Still fussing in the courts about the LHC

ENOUGH! If the naysayers are correct, then there won't be anyone around to point a finger and say "We told you so". But then, will the naysayers assume any responsibility for anxiety for some, waisted court time, and maybe some bad science if nothing disastrous occurs? Should the likes of the Spanish Inquisition experts re-oil the rack and get the coals glowing? Let's enjoy the "spirit" of adventure.

"COURTS WEIGH DOOMSDAY CLAIMS"

by

Alan Boyle

September 2nd, 2008

MSNBC.com

Critics who say the world's largest atom-smasher could destroy the world have brought their claims to courtrooms in Europe and the United States - and although the claims are likely to get further consideration, neither court will hold up next week's official startup of the Large Hadron Collider.

The main event is taking place today in Honolulu, where a federal judge is mulling over the federal government's request to throw out a civil lawsuit filed by retired nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner and Spanish science writer Luis Sancho.

Meanwhile, legal action is pending as well at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. Last week, the court agreed to review doomsday claims from a group of professors and students, primarily from Germany and Austria. However, the court rejected a call for the immediate halt of operations at the LHC.

What it's all about

In the U.S. as well as the European lawsuit, the plaintiffs claim that those involved in the particle collider's operation have not adequately addressed the idea that the LHC could create globe-gobbling microscopic black holes or other catastrophes such as matter-wrecking strangelets or magnetic monopoles. They're calling for further safety reviews to be conducted.

The defendants - including the U.S. Department of Energy as well as Europe's CERN particle-physics center - say such fears already have been knocked down in a series of safety reports. The reports, drawn up by leading researchers in high-energy physics, note that cosmic-ray collisions are many times more energetic and prevalent than the collisions expected at the LHC. If the LHC were capable of creating cosmic catastrophes, they would already have been seen many times over in the wider universe, even in the unlikeliest circumstances, the researchers say.

Past "big-bang machines" have faced similar legal challenges, but the worries are emerging anew because the LHC will smash protons together at energies seven times higher than the current world record, held by the Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois.

Physicists hope to gain new insights into mysteries of the universe ranging from dark matter to supersymmetric particles. The main quarry is an as-yet-undetected subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, also known as the "God Particle." The Higgs boson is the only fundamental particle predicted by current theory that has not yet been found. If it does not exist, that would add weight to alternative theories that depend on extra dimensions of space-time.

Theorists say the LHC could create microscopic black holes - or, more accurately, subatomic knots of ultra-concentrated energy - only if there are extra dimensions. Current theory also dictates that these knots would unravel instantly. The LHC's critics take issue with that particular claim.

In any case, the collider won't be in a position to create any type of black hole for months. The scheduled Sept. 10 turn-on would circulate only one beam of protons around the LHC's 17-mile-round ring at low energy. The first low-energy collisions won't occur until at least a month from now, and the device won't achieve its top collision energy until next year. That's why the courts are not rushing to rule on the critics' claims.

What's up in court

Both sides in the federal lawsuit contributed to a flurry of filings in the days before today's hearing in District Judge Helen Gillmor's Honolulu courtroom.

The federal government's attorneys, representing the Energy Department, want Gillmor to dismiss the suit or render a summary judgment against Wagner and Sancho - on the grounds that the suit's outcome won't affect operations at the European collider, and that the plaintiffs missed their deadlines for legal filings.

In response, the plaintiffs insisted that their challenge was timely and said the defendants' past assurances did not ease their concerns about the safety issues. They called for the case to continue toward trial, with a tentative date of June 2009 already scheduled.

In the next legal volley, Bruce Strauss, who was the Energy Department's associate program manager for the LHC construction project, takes aim at Wagner's credentials as well as his arguments. Strauss wrote that assessing the LHC's safety would "require competency in the field of high-energy physics, not health physics or nuclear medicine." Strauss also questioned Wagner's claims about his role in research, citing recent searches of scientific literature.

Strauss said that the federal lawsuit would have no effect on LHC operations because the federal role in building the collider ended a while ago. He said federal funds were now slated to go only toward supporting research activities at the LHC, to the tune of $10 million a month.

On the safety issue, Strauss said CERN's recent report, which was reviewed by outside experts, covered all the realistic scenarios for out-of-control black holes as well as the other doomsday scenarios - and he pointed out that experts at the American Physical Society recently endorsed the report's conclusions. Two Nobel laureates (Sheldon Glashow and Frank Wilczek) as well as a prominent Harvard physicist (Richard Wilson) have also taken the government's side as friends of the court.

Wagner responded to the government's filing just before today's hearing with another round of documents. He contended that the LHC would search for strangelets, insisted that the safety reports were insufficient and complained about Strauss' "ad hominem" attacks - while adding a little hominem of his own. For example, Wagner said Strauss once was searching for evidence of magnetic monopoles himself and was "apparently rankled that my work was successful, while his was not."

If this sounds to you like a blizzard of documents, you're not alone. At today's hearing, Judge Gillmor took both sides to task for filing so many disjointed documents and for failing to follow the local rules of the court, Justice Department spokesman Andrew Ames told me. (I've left a phone message with Wagner to get his side of the story.)

Gillmor took the case under advisement and will decide whether or not to dismiss the case at a later, not-yet-determined time. If the case goes forward, the next step would be to consider the plaintiffs' requests for a preliminary injunction against LHC operations as well as for a summary judgment against CERN.

Will the judge weather yet another storm of paperwork? Maybe not. "She doesn't want any more filings without her permission," Ames told me.

Past chapters in the doomsday saga:

• September 10th, 2006: Subatomic scare tactics
• June 21st, 2007: Toiling in the fields of physics
• March 27th, 2008: Doomsday fears spark lawsuit
• May 20th: Big-bang battle plan set
• May 30th: Doomsday debate update
• June 16th: Doomsday still under debate
• June 20th: Report rules out subatomic doomsday
• June 24th: Doomsday lawsuit dissed
• June 25th: Black holes for beginners
• July 2nd: The benefits of black holes
• August 4th: Science's summer blockbuster
• August 7th: Big day set for big-bang machine
• August 19th: Twists in the doomsday debate
• August 25th: Final countdown for collider

Eleventh hour legal wrangling

Eleventh hour legal wrangling

"Twists in the doomsday debate"

by

Alan Boyle

August 19th, 2008

msnbc

Preparations for starting up the world's largest atom-smasher on Sept. 10 are proceeding smoothly, but the legal tussle over whether it should be stopped is facing new twists. Look for Nobel laureates and diplomats to weigh in as a key federal court hearing nears.

The hearing is scheduled to begin in Hawaii on Sept. 2, just a week before the official startup of Europe's Large Hadron Collider. U.S. District Judge Helen Gillmor will consider whether to dismiss a civil lawsuit claiming that the machine could destroy the world.

The plaintiffs in the case, former nuclear safety official Walter Wagner and Spanish science writer Luis Sancho, say the officials in charge of the LHC at the CERN particle-physics center have not fully considered the possibility that the collider could create globe-gobbling black holes or other catastrophes of cosmic proportions.

The defendants, including CERN and the U.S. Department of Energy, say the doomsday worries are pure science fiction - and have cited a series of safety reports concluding that the Large Hadron Collider poses no global threat.

Both sides are getting their briefs in order as the hearing date approaches - and picking up new allies (or new foes, depending on how you see the issue) along the way. Here are several developments of note:

CERN in default, or off the hook?

Some observers have wondered whether a European organization such as CERN can rightly be held accountable by a private party in U.S. court over activities that will be happening exclusively in Europe. Wagner and Sancho say it can, and they hired a process-server to deliver legal documents to CERN's headquarters on the French-Swiss border. When CERN didn't respond, they filed a motion seeking a default judgment against the organization.

However, last week the Swiss government sent the court a letter through diplomatic channels, saying that the document drop-off did not officially make CERN a party to the case. According to Swiss charge d'affaires Alexander Wittwer, the only way CERN could be served would be if the U.S. Embassy in Switzerland delivered the documents to the Swiss foreign ministry.

The Justice Department, which is handling the federal government's defense in the case, had no comment today on how the procedure might play out. A hearing on the plaintiffs' motion for a default judgment has been scheduled on Sept. 25, and the issue is sure to come up at that time - that is, if the case hasn't been resolved by then.

Nobel laureates weigh in

The defendants' side of the story is about to get a high-powered boost from two Nobel Prize-winning physicists and a well-known colleague of theirs from Harvard. The scientists are seeking to file a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, saying that they have "special knowledge which they believe will assist the court."

The three physicists are Boston University's Sheldon Glashow (Nobel in Physics, 1979), MIT's Frank Wilczek (Nobel in Physics, 2004) and Harvard's Richard Wilson (an expert on high-energy physics, nuclear safety and risk analysis).

"All three of them had done work with respect to the accelerator at Brookhaven, which Walter Wagner challenged back in the day," said Martin Kaufman, an attorney for the New York-based Atlantic Legal Foundation who is handling the filing.

Kaufman was referring to the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, an earlier "big bang machine" that Wagner claimed would create a catastrophe. No catastrophe has occurred to date, eight years after RHIC's startup.

In their new brief, the physicists say that questions about the LHC's safety "have been raised, studied and answered decisively," and that the plaintiffs "have apparently not educated themselves about the extensive analysis that has been done."

Kaufman tried to get the physicists involved in the case as friends of the court last week, but it turned out that he lacked the legal standing to do so. Kaufman told me he was now in the process of getting the official go-ahead, known in legalese as "pro hac vice" permission.

In the meantime, an initial draft of the brief wound up in the court docket with some scientific errors: For example, the draft called the LHC a linear accelerator (it isn't) and said that the collider wouldn't smash nuclei together (it will). That drew Wagner's derision: "They're just being way off the wall on the facts," he told me.

Kaufman said Glashow independently caught mistakes in the draft document, and the errors will be fixed in the final copy.

When I spoke with Glashow, he said he hoped the friend-of-the-court brief would add an extra bit of gravity to the legal proceedings - and lead to the speedy dismissal of a "frivolous" lawsuit.

"It's wasting lots of time and effort to argue against this, but I think it's important to dispose of this as soon as possible," he told me.

Dueling documents

If the case goes forward, there will likely be a flurry of scientific papers cited by both sides. Glashow and the other would-be friends of the court cite one yet-to-be-published paper titled "Exclusion of Black Hole Disaster Scenarios at the LHC." The three German physicists behind the research look at the different scenarios for the growth of black holes and contend that the collider couldn't put a black hole on a world-threatening course.

Meanwhile, Wagner's retort to the friends of the court cites another unpublished paper titled "On the Potential Catastrophic Risk From Metastable Quantum-Black Holes Produced at Particle Colliders." This paper, written by German astrophysicist Rainer Plaga, contends that tiny black holes could conceivably emit harmful radiation soon after they were produced, and that such phenomena would "remain undetectable in astrophysical observations."

Wagner's most recent filings also cite warnings about the LHC's risks from German chemist Otto Rössler. Those warnings have gotten so much press lately that a group of leading quantum physicists in Germany, known as the Committee for Elementary Particle Physics, recently issued a letter countering Rössler's claims.

"There is no way that the LHC will produce black holes capable of swallowing up the Earth," the letter read, according to a report on Spiegel Online. "This claim is based on extremely well tested theories of physics and on observations of the cosmos."

The University of Wuppertal's Peter Mättig told Spiegel Online that he didn't think many people took the doomsday fears seriously. "But it is notable how often we have been asked about the problem," he said. "And we especially want to refute those, like Dr. Rössler, who try to use science to back up their claims."

Even as the hearing date nears on the topics of black holes, strangelets and magnetic monopoles, Wagner told me he is gearing up for a new challenge to LHC operations, on the grounds that the builders haven't fully considered the possibility that a wayward beam of protons could touch off an explosive "fusion propagation wave."

CERN says the LHC is designed to cope with particle beams that go astray. Here's how the question is addressed in the organization's file of frequently asked questions:

"... The beam of particles has the energy of a Eurostar train traveling at full speed, and should something happen to destabilize the particle beam there is a real danger that all of that energy will be deflected into the wall of the beam pipe and the magnets of the LHC, causing a great deal of damage. The LHC has several automatic safety systems in place that monitor all the critical parts of the LHC. Should anything unexpected happen (power or magnet failure, for example) the beam is automatically 'dumped' by being squirted into a blind tunnel where its energy is safely dissipated. This all happens in milliseconds - the beam, which is traveling at 11,000 circuits of the LHC per second, will complete less than three circuits before the dump is complete."

To research his claims, Wagner is reaching back to the 1940s, the golden age of nuclear paranoia, when Edward Teller and two other physicists wrote a report discussing the idea that nuclear bombs could set Earth's atmosphere on fire. (They concluded it wasn't possible because the bombs weren't powerful enough.) The long-classified report, known as LA-602, recently came up for discussion on the Overcoming Bias blog.

You might get the impression from all this that Wagner just doesn't like the LHC, no matter what anyone says. "It's not that I don't like it," he insisted. "In fact, I think it's wonderful ... if it's done safely."

BIG BOOK on high-energy physics available soon

Cooooooooool--LHC in preparatory stage

"Fear and trembling"...of the unknown

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

Government and lawyers put suits to rest

LHC again

Σπυροπούλου [Maria Spiropulu]--physicist

LHC--no problem so far

Pinching validates existence...
I pinched myself...
Therefore, I exist

The LHC was successful today but understand that this was just a linear experiment and that particle collisions won't occur until next month.

"Scientists' joy after world's greatest atom-smasher starts operations"

September 10th, 2008

PhysOrg.com

Particle physicists were jubilant on Wednesday after the long-awaited startup of a mega-machine designed to expose secrets of the cosmos passed its first test with flying colours.

Cheers, applause and the pop of a champagne cork -- rather than the cataclysmic suck of a black hole, as doomsayers had feared -- marked the breakthrough at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).

Robert Aymar, the organisation's director general, hailed it as a "historic day" for CERN and mankind's thirst for knowledge.

Humans have "a quest for (knowing) where they came from and where they should go, whether the Universe will end, and where the Universe will go in the future," he said.

Just after 0730 GMT, the first proton beam was injected into the Large Hadron Collider (LHV), a massive built 100 metres (325 feet) underground at CERN headquarter.

The mission aims at resolving some of the greatest enigmas in physics: whether a so-called "God particle" exists that would account for the nature of mass; an explanation for "dark matter" and "dark energy" that account for 96 percent of the cosmos; and whether other dimensions exist in parallel to our own.

In a 27-kilometre (16.9-mile) circular tunnel on the Swiss-French border, parallel beams of protons will be accelerated to nearly the speed of light.

Superconducting magnets will then steer the counter-rotating beams so that strings of protons smash together in four huge laboratories, fleetingly replicating the conditions that prevailed at the "Big Bang" that created the Universe 13.7 billion years ago.

Arrays of detectors will trace the sub-atomic rubble spewed out from the collision, looking for signatures of novel particles.

CERN scientists have dismissed fears that the process could create a "black hole" whose super-gravity would swallow the Earth.

Wednesday's startup marked the start of a long and cautious commissioning process to check equipment and operational procedures before these collisions can get underway.

The first batch of protons was halted, sector by sector, to verify that monitoring systems and the steering magnets were working properly. Their speed was purposely slowed for the inspection process.

The clockwise beam completed this first test lap in under an hour, causing an eruption of joy and an outbreak of bubbly in the control room.

"No-one would have imagined that this could have been done in less than an hour. It's phenomonenal, quite unbelievable," an operator told AFP. "We are very happy and proud."

By comparison, the predecessor to the LHC at CERN, the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider, took 12 hours to achieve the same goal.

A test of the anticlockwise beam would take place later on Wednesday, scientists said.

LHC Project Leader Lyn Evans, who has been working on the collider for 14 years, said he felt a wave of relief after the protons had completed their first lap so smoothly.

"It's a machine of enormous complexity and things can go wrong at any time," he said.

Messages of congratulations flooded in from CERN's partners and rivals, including the legendary Fermilab particle physics lab near Chicago.

The LHC took nearly 20 years to complete and at six billion Swiss francs (3.76 billion euros, 5.46 billion dollars) is one of the costliest and most complex scientific experiments ever attempted.

When all is ready, the LHC will whizz two parallel beams, one clockwise and the other anticlockwise, around the tunnel at up to 11,000 laps per second before steering them into collisions into four chambers whose walls are swathed with detectors.

The first collisions are likely to start in several weeks, but only next year will the LHC be cranked up to its full capacity of 14 teraelectronvolts -- a massive amount of energy -- or seven times the record held by Fermilab.

Over the 10-15 years in which will the LHC will operate, masses of data will spew from these collisions and will be scrutinised by physicists around the world.

"It's about acquiring knowledge for humanity about the behaviour of fundamental matter," physicist Daniel Denegri told AFP. "We expect to make discoveries that could be rather spectacular."

The Holy Grail will be finding a theorised component called the Higgs Boson, which would explain how particles acquire mass. Believed to be ubiquitous -- yet also frustratingly elusive until now -- the Higgs has been dubbed the "God particle."

The giant machine was several times over its initial budget and began operations two years late.

Before the startup, Internet-driven rumours said the LHC would create black holes or a nasty hypothetical particle called a strangelet that would gobble up the planet.

CERN commissioned a panel to verify its safety calculations and France also carried out its own assessment.

Σπυροπούλου [Maria Spiropulu]--physicist

BIG BOOK on high-energy physics available soon

British politics and science

Cooooooooool--LHC in preparatory stage

Drawing a perspective on the LHC

Eleventh hour legal wrangling

"Fear and trembling"...of the unknown

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

Government and lawyers put suits to rest

Kate McAlpine raps about the LHC

LHC again

Nerds/geeks rule

Still fussing in the courts about the LHC

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

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

"LHC destroy Earth" poll

Will the LHC gobble up the Earth by a small blackhole?

Yes...0
No...5

Yes, I am aware that I asked a similar question on March 13th of this year ["LHC/"dooms day" poll"] but I thought I would rephrase it to solicit some responses. I think the percent of fear mongers is small [like those that wish Pluto would regain planetary status] and pose no significant threat or concern.

Annihilation of the world put on hold

Eleventh hour legal wrangling

"Fear and trembling"...of the unknown

Government and lawyers put suits to rest

LHC again

LHC shut down for maintenance

Still fussing in the courts about the LHC

LHC/"dooms day" poll

Do you fear the "dooms day" rhetoric about the LHC?

Yes...0
No...4 [100%]

Chicken Little lost this one.


Annihilation of the world put on hold

Eleventh hour legal wrangling

"Fear and trembling"...of the unknown

Government and lawyers put suits to rest

LHC again

LHC shut down for maintenance

Still fussing in the courts about the LHC