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International Herald Tribune
Try this headline: Black Hole Eats Earth
By Dennis Overbye
Saturday, March 29, 2008
More strife in Iraq. U.S. financial system in crisis. Rice prices soar.
None of these headlines will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a
lawsuit in a court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant
particle
accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this
summer might produce a black hole that will spell the end of the Earth -
and
maybe the universe.
Scientists say that is very unlikely - though they have done some checking
just to make sure.
The world's physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the
Large
Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and
conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
Researchers
will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the
nature
of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.
But Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European
Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that
the
collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which,
they
say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a
"strangelet"
that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something
called "strange matter." Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide
an
environmental impact statement as required under the U.S. National
Environmental Policy Act.
Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has
bothered scholars and scientists in recent years - namely how to estimate
the
risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or
not
to go ahead.
The lawsuit, filed March 21 in U.S. District Court in Honolulu, seeks a
temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the
accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environmental
assessment. It names the U.S. Department of Energy, the Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and CERN as
defendants.
According to a spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing
the
Department of Energy, a scheduling meeting has been set for June 16.
Why should CERN, an organization of European nations based in Switzerland,
even show up in a Hawaiian courtroom?
In an interview, Wagner said, "I don't know if they're going to show up."
CERN
would have to voluntarily submit to the court's jurisdiction, he said,
adding
that he and Sancho could have sued in France or Switzerland, but to save
expenses they had added CERN to the docket here. He claimed that a
restraining
order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helps to supply and
maintain the accelerator's massive superconducting magnets, would shut
down
the project anyway.
James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory as of
yet
had no comment on the suit. "It's hard to see how a district court in
Hawaii
has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe,"
Gillies
said.
"There is nothing new to suggest that the LHC is unsafe," he said, adding
that
its safety had been confirmed by two reports, with a third on the way, and
would be the subject of a discussion during an open house at the lab on
April
6.
"Scientifically, we're not hiding away," he said.
But Wagner is not mollified. "They've got a lot of propaganda saying it's
safe," he said in an interview, "but basically it's propaganda."
In an e-mail message, Wagner called the CERN safety review "fundamentally
flawed" and said it had been initiated too late. The review process
violates
the European Commission's standards for adhering to the "Precautionary
Principle," he wrote, "and has not been done by 'arms length' scientists."
Physicists in and out of CERN say a variety of studies, including an
official
CERN report in 2003, have concluded there is no problem. But just to be
sure,
last year the anonymous Safety Assessment Group was set up to do the
review
again.
"The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a
threat
to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots," said Michelangelo
Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group. The others
prefer
to remain anonymous, Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was
due
in January.
This is not the first time around for Wagner. He filed similar suits in
1999
and 2000 to prevent the Brookhaven National Laboratory from operating the
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. That suit was dismissed in 2001. The
collider, which smashes together gold ions in the hopes of creating what
is
called a "quark-gluon plasma," has been operating without incident since
2000.
Wagner, who lives on the Big Island of Hawaii, studied physics and did
cosmic
ray research at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a
doctorate in law from what is now known as the University of Northern
California in Sacramento. He subsequently worked as a radiation safety
officer
for the Veterans Administration.
Sancho, who describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory,
lives in Spain, probably in Barcelona, Wagner said.
Doomsday fears have a long, if not distinguished, pedigree in the history
of
physics. At Los Alamos before the first nuclear bomb was tested, Emil
Konopinski was given the job of calculating whether or not the explosion
would
set the atmosphere on fire.
Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist whose work helped fuel the speculation
about
black holes at the collider, pointed out in a paper last year that black
holes
would not be produced at the collider after all, although other effects of
so-called quantum gravity might appear.
As part of the safety assessment report, Mangano and Steve Giddings of the
University of California, Santa Barbara, have been working intensely for
the
last few months on a paper exploring the possibilities of black holes.
They
think there are no problems but are reluctant to talk about their findings
until they have been reviewed, Mangano said.
2008 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
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