Lawsuit over CERN's Large Hadron Collider

[Maggy J]

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archi...27/823924.aspx

Last Friday, Wagner and another critic of the LHC's safety measures, Luis Sancho, filed a lawsuit in Hawaii's U.S. District Court. The suit calls on the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation and CERN to ease up on their LHC preparations for several months while the collider's safety was reassessed.

Some folks outside the scientific mainstream have asked darker questions as well: Could the collider create mini-black holes that last long enough and get big enough to turn into a matter-sucking maelstrom? Could exotic particles known as magnetic monopoles throw atomic nuclei out of whack? Could quarks recombine into "strangelets" that would turn the whole Earth into one big lump of exotic matter?

Eh?

Now I'm worried...and I wasn't before in my happy ignorance..now you can be worried with me...Or not as the case maybe.

[bmxbandit]

Hmm. File all under Fascinating Scientific Questions to which the Answer is 'No'™

[TheNorm]

Interesting. I think this comment summed it up well:

Could we, just for a moment, please stop being afraid of every little thing we don't fully understand? This is science, not science fiction. Let's learn what there is before we hide under our beds from it.

[bmxbandit]

The comments are quite amusing, half being "will you please think of the children!" and half "haha, but seriously now, no".

---------- Post added at 15:31 ---------- Previous post was at 15:12 ----------

Suitably derisory article on The Register

[TheNorm]

I just love that title:

Botanist sues to stop CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe

[Skatoony]

I wonder if this is a "yours is bigger than ours, so we're suing you" type of thing

[greencreeper]

The problem is that we're experimenting with stuff that no one fully understands. Bit like the early days of nuclear power, when we irradiated one or two people, and very nearly the odd country or two. The argument that we should only be afraid of what we know, doesn't really stand up when you consider that by the time we know, it may be too late.

[popper]

Originally Posted by Skatoony

I wonder if this is a "yours is bigger than ours, so we're suing you" type of thing

nail+head, ill get my coat...

[Anonymouse]

Originally Posted by greencreeper

The problem is that we're experimenting with stuff that no one fully understands. Bit like the early days of nuclear power, when we irradiated one or two people, and very nearly the odd country or two.

Not quite...during the first A-bomb and H-bomb tests, there weren't many senior officers exposed, were there? Mainly enlisted men and civilians were in positions we now know were insanely dangerous, i.e. not in properly-shielded bunkers. True, they were a few miles away from the blasts, but that doesn't mean squat when you consider hard gamma rays, which of course travel at the speed of light, like all electromagnetic waves. Beta rays (high-energy electrons) don't half shift, too - typical velocities are a fair fraction of lightspeed. That's why there's no point running from an A-bomb explosion if you're in direct line of sight with nothing but air between you and the blast; you're already dead unless you're far enough away for the air to absorb the radiation and particles. A mile or less - forget it. You're done.

Oh, they were pretty sure it was lethal, all right. They just weren't that sure of how lethal. But in the case of the LHC, the alleged risks are minimal at best; there are practical limits to the energy levels of the accelerated particles, and as someone pointed out in The Register, supernovae generate more energy than we as a species have ever used, or are ever likely to - and that certainly isn't enough to cause anything universe-threatening. On the other hand, if it does happen we can at least take the fatalistic view that it'll likely happen too fast for us to know about it.

As for the magnetic monopoles - well, there are theories that predict (or imply or, in some cases, demand) their existence, but they're not obligatory. Symmetry theories suggest they should exist; after all, electric monopoles - electrons and protons - certainly exist, and magnetism & electricity are of course related and unified by Maxwell's equations. But thus far the existence of a particle which has only a north or south magnetic pole has not been observed (well, not confirmed, anyway!); either they are too unstable to exist for long enough to be observed, or they require more energy to create than we can provide, or they don't exist at all. The jury's still out.

Hence the LHC.

I rather suspect they've watched the last season of Lexx a bit too often. Not that it's possible to watch too much of Xenia Seeberg or Louise Wischermann...

[alferret]

There gonna fire this baby up and were all gonna end up in some parralel universe where apes rule and charlton heston is an astronaut.

Oppppsssss they already done that

---------- Post added at 17:23 ---------- Previous post was at 17:19 ----------

Originally Posted by greencreeper

The problem is that we're experimenting with stuff that no one fully understands. Bit like the early days of nuclear power, when we irradiated one or two people, and very nearly the odd country or two. The argument that we should only be afraid of what we know, doesn't really stand up when you consider that by the time we know, it may be too late.

We shouldnt be afraid of progress its what we as a species do best.
We learn a little from what we already know but we learn an awful lot more from what we dont know or from what we are just starting out on.
I for one am pleased that we have the knowledge and courage to explore what we dont yet full understand.
CERN gets a bit from me.

[polmki]

The power of the LHC is a bit exaggerated. Every day the Earth is bombarded by cosmic ray particles that are much more energetic than anything the LHC could create.

[Sirpingalot]

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator in the final stages of constuction. When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and "missing links" in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass.

There is a CHANCE that it will create a black hole which would devour us all, but scientists aregue that it doesn't have the energy required to create such a scenario.

There are also various other risks associated with the machine.

The LHC is scheduled to go online within the next few months.

What do you guys think of this?

Personally I think we should wait until we FULLY unsderstand what we are doing.

[Sirius]

Originally Posted by Sirpingalot

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator in the final stages of constuction. When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and "missing links" in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass.

There is a CHANCE that it will create a black hole which would devour us all, but scientists aregue that it doesn't have the energy required to create such a scenario.

There are also various other risks associated with the machine.

The LHC is scheduled to go online within the next few months.

What do you guys think of this?

Personally I think we should wait until we FULLY unsderstand what we are doing.

Personally i have much more important things to think about than a glorified magnet getting turned on. Now where did i put that tin foil hat

[Enuff]

Duck and cover.

Seriously though, I really hope it is!

[BBKing]

Personally I think we should wait until we FULLY unsderstand what we are doing.

We'd never get anywhere. In 1829 people thought that going at 30mph on a steam train would asphyxiate you and kill the cows.

I say turn it on and crank it up to 11. We're human after all. I want to see the 24 hour news coverage.