http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=11520991


International Herald Tribune
Try this headline: Black Hole Eats Earth
By Dennis Overbye
Saturday, March 29, 2008


More strife in Iraq. U.S. financial system in crisis. Rice prices soar.

None of these headlines will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a
lawsuit in a 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 that will spell the end of the Earth - and
maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely - though they have done some checking
just to make sure.

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 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 U.S. 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.

The lawsuit, filed March 21 in U.S. 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 U.S. Department of Energy, the Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and CERN as
defendants.

According to a spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing the
Department of Energy, a scheduling meeting has been set for June 16.

Why should CERN, an organization of European nations based in Switzerland,
even show up in a Hawaiian courtroom?

In an interview, Wagner said, "I don't know if they're going to show up." CERN
would have to voluntarily submit to the court's jurisdiction, he said, adding
that he and Sancho could have sued in France or Switzerland, but to save
expenses they had added CERN to the docket here. He claimed that a restraining
order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helps to supply and
maintain the accelerator's massive superconducting magnets, would shut down
the project anyway.

James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory as of yet
had no comment on the suit. "It's hard to see how a district court in Hawaii
has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe," Gillies
said.

"There is nothing new to suggest that the LHC is unsafe," he said, adding that
its safety had been confirmed by two reports, with a third on the way, and
would be the subject of a discussion during an open house at the lab on April
6.

"Scientifically, we're not hiding away," he said.

But Wagner is not mollified. "They've got a lot of propaganda saying it's
safe," he said in an interview, "but basically it's propaganda."

In an e-mail message, Wagner called the CERN safety review "fundamentally
flawed" and said it had been initiated too late. The review process violates
the European Commission's standards for adhering to the "Precautionary
Principle," he wrote, "and has not been done by 'arms length' scientists."

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, Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due
in January.

This is not the first time around for 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.

Wagner, who lives on the Big Island of Hawaii, studied physics and did cosmic
ray research at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a
doctorate in law from what is now known as the University of Northern
California in Sacramento. He subsequently worked as a radiation safety officer
for the Veterans Administration.

Sancho, who describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory,
lives in Spain, probably in Barcelona, Wagner said.

Doomsday fears have a long, if not distinguished, pedigree in the history of
physics. At Los Alamos before the first nuclear bomb was tested, Emil
Konopinski was given the job of calculating whether or not the explosion would
set the atmosphere on fire.

Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist whose work helped fuel the speculation about
black holes at the collider, pointed out in a paper last year that black holes
would not be produced at the collider after all, although other effects of
so-called quantum gravity might appear.

As part of the safety assessment report, Mangano and Steve Giddings of the
University of California, Santa Barbara, have been working intensely for the
last few months on a paper exploring the possibilities of black holes. They
think there are no problems but are reluctant to talk about their findings
until they have been reviewed, Mangano said.




2008 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com

- wrote:
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=11520991


International Herald Tribune
Try this headline: Black Hole Eats Earth
By Dennis Overbye
Saturday, March 29, 2008


More strife in Iraq. U.S. financial system in crisis. Rice prices soar.

None of these headlines will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a
lawsuit in a 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 that will spell the end of the Earth - and
maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely - though they have done some checking
just to make sure.

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 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 U.S. 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.

The lawsuit, filed March 21 in U.S. 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 U.S. Department of Energy, the Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and CERN as
defendants.

According to a spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing the
Department of Energy, a scheduling meeting has been set for June 16.

Why should CERN, an organization of European nations based in Switzerland,
even show up in a Hawaiian courtroom?

In an interview, Wagner said, "I don't know if they're going to show up." CERN
would have to voluntarily submit to the court's jurisdiction, he said, adding
that he and Sancho could have sued in France or Switzerland, but to save
expenses they had added CERN to the docket here. He claimed that a restraining
order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helps to supply and
maintain the accelerator's massive superconducting magnets, would shut down
the project anyway.

James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory as of yet
had no comment on the suit. "It's hard to see how a district court in Hawaii
has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe," Gillies
said.

"There is nothing new to suggest that the LHC is unsafe," he said, adding that
its safety had been confirmed by two reports, with a third on the way, and
would be the subject of a discussion during an open house at the lab on April
6.

"Scientifically, we're not hiding away," he said.

But Wagner is not mollified. "They've got a lot of propaganda saying it's
safe," he said in an interview, "but basically it's propaganda."

In an e-mail message, Wagner called the CERN safety review "fundamentally
flawed" and said it had been initiated too late. The review process violates
the European Commission's standards for adhering to the "Precautionary
Principle," he wrote, "and has not been done by 'arms length' scientists."

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, Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due
in January.

This is not the first time around for 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.

Wagner, who lives on the Big Island of Hawaii, studied physics and did cosmic
ray research at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a
doctorate in law from what is now known as the University of Northern
California in Sacramento. He subsequently worked as a radiation safety officer
for the Veterans Administration.

Sancho, who describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory,
lives in Spain, probably in Barcelona, Wagner said.

Doomsday fears have a long, if not distinguished, pedigree in the history of
physics. At Los Alamos before the first nuclear bomb was tested, Emil
Konopinski was given the job of calculating whether or not the explosion would
set the atmosphere on fire.

Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist whose work helped fuel the speculation about
black holes at the collider, pointed out in a paper last year that black holes
would not be produced at the collider after all, although other effects of
so-called quantum gravity might appear.

As part of the safety assessment report, Mangano and Steve Giddings of the
University of California, Santa Barbara, have been working intensely for the
last few months on a paper exploring the possibilities of black holes. They
think there are no problems but are reluctant to talk about their findings
until they have been reviewed, Mangano said.




2008 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com


During my lunch with the aliens I asked them about this. They said that
black holes are over rated. There is always a hue and cry about losing
the entire universe, and it always turns out to be only a few
galaxies...
--

Cordially,
Rev. J.D. Walker, MsD, U.C.

- a écrit :
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=11520991


International Herald Tribune
Try this headline: Black Hole Eats Earth
By Dennis Overbye
Saturday, March 29, 2008


More strife in Iraq. U.S. financial system in crisis. Rice prices soar.

None of these headlines will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a
lawsuit in a 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 that will spell the end of the Earth - and
maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely - though they have done some checking
just to make sure.

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 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 U.S. 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.

The lawsuit, filed March 21 in U.S. 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 U.S. Department of Energy, the Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and CERN as
defendants.

According to a spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing the
Department of Energy, a scheduling meeting has been set for June 16.

Why should CERN, an organization of European nations based in Switzerland,
even show up in a Hawaiian courtroom?

In an interview, Wagner said, "I don't know if they're going to show up." CERN
would have to voluntarily submit to the court's jurisdiction, he said, adding
that he and Sancho could have sued in France or Switzerland, but to save
expenses they had added CERN to the docket here. He claimed that a restraining
order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helps to supply and
maintain the accelerator's massive superconducting magnets, would shut down
the project anyway.

James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory as of yet
had no comment on the suit. "It's hard to see how a district court in Hawaii
has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe," Gillies
said.

"There is nothing new to suggest that the LHC is unsafe," he said, adding that
its safety had been confirmed by two reports, with a third on the way, and
would be the subject of a discussion during an open house at the lab on April
6.

"Scientifically, we're not hiding away," he said.

But Wagner is not mollified. "They've got a lot of propaganda saying it's
safe," he said in an interview, "but basically it's propaganda."

In an e-mail message, Wagner called the CERN safety review "fundamentally
flawed" and said it had been initiated too late. The review process violates
the European Commission's standards for adhering to the "Precautionary
Principle," he wrote, "and has not been done by 'arms length' scientists."

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, Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due
in January.

This is not the first time around for 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.

Wagner, who lives on the Big Island of Hawaii, studied physics and did cosmic
ray research at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a
doctorate in law from what is now known as the University of Northern
California in Sacramento. He subsequently worked as a radiation safety officer
for the Veterans Administration.

Sancho, who describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory,
lives in Spain, probably in Barcelona, Wagner said.

Doomsday fears have a long, if not distinguished, pedigree in the history of
physics. At Los Alamos before the first nuclear bomb was tested, Emil
Konopinski was given the job of calculating whether or not the explosion would
set the atmosphere on fire.

Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist whose work helped fuel the speculation about
black holes at the collider, pointed out in a paper last year that black holes
would not be produced at the collider after all, although other effects of
so-called quantum gravity might appear.

As part of the safety assessment report, Mangano and Steve Giddings of the
University of California, Santa Barbara, have been working intensely for the
last few months on a paper exploring the possibilities of black holes. They
think there are no problems but are reluctant to talk about their findings
until they have been reviewed, Mangano said.




2008 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com


Nice try Happy 1st of april!

Eric

On Apr 1, 2:12*pm, (-) wrote:
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=11520991

International Herald Tribune
Try this headline: *Black Hole Eats Earth
By Dennis Overbye
Saturday, March 29, 2008

More strife in Iraq. U.S. financial system in crisis. Rice prices soar.

None of these headlines will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a
lawsuit in a 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 that will spell the end of the Earth - and
maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely - though they have done some checking
just to make sure.

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 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 U.S. 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.

The lawsuit, filed March 21 in U.S. 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 U.S. Department of Energy, the Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and CERN as
defendants.

According to a spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing the
Department of Energy, a scheduling meeting has been set for June 16.

Why should CERN, an organization of European nations based in Switzerland,
even show up in a Hawaiian courtroom?

In an interview, Wagner said, "I don't know if they're going to show up." CERN
would have to voluntarily submit to the court's jurisdiction, he said, adding
that he and Sancho could have sued in France or Switzerland, but to save
expenses they had added CERN to the docket here. He claimed that a restraining
order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helps to supply and
maintain the accelerator's massive superconducting magnets, would shut down
the project anyway.

James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory as of yet
had no comment on the suit. "It's hard to see how a district court in Hawaii
has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe," Gillies
said.

"There is nothing new to suggest that the LHC is unsafe," he said, adding that
its safety had been confirmed by two reports, with a third on the way, and
would be the subject of a discussion during an open house at the lab on April
6.

"Scientifically, we're not hiding away," he said.

But Wagner is not mollified. "They've got a lot of propaganda saying it's
safe," he said in an interview, "but basically it's propaganda."

In an e-mail message, Wagner called the CERN safety review "fundamentally
flawed" and said it had been initiated too late. The review process violates
the European Commission's standards for adhering to the "Precautionary
Principle," he wrote, "and has not been done by 'arms length' scientists."

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, Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due
in January.

This is not the first time around for 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.

On Apr 1, 12:25 pm, Eric Normandeau wrote:

Nice try Happy 1st of april!

I read this a few days ago. It's a *real* lawsuit. And this issue had
been raised years ago.

John Savard

- wrote:
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=11520991


International Herald Tribune
Try this headline: Black Hole Eats Earth
By Dennis Overbye
Saturday, March 29, 2008




WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday 4 Apr 08 Washington, DC

1. LHC: A KNIGHT ERRANT TILTS AT HIGH-ENERGY WINDMILL.
Technology has changed in the 400 years since Cervantes first told the
story of Don Quixote. Windmills are now particle accelerators and the
knight’s lance is a federal court injunction, but the plot is the same.
It begins with a befuddled lawyer in Hawaii named Walter Wagner. Having
read far too much science fiction as a youth, Wagner fantasizes that he is
a physicist by virtue of an undergraduate biology degree with a minor in
physics. Accompanied by Sancho, his loyal TA, Wagner embarks on an
adventure to slay the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a doomsday machine that
he believes is posed to destroy the world by creating a black hole. He
seems to have forgotten the last time he tried this. In 1999 Wagner
warned that RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven
National Laboratory, must be slain lest it create a black hole
http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN99/wn072399.html . The then BNL
director, Jack Marburger, named a distinguished panel of physicists to
investigate. Their report noted that nature has been conducting the
relevant safety test for billions of years by colliding heavy-ion cosmic
rays with the moon. It concluded that creation of a black hole
is "effectively ruled out by the persistence of the Moon."



THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
---
Archives of What's New can be found at http://www.bobpark.org

----------------------------------------

"We've made millions of duckies," Gagnon said.
"Now we want to make an elephant."

----------------------------------------

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...216,full.story

Large Hadron Collider

Fabrice Coffrini / AFP/Getty Images
The collider will send particles crashing into each
other at just a wink shy of the speed of light, generating
energies more powerful than the sun.
Europe's enormous $8-billion particle accelerator,
to be activated as early as this summer, is generating
both excitement and fear.
http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2008-04/37796292.jpg

By John Johnson Jr., Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 13, 2008


GENEVA -- Michelangelo L. Mangano, a respected particle physicist who helped
discover the top quark in 1995, now spends most days trying to convince people
that his new machine won't destroy the world.

"If it were just crackpots, we could wave them away," the physicist said in an
interview at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its
French acronym, CERN. "But some are real physicists."


What the critics are in such a lather about is the $8-billion Large Hadron
Collider, a massive assemblage of iron, steel and superconducting wire 300
feet underground in a 17-mile-long circular tunnel on the Franco-Swiss border.

The most complex piece of scientific equipment ever built, the collider will
send particles crashing into each other at just a wink shy of the speed of
light, generating energies more powerful than the sun.

Scientists like Mangano believe that this instrument, when it begins operating
as early as this summer, will peer into a looking-glass world that could
contain entrances to extra dimensions and super-massive partners of the
familiar particles that make up our world. One creature that must be hiding
there, the scientists say, is the Higgs particle, one of the most exotic
undiscovered objects since the yeti.

Critics think the collider could also spawn a black hole that will swallow
Earth.

That could be just an appetizer. Once the collider got going, according to the
doomsday scenario, it could gobble up distant stars like a child popping
Skittles.

Mangano, who is part of the CERN group studying the safety of the collider,
doesn't deny the scant possibility that the collider could yield a mini-black
hole.

By smashing protons and lead ions together at energies reaching 14 trillion
electron volts, the Large Hadron Collider will dwarf the world's other
atom-smashers, including the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's mighty
Tevatron in Batavia, Ill.

But that energy, Mangano hastened to add, would be concentrated in a space
thinner than a human hair. Any black hole would be so tiny that it wouldn't be
able to get its teeth around a bit of local chevre cheese, let alone the
world.

Still, if a black hole were produced at all, "that would be an extremely
spectacular result," he said, a half-smile creeping across his face.


Particle physics

Deep in a dim cavern, UCLA physicist Bob Cousins scrambled onto a catwalk
straddling the six-story detector known as the Compact Muon Solenoid, then
darted up two flights of stairs to another catwalk, where the guts of the
machine materialized out of the half-light.

It looked a little like the inside of a computer suffering from a severe case
of gigantism. Plates, shields and pipes jutted everywhere. Thick knots of
cable extended from the side like mounds of heavy rope on an 18th century
whaling ship.

"This detector was assembled at the surface and lowered in 15 pieces," Cousins
said, pointing to a wide opening above the detector that reached to the
European sky high above.

The heaviest piece weighed 4 million pounds. It took 10 hours to lower the
middle section. At the center of this section is a bulbous extension that
makes the behemoth look like the world's biggest television picture tube. This
single piece of the collider contains more iron than the Eiffel Tower.

It was all built to probe a beam of particles thinner than a blade of grass.

Decades ago, scientists figured out that atomic nuclei were made up of smaller
things than protons and neutrons.

To find those pieces, 20th century physicists came up with an idea that would
appeal to most 9-year-old boys with a new toy: "Let's smash it and see what
happens."

Early colliders, like the 9-inch cyclotron created at UC Berkeley in 1931,
sent particles down a circular drag strip and crashed them into a target to
see what flew out.

From there, particle physics exploded. Larger and more sophisticated devices
kept packing more energy into the colliding particles, allowing scientists to
peer deeper into the guts of the atom.

Protons and neutrons, they found, were made up of even smaller particles,
dubbed quarks, which were bound together by another set of particles, called
gluons. Gluons were part of a larger family, bosons, each of which carries
some form of force. Photons, which make up light, for example, carry the
electromagnetic force.

They found a bestiary of particles -- pions, kaons, deltas and other
exotically named objects -- that existed beyond an atom's nucleus.

Altogether, scientists found dozens of species of elementary particles, some
composed of pieces so tiny that they make an atom look like a sumo wrestler,
or a mountain. If a quark measured an inch, an atom would stretch at least
1,000 miles, about the distance from Los Angeles to Denver.

These discoveries enabled physicists to devise a compelling picture of the
universe at the subatomic level. Known as the Standard Model, it is considered
the most successful scientific theory in history.

It has been able to explain an array of processes through its description of
the subatomic world and the dynamics of the four essential forces of the
universe: gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force governing radioactive
decay, and the strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together
in an atom's nucleus.

But there are problems. First, the Standard Model can't explain why the
universe is composed of matter. According to theory, equal amounts of matter
and antimatter would have been created in the Big Bang, which created the
universe. As soon as they met, they should have annihilated each other,
releasing photons of light.

"You should end up with a universe with only light," said Tatsuya Nakada, who
directs another of the four major particle detectors at CERN.

The Standard Model also fails to explain why particles have mass.

"In all our equations, the most fundamental particles that we know matter is
made of come up massless," said Pauline Gagnon, an Indiana University
physicist who works on a detector known as ATLAS. "We know that's a flaw in
the Standard Model."

The answers, scientists believe, lie in reactions with the extreme energies
that occurred during the first moments after the Big Bang. To reach those
energies, they have to push particles as close to the speed of light as
possible.

The CERN collider uses a powerful electromagnetic field to accelerate
particles. "Think of a swing," said Sandor Feher, a fast-talking
Hungarian-born physicist, as he strode through a section of the long collider
tunnel. "Each time the beam comes around, the field pushes it a little
faster."

At the peak, the hydrogen protons in the new collider will reach 99.9999991%
of the speed of light. Each packet of protons will complete 11,245 laps around
the collider every second and carry as much power as a speeding train.

The collider will consume as much energy as all the households in Geneva,
running up an annual electric bill of $30 million.

To guide the proton beams through the twin tubes of the collider, 9,600
magnets will continually tune the positively charged protons as they speed
around the collider. The superconducting magnets are cooled with liquid helium
to minus 456.25 degrees, a whisker above absolute zero.

Whatever objects spring into being in the collider won't last long. They will
be relatively big and thus inherently unstable and will quickly decay into
more-familiar particles.

Some of these weird objects may travel as much as a millimeter or two before
decaying, while others will travel less than the diameter of a proton before
vanishing in a shower of quarks, gluons, electrons or neutrinos.

Because the detectors will produce millions of collisions every second,
scientists will rely on huge clusters of computers to analyze the results. The
computers will discard almost all the collisions, preserving only the most
unusual for deeper analysis by humans.

Physicists aren't working completely in the dark. Extra dimensions, for
example, could show themselves by the unusual paths the decaying particles
take as they shoot off into the various layers of the detectors.

If all goes as planned, scientists say, the new collider is likely to become
one of the greatest engines of discovery in history, far outstripping the
Apollo moon missions and even Charles Darwin's monumental voyage aboard the
Beagle.

"This is the elevator that will take us to the next floor" of discovery,
Mangano said.


Explaining mass

The first big mystery to fall, theorists expect, will be the explanation for
mass.

The theory is most often attributed to Scottish physicist Peter Higgs, who
proposed about 40 years ago that the vacuum between the stars is not empty but
made of a fabric that extends infinitely in all directions.

This fabric, which Mangano compared to the ether that the Victorians believed
filled outer space, has come to be known as the Higgs field.

"There is something in the vacuum," Mangano said. "As a particle moves, it
interacts with the vacuum and acquires mass." Some physicists compare this to
a person walking on a dirt path after a rainstorm. As he walks, his boots get
caked with mud.

If the Higgs field is real, physicists say, it should have a fundamental
particle associated with it. Scientists have named the hypothetical particle
the Higgs boson.

Fermilab's Tevatron spent years trying to find it. The Large Electron-Positron
Collider at CERN saw tantalizing hints of the Higgs particle before it was
shut down in 2000 for construction of the new collider.

Physicists are confident of the Higgs boson's existence but think that it is
just too massive to be produced in smaller colliders.

But how could a collision of tiny particles like protons produce a massive
particle like the Higgs?

In our macro-world, crashing things together, like cars, makes big things into
smaller things, like broken headlights and fenders. But it's different in the
subatomic world, where crashing two Priuses together can produce a 10-wheeler.

"Remember," Gagnon said, "according to Einstein, mass is congealed energy." In
other words, if you create enough energy in one place, it can remake itself
into a chunk of mass.

Gagnon compared the particles that have been created in other colliders to
rubber ducks. "We've made millions of duckies," Gagnon said. "Now we want to
make an elephant."

Because the new collider will be seven times as powerful as the Tevatron, if
the Higgs boson exists, the CERN collider should find it.

"If we don't find the Higgs, the theorists have a lot of explaining to do,"
said UCLA postdoctoral student Greg Rakness over lunch in the CERN cafeteria,
where one can hear conversations in a dozen languages.

The huge burst of energy in particle collisions becomes a kind of time
machine, transporting scientists back to the first microseconds after the Big
Bang.

The universe was only about 200 million miles wide, consisting of a viscous
cloud of quarks and gluons floating in a searing plasma. As the universe
expanded and cooled, the quarks combined to make protons and neutrons. The
gluons held them together to form the nuclei of atoms.

To re-create this plasma, one of the collider's detectors, known as ALICE,
will accelerate heavy lead ions. One of the heaviest of all elements, each
lead atom contains 82 protons and 125 neutrons.

By pounding these sacks of protons and neutrons together, the scientists hope
to free the quarks and gluons from their embrace into a free-floating
quark-gluon plasma.

With this re-creation of the early moments of the universe, scientists may
also be able to delve into the unexplained imbalance between matter and
antimatter. So far, experiments have not been able to explain why there's so
much matter in the universe and no antimatter, beyond what is created in
colliders.

According to experiments, there should be 1020 (100 billion billion) more
photons of light than protons of matter in the universe. In fact, Nakada said,
the number is closer to 1010. That's a huge amount of unexplained matter in
the form of galaxies, stars, planets and theoretical physicists.

A detector called the LHCb will try to unravel this mystery by making very
precise measurements of a certain kind of quark that is created in particle
collisions, the b meson, and its opposite, the anti-b meson.


Black holes

Then there's the matter of black holes.

Harvey Newman, a Caltech physicist who was one of the discoverers of the gluon
and is leader of the U.S. contingent on the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment,
said the collider could theoretically produce a mini-black hole by packing a
tremendous amount of energy into a tiny space.

But he said the black hole would pose no threat because it would last only
10-27 seconds before decaying -- hardly enough time to start gobbling up the
French countryside.

Critics are not convinced. Just last month, Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho
filed suit in U.S. District Court in Honolulu to block the start-up of the new
collider until CERN produces a comprehensive safety report.

Speaking from Hawaii, Wagner said that despite assurances from scientists at
CERN and around the world, there was no proof a mini-black hole would
disappear. No one has ever seen it happen, said Wagner, who studied cosmic ray
physics at UC Berkeley as a young man.

It's just as possible that the tiny black hole would be stable and start
chewing up normal matter, he said.

It could take years for it to become large enough to gobble up the Earth, but
there's no evidence that can't happen, he said.

His suit for a restraining order is to "preserve the status quo while the
court considers the arguments. In this case, the status quo is Mother Earth
being here," he said.

Another nightmare possibility is that the collider could produce something
called strange matter, a theoretical substance that some physicists think
exists in the center of the remnants of collapsed stars.

The pressure and temperature are so intense that the protons and electrons
fuse into neutrons, then collapse into a mass of quarks.

Theoretically, the tremendous gravity of strange matter would convert any
ordinary matter it came in contact with.

Mangano said he is now writing a report addressing such concerns. He said that
protests of physics experiments were nothing new.

"Before each new accelerator started, there has been some panic," he said.
Wagner, in fact, filed suit in 1999 to stop Brookhaven National Laboratory's
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York. It went ahead and the world
survived -- just as it will this time, according to scientists from Mangano to
Newman and Stephen Hawking.

"Look," Mangano said, leaning forward in his chair at CERN's sprawling
complex, "what if I told you tomorrow when you shave you will blow up the
world? You laugh. You say that can't happen. But how do you know?

"The only thing we know is that there have been about a million billion shaves
since people started shaving and the world is still here," he said. "So all we
can say is the probability of you blowing up the world when you shave tomorrow
is less than one in 1015."




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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...1,406195.story




2008 Los Angeles Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/sc...in&oref=slogin

Gauging a Collider’s Odds of Creating a Black Hole

By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: April 15, 2008



In Walker Percy’s “Love in the Ruins,” the protagonist, a doctor and an
inventor, recites what he calls the scientist’s prayer. It goes like this:

“Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men.

“Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction.

“Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published
before the destruction takes place.”


Today we require more than prayers that a scientific experiment will not lead
to the end of the world. We demand hard-headed calculations. But whom can we
trust to do them?

That question has been raised by the impending startup of the Large Hadron
Collider. It starts smashing protons together this summer at the European
Center for Nuclear Research, or Cern, outside Geneva, in hopes of grabbing a
piece of the primordial fire, forces and particles that may have existed a
trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

Critics have contended that the machine could produce a black hole that could
eat the Earth or something equally catastrophic.

To most physicists, this fear is more science fiction than science fact. At a
recent open house weekend, 73,000 visitors, without pitchforks or torches,
toured the collider without incident.

Nevertheless, some experts say too much hype and not enough candor on the part
of scientists about the promises and perils of what they do could boomerang
into a public relations disaster for science, opening the door for charlatans
and demagogues.

In a paper published in 2000 with the title “Might a Laboratory Experiment
Destroy Planet Earth?” Francesco Calogero, a nuclear physicist at the
University of Rome and co-winner of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for his work
with the Pugwash conferences on arms control, deplored a tendency among his
colleagues to promulgate a “leave it to the experts” attitude.
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/conten...kdhq.alexandra


“Many, indeed most, of them,” he wrote, “seem to me to be more concerned with
the public relations impact of what they, or others, say and write, than in
making sure that the facts are presented with complete scientific
objectivity.”

One problem is that society has never agreed on a standard of what is safe in
these surreal realms when the odds of disaster might be tiny but the stakes
are cosmically high. In such situations, probability estimates are often no
more than “informed betting odds,” said Martin Rees, a Cambridge University
cosmologist, the astronomer royal and the author of “Our Final Hour.” Adrian
Kent, also of Cambridge, said in a paper in 2003 reviewing scientists’ failure
to calculate adequately and characterize accurately risks to the public, that
even the most basic question, “ ‘How improbable does a catastrophe have to be
to justify proceeding with an experiment?’ seems never to have been seriously
examined.” http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0009204v6


Dr. Calogero commented, as did Dr. Kent, in 2000 after a very public battle on
the safety of another accelerator, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or
Rhic, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. Dr. Calogero said
he hoped to apply a gentle pressure on Cern to treat these issues with
seriousness. “A crusade against it is a danger,” he said of the new collider.
“It would not be based on rational argument.”

Fears about the Brookhaven collider first centered on black holes but soon
shifted to the danger posed by weird hypothetical particles, strangelets, that
critics said could transform the Earth almost instantly into a dead, dense
lump. Ultimately, independent studies by two groups of physicists calculated
that the chances of this catastrophe were negligible, based on astronomical
evidence and assumptions about the physics of the strangelets. One report put
the odds of a strangelet disaster at less than one in 50 million, less than a
chance of winning some lottery jackpots. Dr. Kent, in a 2003 paper, used the
standard insurance company method to calculate expected losses to explore how
stringent this bound on danger was. He multiplied the disaster probability
times the cost, in this case the loss of the global population, six billion. A
result was that, in actuarial terms, the Rhic collider could kill up to 120
people in a decade of operation.

“Put this way, the bound seems far from adequately reassuring,” Dr. Kent
wrote.

Alvaro de Rujula of Cern, who was involved in writing a safety report, said
extending the insurance formula that way violated common sense. “Applied to
all imaginable catastrophes, it would result in World Paralysis,” he wrote.

Besides, the random nature of quantum physics means that there is always a
minuscule, but nonzero, chance of anything occurring, including that the new
collider could spit out man-eating dragons.

Doomsday from particle physics is part of the culture.

Next year will see the release of the film version of “Angels and Demons,” the
prequel to Dan Brown’s “DaVinci Code,” in which the bad guys use a Cern
accelerator to gather antimatter for a bomb to blow up the Vatican, and it
includes scenes at Cern.

In Douglas Preston’s “Blasphemy,” a best seller last winter, the operators of
a giant particle collider in New Mexico find themselves talking to an entity
that sounds like God before religious fanatics descend on the lab and destroy
it.

Some physicists, who have been waiting 14 years for the new collider, have
proclaimed in papers and press releases increasingly ambitious and unlikely
hopes, including proving a long-shot version of string theory by producing
microscopic black holes.

Inevitably, these black holes have taken center stage in the latest round of
doomsday alarms. Most theorists will say the version of their theory that
predicts black holes is extremely unlikely — though not impossible. But the
chance that such a black hole would not instantly evaporate according to a
theory famously propounded by Stephen Hawking in 1974 is even more weirdly
unlikely, the theorists say.

Cern’s most recent safety report, in 2003, focused mostly on refuting the
strangelet threat in the hadron collider and devoted just three pages to black
holes, saying they “do not present a conceivable risk.” It gave no odds. An
anonymous Cern committee is working on a final, more comprehensive report.

Neither Dr. Calogero nor Dr. Rees say they are losing sleep over the collider.
Some risk is acceptable, even inevitable, in the pursuit of knowledge, they
say, and they trust the physicists who have built it.

But it would be more reassuring in the long run, as Dr. Kent noted, if
everybody agreed beforehand how much risk is acceptable, before spending
billions of dollars and major political capital.

One popular option to determine acceptable risk is to demand that the chance
of a man-made disaster be kept below the chance of a natural disaster like
being obliterated by an asteroid. Astronomers estimate that chance as one in
50 million in any given year.

Of course, thanks to those pesky quantum laws, disaster could come anytime. Or
not. It could happen that the scientist’s prayer will be answered and your
discovery will indeed lead to knowledge, human happiness and a new killer ap
for iPhones.

“As in all explorations of uncharted domains, there may be a risk,” Dr. Rees
wrote, “but there is a hidden cost of saying no.”




2008 The New York Times Company