Science: Report Rules Out Subatomic Doomsday
Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 7:49:29 pm PDT
I don’t know about you, but I’m going to sleep a little bit better tonight knowing that the scientists aren’t going to tear a hole in the fabric of the universe.
Or maybe they’re just saying that.
Europe’s CERN particle-physics lab has issued its long-awaited report on safety issues surrounding the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most expensive atom-smasher. Some have feared that when the collider reaches full power, sometime next year, it might create microscopic black holes or other exotic phenomena that could endanger Earth. The new report, like earlier safety studies, rules out the possibility of global danger.
Critics of the collider are pursuing a federal lawsuit challenging the safety claims - and they’re likely to continue the doomsday debate even in the wake of this report.
The report’s argument follows the basic line used in past reports: Even the most energetic collisions planned for the LHC are far less powerful than cosmic-ray collisions that have been going on for billions of years.
“Nature has already generated on Earth as many collisions as about a million LHC experiments – and the planet still exists,” CERN said in its lay-language summary of the report. “Astronomers observe an enormous number of larger astronomical bodies throughout the universe, all of which are also struck by cosmic rays. The universe as a whole conducts more than 10 million million LHC-like experiments per second. The possibility of any dangerous consequences contradicts what astronomers see - stars and galaxies still exist.”
The report also delves into the theoretical implications even if it turns out that microscopic black holes may hang around longer than most scientists think, and still ends up ruling out the catastrophic risk. In the stable-black-hole scenario, physicists do not expect the black holes to gobble up matter and grow to a monster size. Instead, they would interact - or not interact - with the particles they came across.
