Word: lhc
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...Sept. 10, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) laboratory in Geneva will switch on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - a $6 billion particle accelerator that will send beams of protons careening around a 17-mile underground ring, crash them into one another to re-create the immediate aftereffects of the Big Bang, and then monitor the debris in the hopes of learning more about the origins and workings of the universe. Next week marks a low-power run of the circuit, and scientists hope to start smashing atoms at full power by the end of the month...
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...
...accelerating pace. According to Hawking, if tiny black holes occurred at CERN, they would evaporate before they got a chance to do any damage. (Even if Hawking's theories prove to be wrong - no one has yet witnessed black-hole evaporation - scientists at CERN say the LHC's collisions are already known to be harmless: an equivalent amount of energy is produced hundreds of thousands of times a day by cosmic rays colliding with the earth and other objects in the cosmos - always without incident...
...faring life is that all of them have been prevented either by a barrier that would prevent them from getting to our stage of development (i.e. conditions needed to start life) or by a barrier that destroyed them before they could begin spreading into space (i.e. they built a LHC). If the barrier is the latter, then humanity could be in store for a bumpy future...
...Wagner and Sancho’s lawsuit, while improbable, is not frivolous. After all, the one time we got it wrong would easily outweigh all the previous times we were overly cautious. Most likely, when the LHC goes online later this year, nothing will happen, which I will hear about from my basement with my jugs of water and a game of Scrabble...