The safety of switching on the Large Hadron Collider
August 20, 2008 | 8:35 am
Most people interested in the Large Hadron Collider have heard about recent grumblings from a small, dedicated cadre who believe that the risks of starting up the LHC are unacceptable, primarily because they think it could create microscopic black holes that would destroy the Earth.
Although this argument had been refuted many times, and repeated safety studies commissioned by CERN have agreed that the risk is negligible, a new essay is well worth reading. Michael Peskin, from Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, has penned a viewpoint for the American Physical Society’s new online publication, titled Physics.
In it, he discusses the recent technical paper by Giddings and Mangano (G&M) on the risks of black hole production at the LHC. The paper itself is long and probably only readable by scientists, but Peskin’s viewpoint summarises the main arguments admirably clearly. As readers following this topic know, there is a negligible risk, but Peskin relates the quite fascinating contortions that G&M go through to try to find a significant risk before disposing of all those arguments.
If you haven’t read a discussion of this issue but would like to find out a bit more than the newspapers have discussed, Peskin’s viewpoint is well worth reading.
There is a lot of good stuff in Physics and so you might want to add its RSS feed to your feed reader. And you do have symmetry breaking coming in by RSS to your feed reader already, don’t you?
David Harris
Posted in Uncategorized |
August 23rd, 2008 at 9:52 am
Peskin’s article is excellent but has an unsettling closer: “in order to justify accelerators of the future [over 100TeV] we will need to better engage the public…” So physicists have already determined the safety of future accelerators? And the public only needs to be “engaged”? No hubris among physicists. No need for thought about “constructionism”.
August 26th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
So this is it. We’re going to die.
August 28th, 2008 at 6:21 am
Black holes just keep getting bigger, I know I made one in a baby food jar. Sure at first it ate one atom at a time, then it got too big for the baby food jar and Had to put it into a pickle jar. And I assure you it was eating more then one atom at a time, because I had to put it into a fifty gallon aquarium in half the the time it took to go from the baby jar to pickle jar. Long story short my parents said I could not keep it any longer, so I released it into the wild. Now I’m sad.
September 6th, 2008 at 10:06 am
So… leaving the lights on, driving petrol-driven cars and drinking water out of plastic bottles will destroy the planet, but switching on a hadron collider won’t?
Interesting that the people at CERN think that any risk of destroying the planet can be regarded as “negligible”
There’s a negligible risk of getting run over if I walk to the shop.
Now.. if someone told me that walking to the shop incurred a “negligible” risk of creating a black hole and destroying the planet. I’d rethink my options.
However, if I was then told that €6.3bn had been spent enabling me to walk to the shop, and that my head would roll if I didn’t go, then I’d forget about armageddon and do as I was told.
September 8th, 2008 at 11:50 am
[...] and found that collisions present no danger. We have written previously about the safety of the LHC here and [...]
September 9th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
John: I understand what you are saying but the “negligible” risk of getting run over when walking to the shop is a different “negligible” to that of what might happen at the LHC.
However, the similarity is that in both cases “negligible” means, that it is small enough that we don’t need to adjust our behavior based upon the risk.
The risk of the LHC creating a black hole which destroys the planet is almost identical to the risk of your walking to the shop, creating a black hole, and destroying the planet, relative to the risk of being run over.
I think the idea that over 10,000 scientists, engineers, and technicians (who all contribute to the machine) would follow a “party line” seriously underestimates the regard scientists have for their own lives and the lives of their families, and also the degree to which this group think in unison. Scientists in a group are some of the most argumentative, contrary people you can collect because the nature of science is that scientists argue against each other to test ideas.
September 9th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
negligible?!?!?!? seriously? we could all die for godsake. I think this is dumb and there’s no point in it. maybe the LHC should leave the world alone, and not try to kill it off for once? I mean, this is the whole world for love of god! not a town, not a city, not a state, not a country, THE WHOLE WORLD!! that’s like 4.5 billion people. think with the practical part of your brain instead of the nerdy must-prove-we’re-smart part.
September 9th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
Katherine: It is precisely because scientists are thinking with the practical parts of their brains that they can say there is no risk. They are not being swayed by irrational fears being stirred up by two or three people, who have done this repeatedly in the past and been proven to have no idea of what is going on every single time.
The point here is that we couldn’t all die. There is no risk. As the abstract of the paper says: “Indeed, conservative arguments based on detailed calculations and the best-available scientific knowledge, including solid astronomical data, conclude, from multiple perspectives, that there is no risk of any significance whatsoever from such black holes.”
September 9th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Don’t worry everyone, it’ll be OK.
September 10th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
progress for the sake of progress when we can’t even figure out how to get along…what’s the point?
…but if they do make a black hole…it’s a cool way to go out right? You’d have a cool story in the after-life/parallel universe