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Doomsday Fears Spark Lawsuit
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.
. . .
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.
. . .
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.
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.
. . .
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.
. . .
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.
In an older post from two years ago, I mentioned some of these fears about the RHIC (and the LHC):
Six years ago when the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider was about to come online there was some speculation/fears that its operation could be the catalyst for certain scenarios. There was a scientific paper at the time examining why this accelerator wasn't likely to trigger the end of the world (and, obviously, it didn't)--one of those coauthors is a Nobel prize winner, incidentally. But one might speculate that these disaster scenarios might play out in some future lab or perhaps through some natural occurrence (of course I'm not saying it's likely they will--it's just fun to think about).
The first prospect was that a black hole would be created by our tomfoolery with extreme conditions in accelerators. Not a new idea and in fact if certain (very) speculative ideas about the universe are correct such small black holes might be created by the Large Hadron Collider when it gets going next year. I know that program touched on black holes after covering gamma ray bursts but they were talking about rogue black holes that might wander into the solar system. With those, as they said, we'd see it coming for years. A man-made black hole would take us off guard. And it could be very unpleasant for the planet.
The second idea centers on the fact that a vacuum isn't just empty nothingness, it's a structured medium and can undergo transitions into different phases, just as water can be solid ice or liquid (this idea is what's going on in inflationary cosmology if you're familiar with that). The possibility exists that the vacuum is in fact not stable but rather metastable, meaning if you pour enough energy into it it can clear the hurdles in its way and settle down to a more stable state. It's as if there were a ball in a depression (so any small push leads to the ball moving a bit but then rolling right back down) that was pushed so hard it went up over the rim only to roll down into an even deeper depression than it was already in. If the vacuum was really unstable, concentrating enough energy could be catastrophic not just for the earth but for everything in the entire universe (the disturbance would travel out from wherever it starts at the speed of light). Generally we don't worry about screwing things up because there are things in nature (like high energy cosmic ray collisions) that concentrate a million times more energy than we're capable of. But hey, maybe someday.
A third scenario the guys assessing the dangers of the RHIC brought up is a cool one. It involves strange matter, a material made partly of strange quarks that might exist in neutron stars. Apparently if this stuff has a number of properties that it likely doesn't have (but maybe) the following disaster scenario could occur: a clump (called a strangelet) of this stuff with a negative charge is formed in the extreme conditions of the collider. It comes to a rest and is captured by a regular positively charged atomic nucleus. It absorbs the particles making up this nucleus, forming a larger strangelet. It now has a positive charge but captures electrons to get back its negative charge--it moves on to another nucleus and repeats the process. This thing goes on growing without bound, like the Blob. Spooky. Again, very unlikely but fun to think about.
The bottom line is that this stuff is not going to happen.
