Save the World

New York Times reported two men filed a lawsuit in federal 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 or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

And they think a district court in Hawaii can stop that?

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

Glad they are checking.

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion

And these nuts could not have filed their case before the $8 billion was spent?

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.”

I think that has already happened. There are a lot of things happening nw that are pretty strange.

Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

What is the environmental impact of a black hole swallowing up the earth?

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

Good question, especially after the Supreme Court said Texas did not have to follow a world court decision demanding a new trial for an illegal alien sentenced to die for some terrible crimes, that did not get to call the Mexican Embassy.

Although it is warmer in Hawaii than Switzerland. Maybe they will want to take a tropical vacation.

In an interview, Mr. 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 Mr. Sancho could have sued in France or Switzerland, but to save expenses they had added CERN to the docket here.... 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,” Mr. Gillies said.

My first thought.

... 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 new worries are about black holes, which, according to some variants of string theory, could appear at the collider. That possibility, though a long shot, has been widely ballyhooed in many papers and popular articles in the last few years, but would they be dangerous?

According to a paper by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking in 1974, they would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat. No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate.

If you want to watch one, be sure to stay outside of it's event horizon.

... Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

Better stop it. Black holes and strange matter are one thing, but I did not realize it could create dragons.