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

[groovedaddy]

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/science/27collider.html

[phantom power]

1. Somebody has been taking David Brin and JP Hogan a bit too seriously.

[TechBear_Seattle]

2. I hate sloppy science reporting

Subatomic particles have mass; therefore, they cannot be accelerated to the speed of light, only towards it. The only massless particle is the photon, which is classed as an elementary particle rather than a subatomic particle. Subatomic particles are those which make up atoms, specifically quarks, protons, neutrons and electrons.

And the research is NOT to find "new forms of matter and new laws of physics" but to confirm theories about EXISTING forms of matter and laws of physics.

Sheesh! :eyes:

[groovedaddy]

3. Sounds like its letter to the editor time. Are you game? n.t

[VWolf]

4. The neutrino might be massless as well

but your point is made.

I won't speculate on the graviton.

[TechBear_Seattle]

5. The consenus is that the neutrino does have mass

Just very, very little of it. As for the graviton, that falls under the heading of "confirm existing theories." Anyway, LHC will not be flinging gravitons.

[caraher]

6. I'd cut them a little slack

The "speed of light" part is a major gaffe, but you isn't "confirming existing theories" close enough to "searching for new... laws of physics?" They're certainly hoping to see new "forms of matter" since the biggest hope is to observe the Higgs particle. And anytime you test the Standard Model there's the possibility that you get the signature of something new. If there were no "windows for surprises" the experiments would not be worth the investment of billions of dolla... well, euros.