Then there's the matter of black holes.
Harvey Newman, a Caltech physicist who was one of the discoverers of the gluon and is leader of the U.S. contingent on the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, said the collider could theoretically produce a mini-black hole by packing a tremendous amount of energy into a tiny space.
But he said the black hole would pose no threat because it would last only 10-27 seconds before decaying -- hardly enough time to start gobbling up the French countryside.
Critics are not convinced. Just last month, Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho filed suit in U.S. District Court in Honolulu to block the start-up of the new collider until CERN produces a comprehensive safety report.
Speaking from Hawaii, Wagner said that despite assurances from scientists at CERN and around the world, there was no proof a mini-black hole would disappear. No one has ever seen it happen, said Wagner, who studied cosmic ray physics at UC Berkeley as a young man.
It's just as possible that the tiny black hole would be stable and start chewing up normal matter, he said.
It could take years for it to become large enough to gobble up the Earth, but there's no evidence that can't happen, he said.
His suit for a restraining order is to "preserve the status quo while the court considers the arguments. In this case, the status quo is Mother Earth being here," he said.
Another nightmare possibility is that the collider could produce something called strange matter, a theoretical substance that some physicists think exists in the center of the remnants of collapsed stars.
The pressure and temperature are so intense that the protons and electrons fuse into neutrons, then collapse into a mass of quarks.
Theoretically, the tremendous gravity of strange matter would convert any ordinary matter it came in contact with.
Mangano said he is now writing a report addressing such concerns. He said that protests of physics experiments were nothing new.
"Before each new accelerator started, there has been some panic," he said. Wagner, in fact, filed suit in 1999 to stop Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York. It went ahead and the world survived -- just as it will this time, according to scientists from Mangano to Newman and Stephen Hawking.
"Look," Mangano said, leaning forward in his chair at CERN's sprawling complex, "what if I told you tomorrow when you shave you will blow up the world? You laugh. You say that can't happen. But how do you know?
"The only thing we know is that there have been about a million billion shaves since people started shaving and the world is still here," he said. "So all we can say is the probability of you blowing up the world when you shave tomorrow is less than one in 1015."
http://www.latimes.com/news/printed...01.story?page=4
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18-05-2008, 20:52
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