Fears of quantum implosion prompt lawsuit!

CaptainChewbacca · Mar 28, 2008

The builders of the world's biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.

Representatives at Fermilab in Illinois and at Europe's CERN laboratory, two of the defendants in the case, say there's no chance that the Large Hadron Collider would cause such cosmic catastrophes. Nevertheless, they're bracing to defend themselves in the courtroom as well as the court of public opinion.

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is due for startup later this year at CERN's headquarters on the French-Swiss border. It's expected to tackle some of the deepest questions in science: Is the foundation of modern physics right or wrong? What existed during the very first moment of the universe's existence? Why do some particles have mass while others don't? What is the nature of dark matter? Are there extra dimensions of space out there that we haven't yet detected?

Some folks outside the scientific mainstream have asked darker questions as well: Could the collider create mini-black holes that last long enough and get big enough to turn into a matter-sucking maelstrom? Could exotic particles known as magnetic monopoles throw atomic nuclei out of whack? Could quarks recombine into "strangelets" that would turn the whole Earth into one big lump of exotic matter?

Former nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner has been raising such questions for years - first about an earlier-generation "big bang machine" known as the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, and more recently about the LHC.

Last Friday, Wagner and another critic of the LHC's safety measures, Luis Sancho, filed a lawsuit in Hawaii's U.S. District Court. The suit calls on the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation and CERN to ease up on their LHC preparations for several months while the collider's safety was reassessed.

"We're going to need a minimum of four months to review whatever they're putting out," Wagner told me on Monday. The suit seeks a temporary restraining order that would put the LHC on hold, pending the release and review of an updated CERN safety assessment. It also calls on the U.S. government to do a full environmental review addressing the LHC project, including the debate over the doomsday scenario.

On Monday, District Judge Helen Gillmor assigned the case to a magistrate judge, Kevin S.C. Chang, for an initial conference on June 16. Wagner said he planned to ask for a more immediate hearing on the request for a restraining order - that is, once he has served the federal government with the court papers.

The case is currently being handled by the U.S. attorney's office in Hawaii, where Wagner and Sancho both live,`but that may not necessarily be where the legal proceedings end up. The Justice Department's Environmental and Natural Resources Division, based in Washington, is also being brought in on the case, assistant U.S. attorney Derrick Watson told me in an e-mail Wednesday.

In Washington, Justice Department spokesman Andrew Ames noted that the court papers had not yet been received. "We don't have any comment," he told me Thursday. "We'll comment in court when it's appropriate."

Debating doomsday

The defense attorneys would likely dwell on the regulatory and procedural questions rather than the worries over a cosmic catastrophe. Those worries have been around for years, and most physicists have scoffed at them for almost as long. The doomsday scenarios raised by Sancho and Wagner include:

* Runaway black holes: Some physicists say the LHC could create microscopic black holes that would hang around for just a tiny fraction of a second and then decay. Sancho and Wagner worry that millions of black holes might somehow persist and coalesce into a compact gravitational mass that would draw in other matter and grow bigger. That's pure science fiction, said Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at the City College of New York. "These black holes don't live very long, and they have microscopic energy, and so they are harmless," he told me.

* Strangelets: Smashing protons together at high enough energies could create new combinations of quarks, the particles that protons are made of. Sancho and Wagner worry that a nasty combination known as a stable, negatively charged strangelet could theoretically turn everything it touches into strangelets as well. Kaku compared this to the ancient myth of the Midas touch. "We see no evidence of this bizarre theory," he said. "Once in a while, we trot it out to scare the pants off people. But it's not serious."

* Magnetic monopoles: One theory suggests that high-energy particle collisions might give rise to massive particles that have only one magnetic pole - only north, or only south, but not the north-south magnetism that dominates nature. Sancho and Wagner worry that such particles could be created in the LHC and start a runaway reaction that converts atoms into other forms of matter. But physicists have seen no evidence of such reactions, which should have occurred already as the result of more energetic cosmic-ray collisions in Earth's upper atmosphere.

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.
In response, particle physicists are developing counter-counterarguments - based on their theoretical work as well as data from astronomical observations and experiments at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider. For instance, the physicists would say that enough of the doomsday particles still should have been captured by neutron stars or cosmic gas clouds to have an impact. No such impact has ever been seen. Therefore, no doomsday.

CERN spokesman James Gillies told me that a 2003 assessment of the doomsday scenarios was being updated with the new information. Release of that updated report - the one that Sancho and Wagner apparently have been waiting for - is "imminent," Gillies told me.

Questions about the doomsday scenarios may well come up at CERN on April 6, during a public open house at the LHC. Some researchers have gotten the word to be prepared to talk about microscopic black holes and strangelets if asked.

Reality check

Saying something is absolutely impossible doesn't always come easy. Some scientists find it difficult to state categorically that such-and-such a theoretical catastrophe has no chance of happening, and Fermilab spokeswoman Judy Jackson told me that the doomsayers have "cynically distorted" that natural reluctance to rule out even the most outlandish theoretical possibilities.

The doomsaying can continue as long as scientists hold out even a tiny sliver of uncertainty. Jackson cited the example of Paul Dixon, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii at Hilo who has been saying for more than a decade that experiments at Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator are in danger of touching off an artificial supernova. Dixon is still going strong: He submitted an affidavit in support of the LHC lawsuit filed by Sancho and Wagner.

The current lawsuit could well be decided not by scientific arguments but rather by narrower regulatory issues. On that point, Jackson said that Fermilab has followed U.S. environmental regulations, just as CERN has followed European regulations. "Of course there are plenty of environmental laws and regulations, and they have all been followed to the letter," she said.

However, Jackson said CERN shouldn't be held to U.S. requirements when it comes to operating the LHC - even if the collider happens to be using magnets built by Fermilab. "Just because we built them doesn't mean we have any say over French environmental regulations," she said.
For his part, Wagner said he hoped Fermilab and the other defendants in the lawsuit would take another look at the doomsday scenarios - and speculated that a restraining order might not even be necessary. He noted that the startup schedule for the LHC has been repeatedly delayed, which would give more time for further safety assessments. (CERN's schedule currently calls for first collisions by the end of August, and the word is that the collider may not reach its full power of 14 trillion electron-volts until next year.)

Wagner suggested that cosmic-ray observations by the Pierre Auger Observatory and the yet-to-be-launched Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, could shed new light on the debate. "The way I look at it, this should be a basis to look for more funding to find a solution to the problems we raised," he told me.

I'm pretty sure most physicists won't see it that way. They're generally anxious to spend their time and their grant money using the LHC rather than chasing down cosmic improbabilities. The doomsday lawsuit could conceivably be dismissed once it comes up for a hearing - that's basically what happened to Wagner's earlier lawsuit against the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider. But in the meantime, feel free to make your own arguments, counterarguments and counter-counterarguments in the comment section below.
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http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/03/27/823924.aspx

Now, you may think this is funny, but I assure you its no laughing matter:

[yt="Watch this"]T1vKisefsuI[/yt]

Bulldog · Mar 28, 2008

Ross Perot was right when he warned us of giant sucking sounds!

Marso · Mar 28, 2008

Do they fire the particles from moving conveyor belts?

Dan Leach · Mar 28, 2008

What a way to go
Being on a planet that gets ripped apart by an emerging black hole... thats probably about as cool as its possible to get.
Thats even cooler than Top Gears favourite best way to die, which involves going through the pearly gates in a sports car thats going backwards at 200pmh and on fire

Lethesoda · Mar 28, 2008

I think we should hold onto "Destroyed by Black Hole of our Own Volition" in case it becomes the better option one day.

Ramen · Mar 28, 2008

The question is whether you would kill yourself or become trapped at the event horizon for all eternity.

Beck · Mar 28, 2008

That's okay. Captain Janeway will just go back in time and fix it.

Jenee · Mar 28, 2008

I was never able to figure out that episode.

Volpone · Mar 28, 2008

Ramen said: ↑

The question is whether you would kill yourself or become trapped at the event horizon for all eternity.
Click to expand...

Ah, how I miss the good sci-fi episodes of SG1 from back in the early seasons.

The Exception · Mar 28, 2008

This would make a great premise for a story.

Too bad you wouldn't be able to finish it before the end.

bryce · Mar 28, 2008

This is why we haven't hear from ET's yet!

They all reach this level of particle physics tech, and *KABOOM*

In fact, the entire Universe may have already been destroyed...there could be wavefront of strange mater conversion or a collapse of the false vacuum approaching us at the speed of light even now. Maybe multiple wavefronts approaching from different directions!

But since it's coming at us at light speed, we just won't know it's here until it's too late...

Then Bruce Willis won't be able to nuke it in time. :omg:

Nautica · Mar 28, 2008

Ramen said: ↑

The question is whether you would kill yourself or become trapped at the event horizon for all eternity.
Click to expand...

I'd become trapped in my Andromeda-class heavy cruiser near the event horizon, and 300 years would go by for the outside world (but just the blink of an eye for me) before I was rescued by a low-rent salvage operation.

Of course the known universe would have crumbled into chaos in the interim, and the Systems Commonwealth would no longer exist to bring peace, order, and prosperity to its members. So I'd recruit a rag-tag team from the salvage crew, plus a mercenary and a deadly but peaceful Magog preacher, and go about refounding the Systems Commonwealth with my hot ship's avatar.

Tuckerfan · Mar 28, 2008

IMHO, these people should be clubbed like baby harp seals for their stupidity. Certainly, they're in season.

Vessels pursuing seals maneuvered through heavy ice in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on Friday at the start of the largest marine mammal hunt in the world.

Only a few seals had been killed so far, said Fisheries and Oceans Canada spokesman Phil Jenkins said, noting that the ice had hampered about 16 vessels and kept the sealers ``quite a distance from a herd.''
Click to expand...

oldfella1962 · Mar 28, 2008

Runaway black hos: Some physicists say the LHC could create microscopic black hos that would hang around for just a tiny fraction of a second and then decay. Sancho and Wagner worry that millions of black hos might somehow persist and coalesce into a compact gravitational mass that would draw in other matter and grow bigger. That's pure science fiction, said Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at the City College of New York. "These black hos don't live very long, and they have microscopic energy, and so they are harmless," he told me.
Click to expand...

Marso · Mar 28, 2008

If you remember, some of the scientists on the Manhattan Project weren't positively sure that a nuclear detonation wouldn't ignite the planet's atmosphere in a fusing chain reaction and burn it up, or some damn thing like that.

Linda R. · Mar 28, 2008

Ramen said: ↑

The question is whether you would kill yourself or become trapped at the event horizon for all eternity.
Click to expand...

Argh, isn't it 'Time for Yesterday' that uses that plot device?
Got to admit, the possibility bugs the hell out of me.

bryce · Mar 28, 2008

oldfella1962 said: ↑

Runaway black hos: Some physicists say the LHC could create microscopic black hos that would hang around for just a tiny fraction of a second and then decay. Sancho and Wagner worry that millions of black hos might somehow persist and coalesce into a compact gravitational mass that would draw in other matter and grow bigger. That's pure science fiction, said Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at the City College of New York. "These black hos don't live very long, and they have microscopic energy, and so they are harmless," he told me.
Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Unless you miscalculated and created the deadly 'nappy-headed' variety of black ho.

Then again, astrophysicist John Archibald Wheeler once stated that "Black holes have no hair."

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Fears of quantum implosion prompt lawsuit!

CaptainChewbacca Lord of Rodly Might

Bulldog Only Pawn in Game of Life

Marso High speed, low drag.

Dan Leach Climbing Staff Member Moderator

Lethesoda Quixiotic

Ramen Banned

Beck Monarchist, Far-Right Nationalist

Jenee Driver 8

Volpone Zombie Hunter

The Exception The One Who Will Be Administrator Super Moderator

bryce Optimism - It's Back!

Nautica Probably a Dual

Tuckerfan BMF

oldfella1962 the only real finish line

Marso High speed, low drag.

Linda R. Fresh Meat

bryce Optimism - It's Back!

Log in or Sign up

Fears of quantum implosion prompt lawsuit!

CaptainChewbacca Lord of Rodly Might

Bulldog Only Pawn in Game of Life

Marso High speed, low drag.

Dan Leach Climbing Staff Member Moderator

Lethesoda Quixiotic

Ramen Banned

Beck Monarchist, Far-Right Nationalist

Jenee Driver 8

Volpone Zombie Hunter

The Exception The One Who Will Be Administrator Super Moderator

bryce Optimism - It's Back!

Nautica Probably a Dual

Tuckerfan BMF

oldfella1962 the only real finish line

Marso High speed, low drag.

Linda R. Fresh Meat

bryce Optimism - It's Back!

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