Last night saw what was reported to be the largest gathering yet of the Boston Skeptics in the Pub. The second floor of Tommy Doyle’s in Harvard Square was packed to the beams. The crowd came to find out more about CERN’s doomsday device supercollider (LHC), a project that has been the focus of headlines that question the safety of a machine designed to recreate conditions at the moment of the Big Bang. This uncertainty has gone Hollywood in the form of the recent Ron Howard/Tom Hanks offering in which a completely unreasonable amount of anti-matter produced by the collider is stolen and used as fuel for a bomb to explode the Vatican.
It seems that CERN is quite concerned with the fallout, as it were, from Dan Brown’s book. Even on this night, the majority of the debunking presented in Dr. Shulamit Moed’s fantastic talk was about this very question. Up until that point in the lecture (at about the one hour mark), Dr. Moed discussed particle physics in a way that had me fooling myself into thinking this isn’t so bad… Perhaps I can have a decent handle on the subtleties of Top quarks and lucky charm quarks and gluons and muons and so forth. My confidence was eventually dashed by the appearance of a terrifying slide riddled with formulae. These kinds of greek-letter-infested ciphers ensure the integrity of the physicist mystique.
To hell with the dangers of anti-matter. I wanted to hear about the vicious murmurings of black hole creation! There is a supposed danger, in the popular imagination, that proton collisions at the LHC will yield microscopic black holes that will grow astonishingly fast and suck us all into oblivion. In fact, this possibility was placed front and center on the Skeptics event horizon announcement and I was disappointed that Dr. Moed did not address it in her talk. So, here is what the folks at CERN have to say on the matter:
Speculations about microscopic black holes at the LHC refer to particles produced in the collisions of pairs of protons, each of which has an energy comparable to that of a mosquito in flight. Astronomical black holes are much heavier than anything that could be produced at the LHC.
According to the well-established properties of gravity, described by Einstein’s relativity, it is impossible for microscopic black holes to be produced at the LHC. There are, however, some speculative theories that predict the production of such particles at the LHC. All these theories predict that these particles would disintegrate immediately. Black holes, therefore, would have no time to start accreting matter and to cause macroscopic effects.
Oh! Einstein says it’s okay. Nevermind then.
It is clear that too much has been made of the various dangers of the LHC for purposes that range from sheer paranoia to attention mongering. The physics, what we know about the behavior and order of the natural world, is consistent with the LHC being as safe as any collider that currently exists. Even still, there is a small, mischievous part of me that muses darkly about the timing of when the LHC will reach full operation after all the set-backs. 2012 is just around the bend.