With the construction complete on CERNs Large Hadron Collider, two men have sought an injuction in a Hawaiian court to prevent them flicking the switch, out of safety concerns.
The two major concerns are the possibility of creating small scale black holes that could suck up the earth, or the creation of strangelets that could theoretically convert us all into matter straight out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel (or possibly “Plan 9 From Outer Space”).
Though the chances of either of these senarious actually playing out is essentially zero, it should be pointed out that the chances are NOT ACTUALLY zero. According to some critics, the chances of anything bad happening are about equivalent to winning the lottery 3 weeks in a row, which sounds really low, except that finding articles about 2 time winners on google is quite easy.
However James Gillies, head of communications at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), told the New York Times the LHC had been declared “safe”.
“There is nothing new to suggest that the L.H.C. is unsafe,” he said. “Scientifically, we’re not hiding away,” he noted adding that the LHC safety record had been tested and passed in two safety reports with a third on the way.
Mr Wagner though, has described the safety reviews as “fundamentally flawed.”
Most physicists have said the chances of black holes appearing during the experiments were “minute” and if they did occur, should evaporate and disappear straight away.
I just can’t shake the feeling that the words ’should’ and ‘minute’ shouldn’t be a part of the lexicon of a device that could basically swallow up the whole planet with the throw of a switch.
Just in case something bad does happen when Black Mesa… I mean the LRC… is fired up, I’ll be keeping a crowbar handy. It worked for Gordon Freeman.
One Comment
So … is that … every day for three weeks? Or once a week for three weeks?
And what are the chances that the assumptions that had to be made in order to make calculating the chances possibles, are in fact wrong?
BTW there has been evidence that small singularities have been created in labs before, without swallowing the Earth.
IMO if that were even possible, there is not way the Earth would still be here considering all of the stuff that’s probably happened in the vicinity. Massive black holes just can’t be that easy.