Doomsday Fears Spark Lawsuit
Alan Boyle writes that 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. More.Image: EIROforum/CERN | Hadron Collider's "ATLAS detector"
Video: LHCIntro Previs 080523
Interesting article written before last week's NASA GLAST launch. (Gamma-ray observatory mission to examine black holes)
View Video explanation/talk (below) or: Here. (Slow to load)
Scientist Boyle writes:
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?The loop repeats, the code is cracked, and again... And as precise as it was, the curiously abrupt calendar end... We're likely to discover the secret of the Mayans, or at least, forever alter how we implement travel...
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.
(But now it appears that they forgot to do a negative impact study.)
