to real scientists.

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

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:

• Will relativistic heavy-ion colliders destroy our planet? [sciencedirect.com]
• How unlikely is a doomsday catastrophe? [arxiv.org]

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.

Re:WTF?

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.

Re:WTF?

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!

Re:WTF?

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.

Re:WTF?

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?

Re:Are they serious?

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 ...

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.

Re:Not this again...

The reason they're doing the experiment is because they don't know what will happen.

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?

Re:John Titor

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".

Re:John Titor

So, was he sent back to warn us about our impending loss of the letter 'e'?