Thereby demonstrating his grasp of geography is as poor as his knowledge of physics.

From VNUnet.com:

A US District Court in Hawaii has been petitioned to stop the operation of the Cern Large Hadron Collider (LHC) over fears that it might cause the end of the world.

Walter Wagner, a retired nuclear safety officer, has filed suit in the District Court in Hawaii to stop CERN from starting up their Large Hadron Collider (LHC). He claims the LHC might create a mini black hole that would swallow the planet, or else create ‘strangelets’ that would rapidly convert the entire Earth to strange matter. The claims have been dismissed by the physicists at CERN.

In a statement, the organisation claimed that no black hole strong enough to pull in surrounding matter could be produced by LHC, pointing out that the individual energy of the collisions in the device is of the same order as being bumped into by a mosquito. Referring to the fact that much higher energy cosmic rays have regularly bombarded the Earth for all its 4.5 billion year existence, the statement added “If the LHC can produce microscopic black holes, cosmic rays of much higher energies would already have produced many more. Since the Earth is still here, there is no reason to believe that collisions inside the LHC are harmful.”

Even if successful, Wagner’s suit would not stop the planned operation of the LHC, which is buried below the French/Swiss border, just northwest of Geneva, and is not dependent on the US.

So far, men have not been able to produce something that is more powerful then a black hole or the sun.  Looks like someone has taken a urban legend for truth

Mind you, some researchers think that mini black holes have already been produced in the lab. Specifically in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0501068
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0603176

Hold Me…

A US District Court in Hawaii has been petitioned to stop the operation of the Cern Large Hadron Collider (LHC) over fears that it might cause the end of the world.

I know there a some strong opponents to the adult entertainment industry, but really.  To take it to Federal Court?  I mean…

What?  HAD-ron?

Nevermind.

Tah - 28 March 2008 05:25 PM

A US District Court in Hawaii has been petitioned to stop the operation of the Cern Large Hadron Collider (LHC) over fears that it might cause the end of the world.

I know there a some strong opponents to the adult entertainment industry, but really.  To take it to Federal Court?  I mean…

What?  HAD-ron?

Nevermind.

Who had ron??? 

He claims the LHC might create a mini black hole that would swallow the planet

Been reading Dan Simmons, much? This sounds an awful lot like the Big Mistake of ‘38 from his book Hyperion.

I think this is a case where a little knowledge can be a bad thing.  Both the plaintiffs are math people and all they can see is the numbers.  I doubt that they ever used common sense to look at the problem (A somewhat common problem with some science types…).  Had they done so, they would realize that super-colliders have been operating for what, 50 odd years?  Yes, this one is bigger. Yes it is stronger.  But on a microscopic scale.

The numbers just show the possibilities. It almost sounds like they have had too big a dose of quantum theory and too small a dose of common sense. *sigh*

I kinda feel for the guys. Their fear is real. Just like the fear of many scientists that the first nuke test would set fire to the Earth’s atmosphere.  People forget that for some reason nature is pretty forgiving of fools.  Maybe it has something to do with all that entropy…..

I’m just curious what made them think that filing suit in hawaii would get it stopped..

I rather uncharitably put it down to a poor knowledge of geography, but more likely the legal action is probably just a way of drawing some attention to their concerns.

The possibility of the LHC creating a black hole is real, there is a small - but non-zero - chance that it will. However this is also true of the type of collisions that happen a gazillion times a day in the cathode-ray tubes of the world’s televisions, sure the individual probability might be a trillion-trillion times smaller for a TV than the odds that the LHC will make one, but then there are an awful lot of TVs out there smashing electrons into each other in huge numbers all day long.

Why shut down just one high-energy particle accelerator but ignore the millions of low-energy ones all around us?

(And, yes, I do know that electrons are not hadrons but leptons!)

When I started learning about the sub-atomic world, quarks were still only a hypothesis (and supported by a minority of scientists to boot), so it’s a constant source of amazement to me how far high-energy physics has come within my lifetime. This is despite me having worked in that field for over a decade.

Perhaps that’s why I find it so ironic when people like P-motion (or Jim or whatever he’s calling himself now) and AB Hammer claim that the science educated are bound by orthodoxy and unwilling to see any part of what they’ve learnt in college turn out to be wrong.

Hell, at least 30% of everything I learnt at university has been superseded since I left. In fact the proportion is probably higher and I’ve just not noticed yet. So how do I feel about all my ‘scientific learning’ becoming stale and outdated?

I think it’s brilliant! Science is moving on, discovering new things, and refining or discarding old ideas all the time; yee-hah! The day we stop mining that little seam of insight buried in the mountain of ignorance is the day I’ll cry, thanks.

Mind you, it’s worth noting that every one of those ‘cherished little theories’ I was taught that since bit the dust did so because someone could demonstrate that they were wrong, inconsistent, incomplete or just plain inferior to the idea that replaced them. Science is sceptical like that, so whether it’s Intelligent Design or Perpetual Motion, the answer is usually the same. Come back to us when you have a working model.

It was filed at a Federal court (U.S. District).  If it’s an international incident doesn’t it need to start in the Federal court system?

And it doesn’t state where Walter Wagner lives.  If he lives in Hawaii it would make sense to file a charge in Hawaii.