Episode 75
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Higgs boson… the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is supposed to come online this September, and is expected to detect the Higgs boson. Maybe. If it exists. But, in any case, they’ve got a lower limit of about 100 GeV on its mass (I think that’s what it was…), but no upper limit that I could find by skimming Wikipedia.
How valuable will knowledge of the Higgs boson or other discoveries be if the Earth is given an incurable case of micro black hole cancer and a 50 month to 50 year prognosis.
Several prominent physicists who do not appear to display a competent understanding of LHC Safety issues proclaim that more powerful cosmic rays harmlessly strike Earth regularly proving safety. This argument is nonsense.
Stable micro black holes created by cosmic ray collisions with Earth would travel through Earth at nearly the speed of light, leaving the Earth unharmed. CERN’s LHC Safety Assessment Group acknowledged this in a March 2008 email.
Abstract below from Dr. Rossler’s plea to the world, copy available on LHCFacts.org.
“A nightmarish situation, that can still be hoped to be averted in time through communication within the scientific community, is drawn attention to. Only a few weeks remain to find out whether the danger is real or nothing but a mirage. After this time window is closed, it will take years until we know whether or not we are doomed. The story line has all the features of a best-selling novel. The reader is asked to contribute constructively.”
Quote from Dr. Otto E. Rossler, Professor Theoretical Biochemist, visiting Professor of Theoretical Physics, inventor of the Rossler Attractor, founder of Endophysics, winner of the 2003 Chaos Award of the University of Liege and the 2003 Rene Descartes Award.
Comment by jtankers — August 9, 2008 @ 10:17 am
Whoa, hold your horses, there.
The risk of a micro black hole escaping from the LHC, growing in size and thereby swallowing the Earth into a gravitational pit of no return is… so small it’s not worth worrying about. No, really. First off, said black holes would be puny — the mass would necessarily be less than 14 TeV, since the protons the LHC accelerates will have no more energy than 7 TeV. That puts you at about 14000 proton rest masses… or about 2×10^(-23) kg, tops. And given that it’s of that size, it will evaporate via Hawking radiation in an extremely short amount of time. And it’s necessarily created in the vacuum that contains the colliding particles… so, it’s not going to have much of a chance to absorb more mass before it evaporates.
If you want the Wikipedia article, that can be found here. I’d suggest following some of the links and references to the background information.
Basically, the likelihood that we all die because somebody makes a micro black hole in the LHC is probably the same order of magnitude as the likelihood that we all die because the Earth and everything on it quantum tunnels into the Sun. (Which is ridiculously unlikely.) When all’s said and done, it’s just another big particle accelerator.
Anyway, even if you think that we’re all going to die from the LHC’s great power… I hope you find the references amusing.
Comment by sedna — August 9, 2008 @ 11:32 am