Word: cern
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Despite these exciting prospects, however, physicists studying the cosmos at CERN and other accelerators still face a fundamental dilemma: to explain the awesome scale of their work while calming the public's inevitable trepidation. There remains a credibility gap surrounding high-profile physics, after all: the most tangible results of atomic research in the past 50 years have been bombs capable of ending all life on earth. CERN officials refer to the laboratory as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics because they feel "nuclear" in the literal translation carries negative implications, and tour guides at the LHC are quick...
Critics of the LHC say the high-energy experiment might create a mini black hole that could expand to dangerous, Earth-eating proportions. On Aug. 26, Otto Rossler, a German chemist at the Eberhard Karis University of Tubingen, filed a lawsuit against CERN with the European Court of Human Rights that argued, with no understatement, that such a scenario would violate the right to life of European citizens and pose a threat to the rule of law. Last March, two American environmentalists filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Honolulu seeking to force the U.S. government to withdraw...
Should we be scared? No. In June, CERN published a safety report, reviewed by a group of external scientists, ruling out the possibility of dangerous black holes. It said that even if tiny black holes were to be formed at CERN - a big if - they would evaporate almost instantaneously due to Hawking Radiation, a phenomenon named for the British physicist Stephen Hawking, whose theories show that black holes not only swallow up the light, energy and matter around them, but also leak it all back out at an accelerating pace. According to Hawking, if tiny black holes occurred at CERN...
After taking in the results of CERN's report, the European Court of Human Rights rejected Rossler's request last week for an emergency injunction that would have stopped the LHC (it will still hear his lawsuit). The U.S. suit is pending, but CERN spokesman James Gillies said that even if it is successful, the experiment will go ahead without U.S. participation...
...Williams also believes that the flip side of such fear is faith in the redemptive potential of science (there are equally irrational websites about CERN, for example, that predict the LHC will create wormholes to distant corners of the universe, where humanity can escape to other inhabitable planets). Williams wrote in an e-mail: "I have come to see that in their early days, new technology and scientific breakthroughs often serve as Rorschach tests - a phenomenon about which we have little concrete understanding, onto which contemporary social anxieties (and dreams) can readily be projected. As a result we find (often...