Word: wagnerism
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...their own gas tank these days can at least understand a little of that desperation. With oil prices soaring to $135 a barrel, the airlines have little choice but to pass on some of the added expense to their customers. "Current oil prices are a game-changer," says Tim Wagner, an American Airlines spokesman. "It's a tipping point. The airlines are simply not designed to handle oil at this price...
...specific concern filed by Wagner and Sancho is that according to some theories, the LHC, by fracturing atoms into smaller and smaller parts, may create one of three exotic yet dangerous possibilities. The first option is a strangelet, a small particle that makes other atoms strangelets until it “eventually [converts] all of Earth into a single larger ‘strangelet’ of huge size.” If you don’t like the prospect of being turned into exotic atomic material without your consent, then perhaps you should consider what?...
...world scenarios are not new. Wagner filed a similar complaint in 1999 and 2000 to prevent the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory from going online. The collider, which has been functional since 2000, has yet to produce a black hole...
...Although this time around the formation of micro black holes is highly unlikely, Wagner and Sancho do raise the serious question of how much chance is acceptable when it comes to destroying the earth. At some point—not necessarily this point—experimenting with powerful force in biology or physics can become reckless. Kurt Vonnegut, in his novel Cat’s Cradle, which is about the destruction of the Earth by a substance called ice-nine, asks, “What hope can there be for mankind when there are such men…to give...
...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...