So I'm a technological optimist. By and large, I think that, ultimately, technology will solve all my problems. That is, of course, if it doesn't destroy the world first. Because, let's face it, science is kind of scary.
At the top of my list of things that frighten me (followed shortly by a super-flu that turns people into zombies) is the sort-of-fact that the Large Hadron Collider could spew out strangelets and turn the Earth into a black hole, summon aggressive time travelers from the future, or plop us into a mediocre sci-fi movie.
Thank the good lord Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho have their heads screwed on right. They've filed suit in a federal court in Honolulu to stop CERN from powering up the LHC until it's produced safety and environmental reports.
When the Lardge Hadron Collider goes online, scientists hope to produce a controlled environment that represents the universe less than one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. We could learn all sorts of fun things about energy, mass, and space that aren't apparent in any other environment.
Or, as Wagner and Sancho think (and I have nightmares about), the LHC could spawn a tiny black hole that would swallow the Earth or, as a fun bonus, spew out a horde of theoretical objects called stangelets. A strangelet is a piece of strange matter, made up of "strange" quarks in addition to your garden variety up and down quarks. The worry is that a strangelet encountering normal matter would immediately convert the latter into the former. Then you've got an apocalyptic chain reaction.
If strangelets do exist, though, they're likely already related by cosmic rays colliding with each other or Earth's atmosphere. Theoretically, they're just decaying to a ground state before they hit us and ruin our lives. Combine that with the sort-of-fact that the LHC could create black holes, and you've got yourself an EPA case.
It's pretty widely accepted that neither will happen, and even I am willing to begrudgingly admit that the world will probably be enriched (and I'll have more to blog about) by the LHC findings, but the Hawaiians are soldiering on.
Since they've filed in the U.S., though, CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) will probably stay home to finish prepping the Large Hadron Collider. And it's probably okay.
“Neither has any merit,” Dr. Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, told the New York Times of the doomsday scenarios. Because of the wonders of quantum physics, though, there's always the chance that “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”
Thanks, Doc.
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