sci.space.shuttle. Just trying to figure out how this is relevant.
Anyway (he said trollishly) maybe these will actually make God visible...
Brian
--
Brian Gaff....Note, this account does not accept Bcc: email.
graphics are great, but the blind can't hear them
Email: briang1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"David E. Powell" <David_Powell3006@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
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>
> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23844529/?GT1=43001
>
> Doomsday fears spark lawsuit over collider
> Critics worry about mini-black holes, strangelets; experts reject
> claims
> A hardhat worker is dwarfed by the inner workings of the Large Hadron
> Collider's ATLAS detector, deep beneath the French-Swiss border.
> View related photos
> EIROforum / CERN
>
> FREE VIDEO
>
> Secrets of the universe
> March 1, 2007: Scientists are edging closer to launching an experiment
> designed to uncover the origins of the universe, known as the Large
> Hadron Collider.
> NBC News Web Extra
>
> Related stories What's this?
> Smash! The search for 'sparticles'
>
> By Alan Boyle
> Science editor
> MSNBC
> updated 11:23 a.m. ET, Fri., March. 28, 2008
>
> Alan Boyle
> Science editor
>
>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> * Profile
> * E-mail
>
> The builders of the world's biggest particle collider are being sued
> in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-
> gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would
> destroy the planet.
>
> Representatives at Fermilab in Illinois and at Europe's CERN
> laboratory, two of the defendants in the case, say there's no chance
> that the Large Hadron Collider would cause such cosmic catastrophes.
> Nevertheless, they're bracing to defend themselves in the courtroom as
> well as the court of public opinion.
>
> The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is due for startup later this year
> at CERN's headquarters on the French-Swiss border. It's expected to
> tackle some of the deepest questions in science: Is the foundation of
> modern physics right or wrong? What existed during the very first
> moment of the universe's existence? Why do some particles have mass
> while others don't? What is the nature of dark matter? Are there extra
> dimensions of space out there that we haven't yet detected?
>
> Some folks outside the scientific mainstream have asked darker
> questions as well: Could the collider create mini-black holes that
> last long enough and get big enough to turn into a matter-sucking
> maelstrom? Could exotic particles known as magnetic monopoles throw
> atomic nuclei out of whack? Could quarks recombine into "strangelets"
> that would turn the whole Earth into one big lump of exotic matter?
>
> Former nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner has been raising such
> questions for years - first about an earlier-generation "big bang
> machine" known as the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, and more
> recently about the LHC.
>
> Last Friday, Wagner and another critic of the LHC's safety measures,
> Luis Sancho, filed a lawsuit in Hawaii's U.S. District Court. The suit
> calls on the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science
> Foundation and CERN to ease up on their LHC preparations for several
> months while the collider's safety was reassessed.
>
> "We're going to need a minimum of four months to review whatever
> they're putting out," Wagner told me on Monday. The suit seeks a
> temporary restraining order that would put the LHC on hold, pending
> the release and review of an updated CERN safety assessment. It also
> calls on the U.S. government to do a full environmental review
> addressing the LHC project, including the debate over the doomsday
> scenario.
>
> On Monday, District Judge Helen Gillmor assigned the case to a
> magistrate judge, Kevin S.C. Chang, for an initial conference on June
> 16. Wagner said he planned to ask for a more immediate hearing on the
> request for a restraining order - that is, once he has served the
> federal government with the court papers.
>
> The case is currently being handled by the U.S. attorney's office in
> Hawaii, where Wagner and Sancho both live,`but that may not
> necessarily be where the legal proceedings end up. The Justice
> Department's Environmental and Natural Resources Division, based in
> Washington, is also being brought in on the case, assistant U.S.
> attorney Derrick Watson told me in an e-mail Wednesday.
>
> In Washington, Justice Department spokesman Andrew Ames noted that the
> court papers had not yet been received. "We don't have any comment,"
> he told me Thursday. "We'll comment in court when it's appropriate."
>
> Debating doomsday
> The defense attorneys would likely dwell on the regulatory and
> procedural questions rather than the worries over a cosmic
> catastrophe. Those worries have been around for years, and most
> physicists have scoffed at them for almost as long. The doomsday
> scenarios raised by Sancho and Wagner include:
>
> Runaway black holes: Some physicists say the LHC could create
> microscopic black holes that would hang around for just a tiny
> fraction of a second and then decay. Sancho and Wagner worry that
> millions of black holes might somehow persist and coalesce into a
> compact gravitational mass that would draw in other matter and grow
> bigger. That's pure science fiction, said Michio Kaku, a theoretical
> physicist at the City College of New York. "These black holes don't
> live very long, and they have microscopic energy, and so they are
> harmless," he told me.
>
> Strangelets: Smashing protons together at high enough energies could
> create new combinations of quarks, the particles that protons are made
> of. Sancho and Wagner worry that a nasty combination known as a
> stable, negatively charged strangelet could theoretically turn
> everything it touches into strangelets as well. Kaku compared this to
> the ancient myth of the Midas touch. "We see no evidence of this
> bizarre theory," he said. "Once in a while, we trot it out to scare
> the pants off people. But it's not serious."
>
> Magnetic monopoles: One theory suggests that high-energy particle
> collisions might give rise to massive particles that have only one
> magnetic pole - only north, or only south, but not the north-south
> magnetism that dominates nature. Sancho and Wagner worry that such
> particles could be created in the LHC and start a runaway reaction
> that converts atoms into other forms of matter. But physicists have
> seen no evidence of such reactions, which should have occurred already
> as the result of more energetic cosmic-ray collisions in Earth's upper
> atmosphere.
> The cosmic-ray argument has been applied to the black-hole and
> strangelet scenarios as well. If such dangerous things can be created,
> why haven't they already eaten up Earth, along with other planets,
> stars or whole galaxies in the billions of years since the universe
> arose? To answer that question, Sancho and Wagner pose a
> counterargument: Perhaps cosmic-ray collisions really are creating
> tiny black holes or strangelets, but those little bits of doomsday zip
> by too fast to cause any trouble. In the LHC, they say, the bad stuff
> could hang around long enough to be captured by Earth's gravity and
> set off a catastrophe.
>
> In response, particle physicists are developing counter-
> counterarguments - based on their theoretical work as well as data
> from astronomical observations and experiments at the Relativistic
> Heavy-Ion Collider. For instance, the physicists would say that enough
> of the doomsday particles still should have been captured by neutron
> stars or cosmic gas clouds to have an impact. No such impact has ever
> been seen. Therefore, no doomsday.
>
> CERN spokesman James Gillies told me that a 2003 assessment of the
> doomsday scenarios was being updated with the new information. Release
> of that updated report - the one that Sancho and Wagner apparently
> have been waiting for - is "imminent," Gillies told me.
>
> Questions about the doomsday scenarios may well come up at CERN on
> April 6, during a public open house at the LHC. Some researchers have
> gotten the word to be prepared to talk about microscopic black holes
> and strangelets if asked.
>
> Reality check
> Saying something is absolutely impossible doesn't always come easy.
> Some scientists find it difficult to state categorically that such-and-
> such a theoretical catastrophe has no chance of happening, and
> Fermilab spokeswoman Judy Jackson told me that the doomsayers have
> "cynically distorted" that natural reluctance to rule out even the
> most outlandish theoretical possibilities.
>
> The doomsaying can continue as long as scientists hold out even a tiny
> sliver of uncertainty. Jackson cited the example of Paul Dixon, a
> psychology professor at the University of Hawaii at Hilo who has been
> saying for more than a decade that experiments at Fermilab's Tevatron
> accelerator are in danger of touching off an artificial supernova.
> Dixon is still going strong: He submitted an affidavit in support of
> the LHC lawsuit filed by Sancho and Wagner.
>
> The current lawsuit could well be decided not by scientific arguments
> but rather by narrower regulatory issues. On that point, Jackson said
> that Fermilab has followed U.S. environmental regulations, just as
> CERN has followed European regulations. "Of course there are plenty of
> environmental laws and regulations, and they have all been followed to
> the letter," she said.
>
> However, Jackson said CERN shouldn't be held to U.S. requirements when
> it comes to operating the LHC - even if the collider happens to be
> using magnets built by Fermilab. "Just because we built them doesn't
> mean we have any say over French environmental regulations," she said.
>
> For his part, Wagner said he hoped Fermilab and the other defendants
> in the lawsuit would take another look at the doomsday scenarios - and
> speculated that a restraining order might not even be necessary. He
> noted that the startup schedule for the LHC has been repeatedly
> delayed, which would give more time for further safety assessments.
> (CERN's schedule currently calls for first collisions by the end of
> August, and the word is that the collider may not reach its full power
> of 14 trillion electron-volts until next year.)
>
> Wagner suggested that cosmic-ray observations by the Pierre Auger
> Observatory and the yet-to-be-launched Gamma-ray Large Area Space
> Telescope, or GLAST, could shed new light on the debate. "The way I
> look at it, this should be a basis to look for more funding to find a
> solution to the problems we raised," he told me.
>
> An extended version of this report appears as a Cosmic Log posting on
> msnbc.com.
|
