The next month should see further action in the doomsday lawsuit filed in March - the one claiming that mini-black holes from Europe's Large Hadron Collider could destroy the world. The plaintiffs in the case, Luis Sancho and Walter Wagner, want the CERN particle-physics center to put the $8 billion project on hold until more questions about such a scenario (and others) are answered to their satisfaction.

The federal government (that is, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and DOE-supported Fermilab) is one of the defendants in the case, and it's been served with a summons that requires a response by June 24. Wagner relayed word that Europe's CERN particle-physics center, the other major defendant, was served as well this week.

However, CERN spokesman James Gillies told me today he wasn't aware that any papers had been served. "We haven't received anything as yet," he said.

Gillies said scientists have finished updating a safety report that concludes the particle collider poses no danger of destroying the world. That report is to be presented to the CERN Council next month, and would then be released to the public, he said.
go

Someone already beat you to it.

Man, I'll be thinking about this years to come.

I'm betting it is safe. The doom sayers are the same kinds of people who thought going into space would auto-kill you, that the sound barrier would crush any plane flat, that the Y2K computer bug would destroy mankind and that even a low power nuke would ignite the atmosphere and burn the planet down to ash in a couple hours.

In a way it is good to have these people, as scientists seriously over engineer everything for safety these days.

i think that would be a safe bet...



Well, in this case there is really no over-engineering our way out of it. Take an object and design a machine that can throw said object against a wall. No matter how you design that machine, it can only throw the object against the wall with a certain velocity. How do you over-engineer the object-throwing machine so it doesn't break the wall?! Either it does or it doesn't at that velocity no matter how that machine looks. And in this LHC case we have no way of breaking that proverbial wall.

But other than that, I agree with you. It is because of such people that stuff generally over-engineer for safety and in many respects (if not all), we should certainly be happy for that

Cheers,
Badeskov

and breaking news:

Physics expert: European collider is safe

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., July 1 (UPI) -- A U.S. physics professor is scoffing at claims the Large Hadron Collider being built in Europe might create a black hole, producing a planetary catastrophe.

University of California-Santa Barbara Professor Steve Giddings said if any microscopic black holes are produced, they would exist for "about a nano-nano-nanosecond."

The study is co-authored by Michelangelo Mangano of the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, which is building the world's largest particle collider near Geneva, Switzerland.

"The future health of our planet and the safety of its people are of paramount concern to us all," Giddings said. "There were already very strong physics arguments that there is no risk from hypothetical micro black holes, and we've provided additional arguments ruling out risk even under very bizarre hypotheses."

The $8 billion LHC, under construction for 14 years, is expected to begin operations in September, colliding proton beams at levels of energy never before produced to be studied, for among other things, the possibility of extra dimensions of space.

Giddings' research is to be published in the journal Physical Review D.

Source: UPI

not enougth information here , if it works wouldent we be gone yeatserday.

maybe we did