Large Hadron Collider: Doomsday law suit

Carl Herrera · Mar 30, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/s...em&ex=1207022400&en=fc4bb1d73347fe4e&ei=5087

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

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Times Topics: CERNNone of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer 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.

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.

But 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.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

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. It names the federal Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and CERN as defendants.

According to a spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing the Department of Energy, a scheduling meeting has been set for June 16.

Why should CERN, an organization of European nations based in Switzerland, even show up in a Hawaiian courtroom?

In an interview, Mr. Wagner said, “I don’t know if they’re going to show up.” CERN would have to voluntarily submit to the court’s jurisdiction, he said, adding that he and Mr. Sancho could have sued in France or Switzerland, but to save expenses they had added CERN to the docket here. He claimed that 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.

James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory as of yet had no comment on the suit. “It’s hard to see how a district court in Hawaii has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe,” Mr. Gillies said.

“There is nothing new to suggest that the L.H.C. is unsafe,” he said, adding that its safety had been confirmed by two reports, with a third on the way, and would be the subject of a discussion during an open house at the lab on April 6.

“Scientifically, we’re not hiding away,” he said.

But Mr. Wagner is not mollified. “They’ve got a lot of propaganda saying it’s safe,” he said in an interview, “but basically it’s propaganda.”

In an e-mail message, Mr. Wagner called the CERN safety review “fundamentally flawed” and said it had been initiated too late. The review process violates the European Commission’s standards for adhering to the “Precautionary Principle,” he wrote, “and has not been done by ‘arms length’ scientists.”

Physicists in and out of CERN say a variety of studies, including an official CERN report in 2003, have concluded there is no problem. But just to be sure, last year the anonymous Safety Assessment Group was set up to do the review again.

“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots,” said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group. The others prefer to remain anonymous, Mr. Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due in January.

This is not the first time around for Mr. Wagner. He filed similar suits in 1999 and 2000 to prevent the Brookhaven National Laboratory from operating the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. That suit was dismissed in 2001. The collider, which smashes together gold ions in the hopes of creating what is called a “quark-gluon plasma,” has been operating without incident since 2000.

Mr. Wagner, who lives on the Big Island of Hawaii, studied physics and did cosmic ray research at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a doctorate in law from what is now known as the University of Northern California in Sacramento. He subsequently worked as a radiation safety officer for the Veterans Administration.

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Times Topics: CERNMr. Sancho, who describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory, lives in Spain, probably in Barcelona, Mr. Wagner said.

Doomsday fears have a long, if not distinguished, pedigree in the history of physics. At Los Alamos before the first nuclear bomb was tested, Emil Konopinski was given the job of calculating whether or not the explosion would set the atmosphere on fire.

The Large Hadron Collider is designed to fire up protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts before banging them together. Nothing, indeed, will happen in the CERN collider that does not happen 100,000 times a day from cosmic rays in the atmosphere, said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

What is different, physicists admit, is that the fragments from cosmic rays will go shooting harmlessly through the Earth at nearly the speed of light, but anything created when the beams meet head-on in the collider will be born at rest relative to the laboratory and so will stick around and thus could create havoc.

The new worries are about black holes, which, according to some variants of string theory, could appear at the collider. That possibility, though a long shot, has been widely ballyhooed in many papers and popular articles in the last few years, but would they be dangerous?

According to a paper by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking in 1974, they would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat. No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate.

As a result, Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho contend in their complaint, black holes could really be stable, and a micro black hole created by the collider could grow, eventually swallowing the Earth.

But William Unruh, of the University of British Columbia, whose paper exploring the limits of Dr. Hawking’s radiation process was referenced on Mr. Wagner’s Web site, said they had missed his point. “Maybe physics really is so weird as to not have black holes evaporate,” he said. “But it would really, really have to be weird.”

Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist whose work helped fuel the speculation about black holes at the collider, pointed out in a paper last year that black holes would probably not be produced at the collider after all, although other effects of so-called quantum gravity might appear.

As part of the safety assessment report, Dr. Mangano and Steve Giddings of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have been working intensely for the last few months on a paper exploring all the possibilities of these fearsome black holes. They think there are no problems but are reluctant to talk about their findings until they have been peer reviewed, Dr. Mangano said.

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.”
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bladeage · Mar 30, 2008

Rocket River · Mar 30, 2008

My favorite Quote

Scientist said:

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.
Click to expand...

So you saying it is possible?????

I can just see that conversation
"Dude! Can it really make a black hole?"
"No, . . . .well I don't think it can."
"Let's check to make sure"
"BET!"

Rocket River

KingCheetah · Mar 30, 2008

I was wondering if this thing will be as big and powerful as the SSC was designed to be -- budget cuts killed what would have been a great bit of science here in Texas. I think part of the tunnel is still out there somewhere.

Ottomaton · Mar 30, 2008

Rocket River said:

My favorite Quote

So you saying it is possible?????

I can just see that conversation
"Dude! Can it really make a black hole?"
"No, . . . .well I don't think it can."
"Let's check to make sure"
"BET!"

Rocket River
Click to expand...

They knew all along that it couldn't. It's like when your children think there is a monster in the closet, and rather than try to rationally explain to the child that monsters don't exist (which obviously wouldn’t do anything about an irrational fear), you make a show of peeking in the closet to make sure that the monster isn't there.

You deal with irrational fears with no basis in fact by making some 'committee' to 'study the problem' and then after weeks of 'careful deliberation' you come out with a momentous report indicating that you have done some very thorough checking, and in fact you now have conclusive proof that monsters in the closet do not exist (thanks for reminding us to check).

rhadamanthus · Mar 31, 2008

CERN is in europe. NEPA applies in the US only.

Tiny black holes? Can we say "crackpot loonies"?

I'm confused.

Oski2005 · Mar 31, 2008

This expiriment has all the ingredients for the accidental creation of a comic book supervillain.

SamFisher · Mar 31, 2008

once again it is up to lawyers to save the universe.

StupidMoniker · Mar 31, 2008

rhadamanthus said:

Tiny black holes? Can we say "crackpot loonies"?
Click to expand...

Technically, all black holes are infinitely small, existing at a single point. If they were not, they could not have infinite density. The Schwarzchild radius can vary in size, depending on the mass of the black hole.
[/nerd]

Single Cell · Mar 31, 2008

StupidMoniker said:

Technically, all black holes are infinitely small, existing at a single point. If they were not, they could not have infinite density. The Schwarzchild radius can vary in size, depending on the mass of the black hole.
[/nerd]
Click to expand...

Oh, Burn!

busta_cap · Mar 31, 2008

StupidMoniker said:

Technically, all black holes are infinitely small, existing at a single point. If they were not, they could not have infinite density. The Schwarzchild radius can vary in size, depending on the mass of the black hole.
[/nerd]
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Actually, a black hole is not in and of itself infinitely small; the singularity at the center of a black hole is. The black hole also includes the region of space to and including the event horizon (the point at which the speed required to escape the gravitational pull equals the speed of light). [/nerdier]

StupidMoniker · Mar 31, 2008

busta_cap said:

Actually, a black hole is not in and of itself infinitely small; the singularity at the center of a black hole is. The black hole also includes the region of space to and including the event horizon (the point at which the speed required to escape the gravitational pull equals the speed of light). [/nerdier]
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That edge of that area is defined as the Schwarzchild radius, which I already mentioned, and is not a part of the black hole proper.

Rocket River · Mar 31, 2008

Ottomaton said:

They knew all along that it couldn't. It's like when your children think there is a monster in the closet, and rather than try to rationally explain to the child that monsters don't exist (which obviously wouldn’t do anything about an irrational fear), you make a show of peeking in the closet to make sure that the monster isn't there.

You deal with irrational fears with no basis in fact by making some 'committee' to 'study the problem' and then after weeks of 'careful deliberation' you come out with a momentous report indicating that you have done some very thorough checking, and in fact you now have conclusive proof that monsters in the closet do not exist (thanks for reminding us to check).
Click to expand...

Just to be clear. . . I sincerely doubt we capable of creating Blackholes
at this time . . .
but
I just thought it was a funny commentary

Rocket River

B-Bob · Mar 31, 2008

SamFisher said:

once again it is up to lawyers to save the universe.
Click to expand...

Apparently you haven't heard of the Large Attorney Collider; it will be built as a large ring around the Los Angeles basin.

Cheetah, apparently this one (for certain experiments) can do a few tricks the SSC would not have been able to do.

and as for the half-built facility in Waxahachie, I have heard, alternately, that it was to be a Mall, recording studio, and anti-terrorist training facility. I say we should combine those three purposes in the enormous underground ring.

busta_cap · Mar 31, 2008

StupidMoniker said:

That edge of that area is defined as the Schwarzchild radius, which I already mentioned, and is not a part of the black hole proper.
Click to expand...

The term Schwarzschild Radius honors the mathematician Karl Schwarzschild, who was the first to calculate the necessary density of matter which would be required to boost the escape velocity from that same mass to the speed of light. The Schwarzschild radius is defined as the radius at which the outer boundaries of the Black-Hole would start. The Schwarzschild radius is also the radius (from the center of the Black-Hole's mass) at which the escape velocity first and exactly equals the speed of light. The density of mass trapped inside the Black-Hole would be exactly sufficient to raise the escape velocity to the speed of light limit at this radius. Outside this radius, the real-world conditions would prevail. From either side of this speed-of-light cutoff boundary, both the inside and the outside regions would be insulated and isolated from all knowledge and communication1
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http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Schwarzschild+radius

Schwarzschild radius (shwôrtschld, shvärtsshld)
A radius defined for a body of a given mass and proportional to that mass, such that if the body is smaller than that radius, the force of gravity is strong enough to prevent matter and energy to escape from within that radius. The Earth is much larger than its Schwarzschild radius, which is approximately 7 mm (0.28 inches).Black holes are examples of objects smaller than their Schwarzschild radius, which defines the radius of their event horizon. The Schwarzschild radius is a consequence of Einstein's General Relativity theory. It is named after the German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild (1873-1916).
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It is part of the black hole and, since it is calculable and measurable, is not infinitely small. The "infinitely small" part is only the singularity, the very heart of and the motive force behind -- but not the totality of -- a black hole.

StupidMoniker · Mar 31, 2008

busta_cap said:

It is part of the black hole and, since it is calculable and measurable, is not infinitely small. The "infinitely small" part is only the singularity, the very heart of and the motive force behind -- but not the totality of -- a black hole.
Click to expand...

Did you read your own definition?

Black holes are examples of objects smaller than their Schwarzschild radius
Click to expand...

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