What if the World Ended and Nobody Showed Up?
Filed under: Science, Strange Stuff — Rick Moran on March 30, 2008 @ 3:28 pm CEST
In 1911, the great English physicist Ernest Rutherford brought forth a model of the structure of the atom that revolutionized science. He did it with 20 research assistants (including some of the greatest minds in 20th century physics) in the basement of a rambling old stone house known as the Cavendish Laboratory.
Conditions in the lab were appalling. The roof leaked. It was cramped beyond belief. And Rutherford was a notorious skinflint when it came to paying his assistants.
But between 1907 and 1932, one by one the secrets of the atom gave themselves up to Rutherford and his “boys.” Using simple, handmade experimental apparatus for the most part, Rutherford unlocked “the mind of God” as Einstein put it. Considering his funding came from the Royal Society and not the government and his stipend per year was usually around 15 thousands pounds, Rutherford probably advanced human knowledge of the universe more by doing with less than any other scientist in history.
That was then. This is now.
The Large Hadron Collider is the largest collaborative scientific effort in history. It involves more than 2000 scientists from 34 countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. It has taken 14 years to build at a cost of $8 billion and is scheduled to begin serious research work later this year.
And that work is mindboggling. The Collider seeks to accomplish nothing less than giving us a view of what the universe was like about one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang when the 4 fundamental forces in the universe - electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and gravitation - first split apart. By sending particle beams in opposite directions along a 17 mile underground circular track and accelerating them to near light speed while directing the particles with superconducting magnets to points where they are likely to collide, scientists hope to unravel some of the basic mysteries of the universe. Dark matter, extra dimensions, the nature of gravity, perhaps the fate of the universe itself could be revealed by these collisions and the subatomic particles they leave behind.
This kind of research cannot be done in the basement of a leaky house. It requires massive government funding to accomplish. The same can be said for virtually every other scientific discipline - space exploration, gene and DNA research, and climate change are no different. The days when a Rutherford or Edison could set up a lab and run it on a shoestring while making seminal discoveries about the universe are behind us.
Government funding means taxpayers are footing the bill for these research projects. As such, we should have a say when the potential exists for cataclysmic effects to occur as a result of experiments. We are very careful not to allow some altered genes outside of very tightly controlled labs because no one knows what the effects of that gene mixing with the biology that already exists on planet earth would be.
And as far as the Hadron Collider is concerned, very serious questions have been raised about some of the effects of the research on the planet - questions that we taxpayers need to have answered even if the possibility of disaster is extremely remote.
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.
Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.
Scientists believe the possibility is very small that either scenario involving the strangelet or the mini-black hole will come to pass. But the fact that they are looking carefully to make sure they won’t would seem to indicate that it is not an impossibility.
It hearkens back to the Trinity explosion in 1945 where a couple of scientists theorized that the detonation of the first nuclear bomb would set the atmosphere on fire. It didn’t, of course, but the tiny chance that it would didn’t stop the experiment from going forward.
In this instance, because taxpayers are footing the bill (and have been able to follow developments in the unclassified program) these questions are getting more than a fair and thorough airing:
Physicists in and out of CERN say a variety of studies, including an official CERN report in 2003, have concluded there is no problem. But just to be sure, last year the anonymous Safety Assessment Group was set up to do the review again.
“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots,” said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group. The others prefer to remain anonymous, Mr. Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due in January.
This is not the first time around for Mr. Wagner. He filed similar suits in 1999 and 2000 to prevent the Brookhaven National Laboratory from operating the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. That suit was dismissed in 2001. The collider, which smashes together gold ions in the hopes of creating what is called a “quark-gluon plasma,” has been operating without incident since 2000.
The fact that scientists are not laughing at the idea of destroying the earth as a result of an experiment shows the wisdom of taxpayers like Wagner questioning everything - even though his expertise and knowledge may fall short of those he is criticizing. I would hope the same holds true for some bio-medical research that has the potential to loose upon the planet something that could destroy life as well as those working in the artificial intelligence field who some have theorized could end up being quite unfriendly to their creators.
We are entering a new age of scientific exploration where the basic mysteries of the universe have a chance of being unraveled. From studying the smallest sub-atomic particles to discovering the fate of the cosmos, taxpayers will be asked to fund ever grander, more expensive research projects in our quest to understand ourselves and the natural world around us. It is the purest of pursuits, this quest for knowledge. And deciding not only whether it is worth it but also if it is safe must become part of the debate when setting priorities for our governments.
1 Guy Smiley
March 30, 2008 @ 7:49 pm CESTSo called "concerns" are a load of bull. The same sort of energy levels being explored at LHC occur every few seconds in the upper atmosphere from high energy cosmic rays. And have been for billions of years. And yet no black holes have eaten the earth.
Most of the time anyone raising these sorts of complaints are just jockeying for attention and/or political power. It worked for Ralph Nader.
2 Bernie Liederkrantz
March 30, 2008 @ 8:31 pm CESTIn response to Guy Smiley "The same sort of energy levels being explored at LHC occur every few seconds in the upper atmosphere from high energy cosmic rays. And have been for billions of years. "
If that is the case why waste billions of dollars to study something that is already occuring constantly right above us???
3 Anthony May
March 30, 2008 @ 11:04 pm CESTErnest Rutherford was from New Zealand not England. He was therefore not English. Please research your articles before publishing them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Rutherford
4 Rick Moran
March 30, 2008 @ 11:14 pm CESTColumbia EncyclopediaRutherford, Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron, 1871–1937, British physicist
He left New Zealand in 1895. He was knighted in 1914 and received his peerage in 1931. Please research your criticisms before making an ass out of yourself by publishing them.
5 JTankers
March 31, 2008 @ 3:57 am CESTCERN’s web site states that we have not been destroyed by effects of cosmic rays and micro black holes will evaporate. However, cosmic rays travel too fast to be captured by Earths gravity, and Hawking Radiation is disputed (http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0304042) and contradicts Einstein’s highly successful relativity theory. Collider particles smash head on like a car collision and can be captured by Earth’s gravity, and relativity predicts micro black holes will not decay (Hawking called Einstein doubly wrong, yet it is Einstein who is repeatedly found to have been correct in his theories). There is currently no reasonable proof of LHC safety, LSAG (LHC Safety Assessment Group) has been trying for months to prove safety without success. I hold the minority opinion that it may not be possible because it may in fact not be safe. If micro black holes are created, we may soon be trying to calculate the growth rate, and in my personal speculation, it might not be too implausible to believe that calculation might need to account for the same quantum effects that Hawking predicts but as an accelerator not as a decay factor. NewScientist March 22-28 “Stakes get higher in antimatter puzzle”: “We can say with greater than 99.7 per cent probability that CP violation is there” says Sivestrini [of Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics INFN] (link corrected from article: http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.0659) Cosmic Rays from the legal complaint. …any such novel particle created in nature by cosmic ray impacts would be left with a velocity at nearly the speed of light, relative to earth. At such speeds, …, is believed by most theorists to simply pass harmlessly through our planet with nary an impact, safely exiting on the other side. … Conversely, any such novel particle that might be created at the LHC would be at slow speed relative to earth, a goodly percentage would then be captured by earth’s gravity, and could possibly grow larger [accrete matter] with disastrous consequences of the earth turning into a large black hole. Sincerely, JTankers LHCConcerns.com
6 recent discoveries in 2000 2003
April 1, 2008 @ 9:48 pm CEST[…] […]
7 JTankers
April 6, 2008 @ 9:42 am CESTProfessor Dr. Otto E. Roessler estimates 50 months Earth accretion time from a single micro black hole captured by Earth’s gravity (www.golem.de/0802/57477-4.html, translation at http://www.lhcconcerns.com/LHCConcerns/Forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=52)
8 Tauremini26
April 9, 2008 @ 4:51 am CEST50 months. Which would make it around December 2012.
Does anyone recall that a rare galactic allignment is supposed to take place at this exact time?
More worryingly, the Mayans (who were expert at astronomy) believed that the December 2012 expiry on the Long Count Calander would usher in a “renewal” of all things.
If we were pre-destined to build the LHC and thus destroy ourselves in the process, then the universe was pre-destined to do its thing (at this time when man would not inhabit the planet).
This implies that the universe or its functions at this time would not be responsible for our ultimate demise, but rather mankind themselves.
So, having said this, we are given the chance to find The Answer to the universe (and how we came to be), but not the chance to play God. The universe can only do that.
9 The Conqueror
April 18, 2008 @ 10:42 pm CESTAll we have just 4 years…..Ok.. I’ll smoke, drink and do whatever I want…..
10 cass j
April 19, 2008 @ 8:10 pm CESTI have identified 6 layers of protection discussed over the last decade and more regarding the safety of the LHC coming online this summer:1. NO BLACK HOLES WILL BE PRODUCED.
2. BLACK HOLES WOULD EVAPORATE TOO QUICKLY TO INTERACT WITH THE EARTH.
3. PERSISTENCE OF EARTH, MOON, AND OTHER BODIES IN SOLAR SYSTEM PROVES SAFETY OF mBH BOMBARDMENT.
4.THE VASTLY HIGHER ENERGIES OF SOME COSMIC RAYS STRIKING EARTH ARE PROOF OF SAFETY.
5. THE COLLISIONS HAVE LESS ENERGY THAN A FEW FLYING MOSQUITOS, so must be safe.
6.EVEN IF THE PREVIOUS PROTECTIONS FAIL, THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO DANGER BECAUSE:
[At that rate, even if one did not take into account the fact that each black hole would slow down every time it gobbled up a proton, and thus suck down matter at an even slower rate, ‘about 100 protons would be destroyed every year by such a black hole, so it would take much more than the age of universe to destroy even one milligram of Earth material]???(6)All of them fall if you examine them critically, and the last one contains a fatal math error:In a nutshell:Can a growth process, with a built-in positive feedback loop, be linear?
11 notepad
May 7, 2008 @ 11:36 pm CEST>>Do the math. There is no WAY it is only 2-3x the cost to do it here.
Ok. Then lets suppose it is 10 times. Or 20. Even if it would cost 20 times as much building the LHC on the moon than on Earth, what is the problem?
If we can do it, if it helps reducing risk - then do it!
Smart thinking - short answer.
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