"Newtonian Physics"...Newt Gingrich style reviewed

"Is Newt Gingrich's EMP Doomsday a Reality?"

by

Ian O'Neill

December 12th, 2011

DiscoveryNews

This may sound familiar if, like me, you're a fan of "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3" -- a hugely popular first-person video game based in a fictional near-future when the U.S. goes to war with Russia. But if you've been following the GOP presidential campaign recently, you might think one or two of the candidates are out of touch with the not-so-fictional near future.

In particular, it seems Newt Gingrich has been playing too much "Call of Duty."

Gingrich has been a long-time worrier about the threat of an attack on the U.S. from a rich terrorist organization or rogue nation -- such as North Korea or Iran -- that could cripple the nation, killing "millions" of citizens. But how could such a dastardly deed be accomplished?

Citing the specter that has been hanging over us since the Cold War, he believes the U.S. is vulnerable to an electromagnetic pulse -- or EMP for short.

A nuclear weapon could be detonated above North America, reasons Gingrich, and the resulting electronic interference would render the nation's power grid, satellites, computers etc., useless. Death and mayhem would ensue. It would be a bit like "Mad Max," but with less '70's hairdos.

"Without adequate preparation, we would basically lose our civilization in a matter of seconds," he said during a 2009 conference.

The situation is apparently so dire that Gingrich co-wrote a doomsday book on the topic, called "One Second After."

Although game developers take the effect of EMP damage for granted, what are the realities of a space-based nuclear detonation?

NEWS: What It Takes to Make a Nuclear Bomb

Supporting Gingrich's argument, the impact of high-altitude nuclear tests during the Cold War proves that detonating nuclear bombs is a bad idea all-round.

In 1962, the U.S. detonated a 1.4 megaton nuke 200 miles above the Pacific Ocean to, you know, see what would happen.

Although situated 900 miles from the blast site, Hawaii felt the impact from the famous "Starfish Prime" explosion. Streetlights were knocked out, telephone communications were blocked and household alarms were triggered.

Beautiful equatorial auroral displays also lit up the sky. The event was nicknamed the "rainbow bomb."

The nuclear blast had caused all kinds of upper-atmosphere turmoil that generated rapid and powerful changes in the Earth's magnetic field, producing a pulse throughout the atmosphere below. The resulting induction of electrical currents shorted unshielded electrical supplies, like Honolulu's streetlights.

Radiation also surged above the atmosphere, causing indiscriminate damage to a number of satellites. The world's first commercial communications satellite Telstar was also badly bruised by the incident.

ANALYSIS: Will You Survive A Nuclear Attack?

In the same year, a similar test by the Soviets -- using a smaller warhead over a populated region of Kazakhstan -- generated an amplified EMP effect due to the stronger geomagnetic field at that latitude, causing a power station to fail and catch fire.

Some of the effects of an EMP are analogous to a geomagnetic storm, when the solar wind and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) interact with the Earth's magnetosphere. Although not as localized as a nuclear explosion, there are worries that an intense solar storm could generate huge currents across the Earth's atmosphere, shorting entire power grids.

In 1989, for example, the Hydro-Quebec power company in Canada was caught unawares by a huge solar eruption that generated intense atmospheric disruption, overloading the power supply, impacting thousands of customers. Solar flares and CME's regularly cause global communication outages and sometimes even turn satellites into "zombiesats."

OK, so the physics is there, Gingrich's concerns appear to be well-placed. Or are they?

Although Cold War tests have proven that there is some impact by a high-altitude nuclear blast to assets on the ground via an EMP, the result is far from certain.

Commenting in The Space Review last year, Yousaf M. Butt, a nuclear physicist and consultant with the Federation of American Scientists, said, "If terrorists want to do something serious, they'll use a weapon of mass destruction -- not mass disruption. They don't want to depend on complicated secondary effects in which the physics is not very clear."

Like an intense solar storm, although the worst-case scenario could inflict damage on satellites and national power grids, there's no certain way of knowing the impact of any given solar event. The same goes for a hypothetical EMP attack. The target is indiscriminate and the outcome is far from certain.

Surely, if a rogue state or terrorist organization had a nuclear warhead, they'd much rather find new and ingenious ways of rolling it into Washington, D.C. undetected rather than strapping it atop a rocket and blasting it into space?

Besides, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency has got that scenario covered if anyone was stupid enough to send any projectile toward the U.S.

According to Pentagon spokesman Richard Lehner, downing an incoming missile would be pretty straightforward. There's an arsenal of interceptor missiles just waiting for the opportunity to take out an EMP threat before it explodes.

"It doesn't matter if the target is Chicago or 100 miles over Nebraska," he said. "For the interceptor, it's the same thing."

Alas, Gingrich's EMP concern is, at best, misplaced.

In my opinion, the threat of a solar flare-induced disaster is far more serious than a megalomaniac or rogue state flying a nuclear warhead into space. And what about asteroids? There's lots of those floating around just waiting for the opportunity to drop into some unsuspecting gravitational well. There are plenty of real space-based threats out there that could be added to political wrangling without having to make one up.

Unfortunately, real space threats aren't politically "real" until a meteorite flattens a city.


Newt Gingrich has been smoking something odd...shockwave of electricity?

LHC again

I am amused at all of this. It is most interesting that "fear and trembling" is based on theoretical physics. How can the absence of empirical data influence a sound system of knowledge. As I mentioned earlier...Y2K or fall off the edge of the Earth--redux.

The latest...

"Planet Survival, Pro and ConWill the earth be obliterated by Labor Day?"

What the Times didn't tell you

by

Timothy Noah

June 27th, 2008

Slate

The New York Times keeps reporting that there may be an itty-bitty chance that when the Large Hadron Collider at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), located just outside Geneva, Switzerland, gets switched on late in August, the world will come to an end. But probably there is no such chance, even an itty-bitty one.

A story like this poses difficult questions about news placement.

If there's even a microscopic chance that human agency will destroy the planet—the CERN accelerator is the world's largest—then surely this news belongs on Page One. That's how the Times played it on March 29 with Dennis Overbye's story, "Asking A Judge To Save the World, and Maybe A Whole Lot More."

On the other hand, news stories announcing even a microscopic chance that human agency will destroy the planet risk creating worldwide panic. After all, as my friend Gregg Easterbrook pointed out in a fine cover piece in the June Atlantic ("The Sky Is Falling"), it's much likelier that humankind will be wiped out by an asteroid. In the piece, Easterbrook reported that an asteroid specialist for the Air Force put the likelihood of a "dangerous space-object" collision in any given century at one in 10. (Caveat: Not all such collision scenarios, which include comets and meteors in addition to asteroids, posit the destruction of all human life on the planet.)

The Times has kept follow-ups to the end-of-the-world story off Page One. Overbye published an explanatory essay in the paper's science section on April 15, and on June 21 he published deep inside the Times A section a news story bearing the whimsical headline, "Earth Will Survive After All, Physicists Say." On June 27, Overbye reported, again inside the Times A section, that the United States was seeking to dismiss a lawsuit by two worried citizens aimed at preventing anyone from throwing the big switch at the Large Hadron Collider. The government's principal response, I'm sorry to report, wasn't that there's no chance that switching on the Large Hadron Collider will bring about the end of the world, but rather that a six-year statute of limitations has already passed.

I can well understand why the Times doesn't want to give sustained big play to the possibility that the world will end on or around Labor Day. In addition to the civic-minded concern that this might create worldwide panic, there are practical matters of self-interest. If the possibility weren't realized, as most scientists seem to expect, then the Times would look foolish. If the possibility were realized, it would have no opportunity to collect a Pulitzer, because the Times, the Pulitzer board, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which gives out the award, and every last Times reader would all be obliterated, along with the rest of the planet.

On the other hand, when readers are invited to ponder the possibility, or lack thereof, that the Large Hadron Collider will obliterate their planet—even when that invitation is extended in an edgy Timesian spirit of good fun—they deserve a decent summary of the arguments pro and con. Overbye has done a very poor job in this regard. I don't know one-tenth about this subject as Overbye, but since he let you down, your faithful Chatterbox is duty bound to step into the breach. (A previous Slate "Explainer" column on this topic focused, like the feds, on legal issues at the expense of scientific ones.)

To keep things simple, I will limit discussion to the possibility that the Large Hadron Collider will swallow up the planet in a black hole. This is the most-discussed doomsday scenario. (I should note in passing, however, the existence also of scenarios involving "strangelets," a hypothetical category of matter that might set off an uncontrollable fusion chain reaction that would transform the planet into what the BBC calls a "hot, dead lump"; "magnetic monopoles," a hypothetical thingamabob that might conceivably destroy protons, hence atoms, hence matter, hence Planet Earth; and vacuum bubbles, which might alter the entire universe in some way that would render humankind extinct.)

Both sides in the black-hole version of the doomsday argument recognize that the Large Hadron Collider may create black holes. These would be little ("microscopic") black holes. The majority view, as articulated by CERN scientists, is that microscopic black holes are harmless, that cosmic rays create them all the time, and that they traverse our planet at very near the speed of light on a regular basis without causing so much as a nosebleed. The minority view, as articulated in an affidavit filed in federal court by Walter L. Wagner, a retired federal nuclear safety officer, might be summarized by quoting Bruce Springsteen: "From small things, mama/ Big things one day come." According to this view, CERN-created microscopic black holes would be different because they would travel more slowly, increasing the possibility that they would be captured by the earth's gravity, enabling them to gobble up matter and grow bigger, like the monster plant Audrey II ("Feed me") in Little Shop of Horrors, until eventually they gobbled up Planet Earth itself.

Brian Cox, a University of Manchester physicist who works on the Large Hadron Collider, responded to the doomsday argument in an interview posted June 26 by O'Reilly Media. I will give him the last word:

You read on the web, well, what happens if these black holes fly straight through the planet before they have a chance to eat it? Whereas the one that the LHC could [create would] just sit there and perhaps sink to the center of the earth? It turns out that when you do the calculation the black holes are so small that even if they didn't decay and they just sat there they wouldn't come close enough to any matter—because matter is basically empty space—to dissolve and to [inaudible] the matter and to grow so they wouldn't do any damage. Okay; why don't you ignore that? Well the final piece of wonderful evidence which confines these idiots to the bin is that you look up into the sky and you see white walls—some neutron stars—very, very dense stars. Cosmic rays are hitting those with energy greater than those seen at the LHC so if you can make black holes, black holes will be created on that surface. It turns out that they're nuclear dense, these stars, so the black holes are not going to fly through there; they're going to sit there and they're going to eat away and they're going to eat away much quicker than they could eat away the earth because the matter is much denser. So people have calculated how many neutron stars or white walls you would see in the sky if this were happening. If they were getting eaten by little mini-black holes and it turns out that there'd be very few indeed—in fact probably pretty much none, and you can do the calculation. So there's a whole layer [laughs] that—I don't need to reassure you anymore, I'm sure, but there are layer after layer after layer of—of tests and some of them are observational and some of them are theoretical and it turns out that it's utter nonsense.

I won't pretend to understand very much of this. But it does seem reassuring.

And from Scientific American:

"As LHC Draws Nigh, Nobelists Outline Dreams--And Nightmares"

by

JR Minkel

July 2nd, 2008

Scientific American

The number 14 turns up conspicuously in discussions of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the soon-to-be world's biggest particle accelerator. Construction of its underground, 17-mile (27-kilometer) ring on a site near Geneva, Switzerland, has taken 14 years. It is designed to reach energies of 14 tera- (trillion) electron volts (TeV), or about seven times that of the Tevatron, the world's currently reigning accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.

And project leaders at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced today that next month workers should be done chilling the machine's 50,000 tons of magnets to temperatures colder than deep space—a bracing –456.3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.9 kelvins)—making them ready to whip opposing beams of protons to near light speed and collide them so researchers can pick over the debris.

The expected cool-down date? The week of July 14.

Needless to say, switching on the largest, most complex science experiment ever constructed will be a drawn-out process. "There's no red button to press," James Gillies, a CERN spokesperson, said during a news conference yesterday Web cast from the CERN Control Center in Prévessin, France. The lab plans to send the first protons through the ring in mid-August, then spend a couple of months ramping them up to high energies. Ideally, the LHC's massive particle detectors should be ready for action at around the same time.

In anticipation of the start-up, CERN convened a panel of five Nobel Prize–winning physicists to give their thoughts on the project. The LHC was built first and foremost to seek out a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, which solves the conundrum of why the photon (the particle that conveys the force of electromagnetism) has no mass, whereas its counterparts, the W and Z bosons (the operative particles in the weak nuclear force that causes radioactive decay), do.

Physicists believe that the Higgs breaks a symmetry between these forces, similar to the way Earth's gravity makes it appear that space has an up and a down. It does so by acting like molasses that other particles have to plow through. The end result is mass as we know it.

Most of the panelists said they were confident that the LHC would uncover the Higgs, because its presence (or at least something like it) is so strongly implied by the standard model of particle physics, which describes the three forces that hold atoms together. (In addition to electromagnetism and the weak force is the strong nuclear force that keeps individual protons and neutrons from dissolving into more basic particles called quarks.)

Discovering the Higgs would close a three-decade-long chapter in the history of physics. "We are all enormously excited that the LHC is about to turn on," said David Gross of the University of California, Santa Barbara, co-winner of a 2004 Nobel for elucidating the strong nuclear force.

Part of the enthusiasm stems from the fact that the standard model was so successful that physicists have no firm clues on how to proceed beyond it. Even more interesting than the Higgs, panel members said, would be the discovery of particles responsible for dark matter as well as an explanation of why the universe has a preponderance of matter over antimatter, either of which would break new ground in fundamental physics.

And then there's the far-out stuff: George Smoot of the University of California, Berkeley, who shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for mapping the faint cosmic microwave background radiation that gave evidence of the big bang, mentioned the prospect of finding signs of extra dimensions of space implied by string theory. "I have really high hopes‚ Äîperhaps too high," he said.

Gross, who described himself as more conservative, said he expected the LHC to reveal supersymmetry, a proposed theory in which each particle has a heavier counterpart; such a discovery could explain the existence of dark matter as well as solve some lingering coincidences in particle physics known as unification and the hierarchy problem, which have to do with why the forces appear so different from one another.

Of course, nature might throw researchers a curveball. Martinus Veltman of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (Nobelist in 1999 with Gerard 't Hooft of Utrecht University in the Netherlands for work on the weak force that paved the way for the Higgs) suggested a gloomy but speculative scenario in which Higgs exists but fails to show up at the LHC. If that happens, he predicted, "it will probably be the end of particle physics."

Gross said that such a result, going against the standard model, would itself be "enormously exciting." What worried him was finding the Higgs and nothing else, because then it would be impossible to persuade world governments to fund future machines such as the proposed International Linear Collider, which took a hit in December when Congress yanked 2008 funding for the U.S. share of R&D on the project.

Without some hints from nature, physicists would not even know how big to build their machines to try to make new discoveries, Gross said. "My nightmare is we find the Higgs and nothing else," he said. "I have a lot of confidence that we won't, but that is a nightmare."

't Hooft, the fifth panelist, who shared his prize with Veltman, said even if the LHC turned up nothing but the Higgs, physicists would still keep the machine busy studying the way it interacts with other particles. Prior particle accelerators were considered successes for doing essentially the same thing, he said.

The discussion touched at least one laureate's nerves. Theoreticians "have too much time to think" sometimes, Carlo Rubbia (awarded half the 1984 physics prize for experiments that led to the discovery of the W and Z bosons) charged. Rubbia, a former director general of CERN who is considered the father of the LHC for his early work on the project and now holds scientific advisory positions at several European institutions, asked if Veltman would return his share of the Nobel Prize money in the event the LHC found no sign of the Higgs. (Veltman replied that he had already spent it.)

Despite the excitement and sense of urgency, all of the Nobelists acknowledged that uncovering nature's secrets takes time. This, too, however, became a touchy subject. When asked how long before the LHC will perform its first experiments at full energy, Rubbia betrayed signs of exasperation, noting that glitches are to be expected. "This is not going to be a fault, this is not going to be a failure," he said, if there are unexpected delays. "The science community needs peace and tranquility to get over all these problems."

Gross noted that it would take at least several years before evidence of Higgs began to come in. An LHC timeline circulated in April at a physics meeting in St. Louis indicated that certain varieties of supersymmetry ought to show up even before the Higgs does.

The bottom line, Smoot said: "We're all looking for this to be a revolutionary situation, and no matter what comes out, it will tell us something."

Government and lawyers put suits to rest

Government and lawyers put suits to rest

Now it will be officially put to rest though I doubt the naysayers will be placated.

"Government Seeks Dismissal of End-of-World Suit Against Collider"

by

Dennis Overbye

June 27th, 2008

The New York Times

Calling its claims "overly speculative and not credible," and saying that it is too late anyway, lawyers for the federal government argued this week that a so-called "doomsday suit" intended to prevent the startup of a the world’s most powerful particle accelerator should be thrown out of court.

When it begins operations, the collider will smash together subatomic particles at the speed of light in search of new forms of matter and new laws of physics.

In the lawsuit, filed in March in Honolulu district court, Walter Wagner, a retired radiation safety expert who lives in Hawaii, and Luis Sancho, a Spanish science writer, contended that the Large Hadron Collider could create microscopic black holes that could wind up eating the Earth, or other dangerous particles known as strangelets — a sort of contagious dead matter — or so-called magnetic monopoles, which could catalyze the destruction of ordinary matter.

The two men sued the European Center for Nuclear Research, or Cern, which is building the collider outside Geneva, Switzerland, and its American collaborators, the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory to stop the collider from going into operation until it had been proven safe.

In a barrage of some 40 documents filed the this week, government lawyers argued that the case should be dismissed and that they were entitled to a summary judgement in their favor because the lawsuit is subject to a six-year statute of limitations. The clock started ticking in this regard in 1998 or 1999 when the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy began spending money on the collider, the government lawyers say.

The government's counterattack comes on the heels of a long-awaited safety report issued by Cern physicists last week and approved by an outside panel that concluded there was no danger to the Earth from black holes or anything else that might come out of the collider. Everything that could happen in the collider has already happened millions of times over due to cosmic rays, the physicists said.

"There is no basis for any concerns about the consequences of new particles or forms of matter that could possibly be produced by the LHC," the report said.

Citing this and a previous safety report in 2002, the government argued that the plaintiffs, Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho, had no standing because they could not demonstrate any credible injury. "Scientifically," the brief says, "there is no basis for any conceivable threat that Plaintiffs have theoretically envisaged, such as strangelets, black holes, and magnetic monopoles."

This is not the first time, as the government noted, that Mr. Wagner has forecast the apocalypse. In 1999 and 2000, he sued to stop the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or Rhic, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island using the same arguments, which were found to be "speculative." Those cases were dismissed.

"This court should similarly reject Plaintiffs' challenges for the pure speculation they are and dismiss Plaintiffs' claims against Federal Defendants," the government said this week.

The lawyers also argued that even if Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho won, it would do them no good because the American share of the collider’s $8 billion cost — some $531 million — has now all been spent. Indeed, on Wednesday, June 25, Raymond Orbach, under secretary for science at the Department of Energy, issued a formal proclamation that the U.S. construction effort had been completed.

Although the U.S. continues to spend some money to support the experiments that will sift and analyze the products of these subatomic collisions, the machine will start up this fall with or without American participation.

In a deposition filed along with the government brief, Bruce P. Strauss, associate program manager for the collider at the Dept. of Energy, said, "If U.S. scientists were pulled back from the LHC today, this would have no impact on CERN’s start of LHC operations."

He added that important discoveries could be made almost immediately once the collider started up. "If U.S. physicists were enjoined from participating in experiments during that period, the U.S. would miss the early scientific benefits of its $531 million investment in the LHC." Of course, Cern, being a European organization based in Geneva, is outside the jurisdiction of a court in Hawaii.

Meanwhile, the government also argues, Fermilab should be let off the hook. It cannot be sued, they said, because it is not a legal entity, not an agency of a corporation. It is "simply a collection of physical asssets (such as scientific equipment and buildings)" owned by the Department of Energy, which approves and pays for all the operations there, according to an affidavit from Joanna M. Livengood, the department’s site manager there.

According to Andrew Ames, a spokesperson for the Department of Justice, the court set the date of Sept. 2 for on the government’s motions, which means both sides will be producing more briefs and depositions in the next two months.

Mr. Wagner said by e-mail that he plans to fight on. "I believe the Complaint does state a valid case," he said, referring to his lawsuit.

Among other things, he said, he and Mr. Sancho will be filing affidavits saying that the safety report is flawed and incomplete, that Fermilab really is a legal entity, and that the U.S. agencies still have "obligations to Cern."


"Fear and trembling"...of the unknown

"God particle"/Higgs boson--knowledge of the universe

I have not and will not post a counter statement from one individual for the links will not function, but in all fairness there are those that are most perturbed about the LHC and it appears that the spokesperson for the movement is JTankers whose website is here .

If you are interested:

Abstract:

The LHC is an opportunity to make a change. By thinking, and speaking publicly, about fundamental concepts that underlie physical theory, the physicist may both accrue public interest in his work and contribute to the analysis of the foundations of modern physics. We start by several remarks on the scientific and societal context of today’s theoretical physics. Major classes of models for physics to be explored at the LHC are then reviewed. This leads us to propose an LHC timeline and a list of potential effects on theoretical physics and the society.

We then explore three conceptual questions connected with the LHC physics. These are placed in the context of debates both in high-energy physics and in the philosophy of physics. Symmetry is the first issue: we critically review the argument for its a priori and instrumental functions in physical theory and study its connection with naturalness. If perceived as a dynamical process in analogy with non-unitary measurement in quantum mechanics, spontaneous symmetry breaking is found to emphasize the role of randomness against physical law. Contrary to this cosmological
view, the strictly non-dynamical role of spontaneous symmetry breaking within quantum field theory provides one of the strongest arguments in favour of the instrumental approach to symmetry. Second, we study the concept of effective field theory and its philosophical significance. Analogy with S-matrix suggests that one should treat effective theory both as a pragmatic and a provisional tool. Finally, we question the meaning of fine tuning. Legitimate fine-tuning arguments are interpreted nonontologically.

These are contrasted with unsound use of fine tuning, e.g., for comparing different models. Counterfactual reasoning referring to the anthropic principle is shown to be problematic both conceptually and in the light of quantum theory.

On the eve of the LHC: conceptual questions in high-energy physics

The last word...

June 28th, 2008

Could hadron collider devour the Earth?

Particle colliders creating black holes that could devour the Earth. Sounds like a great Hollywood script. But, according to UC Santa Barbara Physics Professor Steve Giddings, it's pure fiction.

Giddings has co-authored a paper, "Astrophysical implications of hypothetical stable TeV-scale black holes," that has been accepted for publication in an upcoming edition of the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review D, documenting his study of the safety of microscopic black holes that might possibly be produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is nearing completion in Europe. The paper, co-authored by Michelangelo Mangano of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), which is building the world's largest particle collider, investigates hypothesized behavior of tiny black holes that might be created by high-energy collisions in the CERN particle accelerator. If they appear at all, these black holes would exist for "about a nano-nano-nanosecond," Giddings said, adding that they would have no effect of consequence. However, the paper studies whether there could be any large-scale effects in an extremely hypothetical situation where the black holes don't evaporate. The Giddings/Mangano study concludes that such microscopic black holes would be harmless. In fact, he added, nature is continuously creating LHC-like collisions when much higher-energy cosmic rays collide with the Earth's atmosphere, with the Sun, and with other objects such as white dwarfs and neutron stars. If such collisions posed a danger, the consequences for Earth or these astronomical objects would have become evident already, Giddings said. "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 LHC, near Geneva, Switzerland, is expected to begin operations this summer. It will collide proton beams at levels of energy never before produced in a particle accelerator. Those results will then be studied for clues to new forces of nature, and possibly even extra dimensions of space. The first collision of beams is likely to be in September. The $8 billion project has taken 14 years. Two men have filed a federal lawsuit in Hawaii in an attempt to halt the LHC due to their concerns about the safety of black holes. Giddings' study has been cited by CERN as evidence of the safety of the LHC. Giddings is a recognized expert in high-energy and gravitational physics. In 2001, he coauthored the first paper investigating black hole production at the LHC and he has authored many other papers on the subject, including an article for Scientific American. Mangano is also recognized as an expert in high-energy physics and, in particular, hadron collisions. This project, Giddings said, greatly benefited from contributions and advice of other members of UCSB's top-rated Physics Department. Source: University of California - Santa Barbara