Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More

[flashl]

Part of a detector to study results of proton collisions by a particle accelerator that a federal lawsuit filed in Hawaii seeks to stop.

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

...

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

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The lawsuit, filed March 21 in Federal District Court, in Honolulu, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environmental assessment. It names the federal Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and CERN as defendants.

New York Times

[ProdigalJunkMail]

1. the atom bomb was going to blow a hole in bottom of the ocean

they should read this http://qntm.org/?destroy

sP

[HeresyLives]

2. This anti-science stuff

has to stop.

Every advance we've ever made has had to be done over the kicking and screaming of anti-science types.

Enough, already.

[flashl]

3. Raising a question about safety is not ant-science.

[HeresyLives]

4. It's anti-science

masquerading as 'safety concerns'.

Everything we've ever put forward, from cars to computers to cellphones to television to you-name-it has been questioned as some kind of 'safety hazard'.

[flashl]

5. Trust me, I've heard that before. Now, returning to sheeple mode and trust our guessing superiors

The L.H.C. could reveal the nature of matter and confirm physicists' best guesses about the validity of string theory. These would be advances comparable to Einstein's or Newton's -- but they are possibilities only because we do not know what will happen when we switch the contraption on. Scientists protest that the probability of their experiments' causing the end of the universe is astronomically low, and they are telling the truth. But tinkering with the unknown is what experimental science is all about, and even the scientists must admit that there is a chance of doomsday (and, indeed, a chance of many other things) in any project like this.

Is it worth the risk? Absolutely. This is not the first time scientists have wondered whether their experiments might cause the world to end.

Atlantic