Particle accelerator project sued on fears it will destroy the planet

[GrnMarvl14]

Source.

The creators of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's biggest particle accelerator, are being sued in a Hawaii federal court on the grounds that the project could have planet-destroying effects, according to MSNBC's science blog.

Defendants in the case, Europe's CERN Laboratory and Illinois-based Fermilab, have said that the collider is perfectly safe. But former nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner, along with another concerned critic, have asked in a lawsuit that the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation, and CERN reassess the collider's security and environmental standards for at least four months before it goes into start-up mode, according to the report. Detractors worry that the collider could create mini black holes that last long enough to suck in matter all around it.

The LHC, designed to test scientific questions like "What's the nature of dark matter?," is expected to start operating later this year at CERN's headquarters in Geneva.

Wow, I never thought I'd see the day when we were suing people to save the planet.

 

[Æsahættr]

It's to be expected. Money talks. Although this is going to be one of the first great scientific undertakings of the new milennium, and I'd hate see a project like this go bust before it gets started.

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

Wait, haven't they been running tests like that for a while? I remember reading back in last year that in November 2007 they were going to do a test that had like a one on five billion chance of creating a black hole, and November came and went with no black holes...

 

[Rayne]

Really? I thought most of those tests were hypothetical. The reason why the Hadron Collider was being built is because other particle accelerators have a tougher time achieving a state that produces a black hole. And while fear of the unknown is warranted especially in a case that puts the world at stake, an ample amount of time and research has gone into assuaging fears that causes the world to be placed in such danger.

The black holes predicted to form in the Cern particle accelerator are, in theory, on the nano scale. By the theory of Hawking Radiation, black holes will radiate a finite amount of thermal energy eventually returning to a state of equilibrium. While it's true that for larger black holes this process will probably take eons, but for small molecular collisions, the energy contained within the black holes they may produce are so minuscule that most will only last for a fraction of a second.

Also, Black holes thrive on the abundance of mass. Large scale black holes form with the collapse of a really dense star. The ones that may form in the collider shouldn't be able to reach any sorts of critical mass that begins to spontaneously react with the environment. Black holes have gravity too and last time I checked the mass of a proton (1.67x10^-27kg), much less for other particles, is hardly enough to draw more particles into itself that is unless particles reached some sort of critical mass building upon one another..

That said black holes are a minor consequence in the scheme of all the research being done, but I don't think they would be a catastrophe.

 

[Luphinid Silnaek]

But you can hardly expect the suers to understand that.

On a more thoughtful note, everyone does have their facts right, yes? It would be dreadful if the project suffered setbacks from someone who doesn't know what he/she/it is talking about.