Will operating the world's largest particle accelerator create a black hole that swallows up the Earth? Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho think it might, so they have sued the Department of Energy and the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in federal court seeking to halt completion of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. The New York Times reports:
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. . . .
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. . . .
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.”
Dragons? Now that would be cool!
Which raises a burning question: Has the Volokh Conspiracy acquired the syndicated "News of the Weird" column? Enquiring Minds Want To Know! (TM)
Seriously, though, if there is any chance of destroying the whole world, perhaps a little caution is called for?
Alternatively, this might happen.
Oh, and yes, even though US rules for forum are a bit lax (I was always taught "forum of the plaintiff", with very few exceptions.), this suit should presumably have been brought in Switzerland.
The black holes that would be created--if any--would last for an unimaginably short time. In addition, black holes aren't actually magic, despite how much fun they are in sci-fi. Outside of the event horizon, the black hole exerts no more gravity than any other body with the same mass.
So, in other words, black holes don't actually suck in neighboring stars and that sort of thing. If you were hanging around outside of the event horizon of a black hole, you would want to make sure you didn't cross the line. But you wouldn't be sucked in. So if you got crushed by almost-infinite gravity, it would be your own damned fault.
What would the gravitational pull of one of these tiny black holes be? It's hard to imagine that it would be sufficient to cause us trouble.
His statement was no less dishonest than a used car salesman responding to someone's worry that the wheels could fall off the car with "well, but anything could happen: you could find million bucks in the glove compartment tomorrow!"
There is a real debate on exactly what would happen with collisions of this energy level in a stationary-to-the-earth frame. It's one thing to say that the evidence is very heavily on the side of safety. It's a very different thing to use people's lack of understanding of QM to misleading and spin.
http://www.inversecondemnation.com/sancho_complaint.pdf
It's sort of amusing to think about it, isn't it? Imagine if it really were a serious possibility that something like this could destroy the entire world (and still was based overseas), and a U.S. Court had to hear a class action lawsuit demanding an injunction, based on the theory of potential loss of life and property. I would LOVE to see that ruling!
As I recall, one of Teller's primary concerns was that a detonation might set the atmosphere on fire, killing every living thing on the planet. I don't believe any theoretical work was done to show that would not happen, it was just assumed it wouldn't.
All of this based on long-ago readings, so apologies to Dr. Teller if my memory is faulty.
I vaguely recall Rhodes mentioning this, but I think they did actually make an estimate of the possibility. 3% is the number that comes to mind. Don't have my copy at hand though, or i'd try to dig it up.
Some people should simply not reproduce.
Was out on a trial ride this afternoon only miles from Los Alamos with a woman whose husband is a particle physicist at Los Alamos, previously at CERN. Never gave a moment's thought to evacuating, whether the thing to do would be to hightail it north or south on Highway 84, and then where to go.
Enjoyed the reference above to Tom Lehrer, surely one of the greatest modern satirists, who selfishly retired way too early. Was that line part of the patter introducing "So Long Mom, I'm Off to Drop the Bomb," the ballad he wrote in advance for WWIII? (Norman Podhoretz maintains that we have already been through WWIII and won it, that being the Cold War, and we are now engaged in WWIV, the fight against Islamic Fundamentalism.) If we are talking about a nuclear end of the world, though, shouldn't we also mention Dr. Strangelove?According to Ron Suskind, Dick Cheney accepts no more than a one percent risk of catastrophe.
No, that line was from the song "We will all go together when we go".
I held back when I called Lehrer "one of the greatest modern satirists." Have there been any greater in recent memory, though? Someone reminded me that Lehrer even went out with an incomparable one, saying after Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that it was time for him (Lehrer) to retire, since satire had reached its absolute zenith.
BTW, if this end-of-the-world thing is going to come to pass, do they have a date certain for it yet?
If my day-to-day standard of living depended on particle accellerators, I think I'd be more willing to take a risk than if, as is really the case, I probably stand to gain absolutely nothing from the operation of this doomsday device.
Some of those problems cancel each other out. Radical Islam takes over the earth? No more nanotechnologists. Virus outbreak? No more radical Islamic types. CERN kills the earth? Okay, global warming would hit an all-time high for a fraction of a second, and then cease to exist, as there would be no globe to warm.
My approach: watch from the sidelines and figure out who is left standing at the end of the post- dragon-ridden, virus-infested, nanoparticle-filled, Islamofascist world.
"World Ends: Women, Minorities, Palestinians Hardest Hit"?
These are smart cookies. I wonder if they're doing that? They may want that for other reasons such as estimating particle lifetimes.
-dk
Well, if the world IS destroyed, at least there will finally have been experimental confirmation of string theory ....
Every cloud has a silver lining!
The headline .. The $5.6 Billion Gizmo
Congress did kill it.
I'm also reminded of David Brin's Earth novel, wherein a micro black-hole falls through the Earth into the center and starts to eat the planet.
Neurodoc,
Upon further reflection, I can see the crazy Islamic types getting into nanotech - nanosensors on burqas that would indicate if a woman had just shown someone a strip of uber-sexy ankle, or the like.
Small thinking? Mea culpa, on many occaisons. (To take this totally off-topic and make an otherwise very nerdy thread quite lowbrow, the engineers in the firm that I used to work in did joke about the 1996 chemistry Nobel laureate and his field - Dick Smalley and his nanotubes.)
By the way, it's small imperfections for nanotechnologists - very, very small. :) (Least that's what I keep telling myself.)
If a black hole were to be made, and if the black hole were to survive long enough to fall to the floor, then it would suck up the particles in the floor, and then fall through to the basement, sucking up the particles there, and then fall through the mantle and the core, where all the fluid would get sucked in. I don't know how long the rocky shell of the planet would survive, but its days would be numbered.
Now, I don't think this would really happen. But if we were to form a black hole on the surface of the earth whose event horizon was far enough out that other matter could enter it, there's trouble. So black holes are "magic" in that way.
Again, I expect that the black holes would evaporate first. This is a fun concept for science fiction (see Dan Simmons), but I doubt it could happen in reality.
The musical satire of Tom Lehrer is great. There are other examples... The "Merry Minuete" by the Kingston Trio is among them. The final verse is:
But we shall be thankful and tranquil and proud
For man has been endowed with a mushroom shaped cloud
And we know for certain, that some lucky day
Someone will set the spark off...
And We Will All Be Blown Away...!
BTW, I'm not going to take this apocolyptic threat unless someone can show me where Nostradamus predicted it.
Off the top of my head, I can think of at least one negative feedback mechanism: all that energy released with stuff crossing the event horizon is going to heat up the immediate surroundings of the black hole something awful. Bound to reduce the density of the matter around it quite a bit, keeping sort of a vapor bubble around it. I wonder if the numbering of Earth's days by this particular mechanism might actually stretch well past Sol's red giant stage but my math has rusted solid in the last 20 years or so...
Let us not forget the Weird Al classic "It's Christmas at Ground Zero"
I doubt that the courts in Hawaii have personal jurisdiction over CERN. Furthermore I think CERN may be entitled to sovereign immunity, and to have the State Department appear and assert it for them.
Shouldn't the lawyers who filed the case be subject to Rule 11 sanctions?
So if there was any such a thing as a magic universe-destroying particle, we wouldn't be here because the universe would have been destroyed a long time ago. A small black hole is a more realistic possibility: we know that black holes have been produced in the past, some are still out there (or at least things that produces the same effects visible from long range that we think a black hole of many sun-masses would), and the universe is still here. OTOH, you don't want to be in a position where close observation of one of those black holes is possible...
But this experiment isn't going to produce such a black hole; there isn't a blue giant star's worth of mass or the equivalent in energy waiting to be compressed into the hole. What there's a bare possibility of producing is a tiny black hole, with an event horizon smaller than an elementary particle and not enough mass and gravitation to notice. That would be very interesting to observe, if that's even possible - it's tiny, it's too small to keep a halo of matter in orbit around itself like the big ones do, and I think the beams are just a little bit off of 180 degrees at the meeting points, so I expect the tiny black hole to be departing CERN at a right angle to the beams at far above the earth's and solar system's escape velocities. According to Hawking, such a small hole should "evaporate" quickly, and that trail of shed particles is how we might be able to track it.
Such a tiny black hole isn't much of a danger. It cannot absorb matter quickly, because it's physical dimension (the event horizon) is smaller than any particle available to be absorbed. You wouldn't feel it passing through you. It is losing mass quickly to evaporation, with the rate increasing as it gets smaller. That does mean it's emitting hard radiation, but the total energy emitted through final dissolution is only the energy of the two protons that slammed together to make it, and that isn't going to kill anyone. (Assuming we don't have a regular spray of black holes coming out the side - but that's a vanishingly unlikely possibility, and if it was expected, you'd have most of the nuclear physicists in the world lining up to stand in the path of that spray with some observing instrument...)
What if Hawking is wrong and the baby black hole doesn't evaporate? Suppose further that in it's formation it happens to fire other particles out the side and wind up with a low enough velocity to spiral down into the Earth? In that case, it would be slowly eating the Earth one electron, proton, or neutron at a time, and in time would grow large enough to have a halo of shredded particles spiraling into it and eat the Earth progressively faster, until the energy emitted from that process blows up what's left. I've no idea how to calculate the time before problems start to show up, but I rather suspect it's not only longer than the sun will burn, but out past the heat death of the universe.
You really think the brainiacs at CERN haven't considered that? I'm sure before they make any black holes, they're going to cover the floor with a drop cloth.
Yes and those imperfections can be fixed with the miracle of nanotech! The perfect tool for small, minor imperfections!
Someone else wrote
If my day-to-day standard of living depended on particle accellerators, I think I'd be more willing to take a risk than if, as is really the case, I probably stand to gain absolutely nothing from the operation of this doomsday device.
Almost every discovery made in history that changed the world was made by accident, or was a result of "pure research" whose immediate application was unknown. Maxwell didn't set out on revolutionizing electro magnetism. Kepler, Bohr, didn't dreamed of nuclear power, they were just trying to figure out how stuff works.
You can't predict in advance what discoveries will happen and how they'll change our understanding of the universe.
Actually one of the arguments against String Theory is that if it were true, it would have changed the world already.
Posner says (at 197):
He also notes (p. 196) that the similar US facility's operational safety protocols do not address potential catastrophic risks. This might be a good argument for an adequate NEPA analysis up front, as the plaintiffs have requested here (putting aside the jurisdictional questions regarding the foreign defendants).
Are any of you more familiar with the LHC than Posner is, have you read his critique, or are you able to refute his sources?
Probably a few vaccine manufacturers have their HQ there as well. Double win!
The Democrats, of course, would prefer to negotiate with the black hole. See how far that gets them!
Even more insidiously, it's possible that Obama might be working with ... well, "black hole," right? Obama?...
... That first letter in "Obama" sure *looks* like a hole to me. (Great graphic there for FoxNews, I'm sure.)
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.
Go read the link Robert Thomas kindly gave us. Turns out that is exactly the parlay that Sancho presents in his affidavit.
The suit was pro se, so no chance of disciplining a lawyer, more's the pity.
As a newspaperman in Hawaii, I am pleased to say that the Honolulu papers have ignored this suit.