hard deadlines

Today's New York Times brings word of a lawsuit filed in federal court in Hawaii to stop the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a giant particle accelerator in Europe, from conducting experiments with high-energy protons that the litigants fear could destroy the earth.

The LHC is indeed a very, very powerful device, and accelerating protons to energies of 7 trillion electron volts will produce conditions unlike anything seen since shortly after the Big Bang. The lawsuit contends that a mini-black hole could be produced which would go bouncing around and eat the earth. Now I only took one grad-level course in physics, but my understanding (and that of cosmologist Stephen Hawking) is that such tiny black holes, even if they were produced, would almost instantaneously evaporate. Not so, contend litigants Wagner and Sancho:

[...]No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate.

As a result, Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho contend in their complaint, black holes could really be stable, and a micro black hole created by the collider could grow, eventually swallowing the Earth.

But William Unruh, of the University of British Columbia, whose paper exploring the limits of Dr. Hawking’s radiation process was referenced on Mr. Wagner’s Web site, said they had missed his point. “Maybe physics really is so weird as to not have black holes evaporate,” he said. “But it would really, really have to be weird.” [...]

Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”
— via The New York Times

Personally, I think the two alien/mutant critters in the Web comic Overcompensating have better reasons for trying to stop the LHC.

— via Overcompensating.com

ps: You can learn more about the LHC here. And that elusive Higgs boson, which just might explain the phenomenon of mass.