The physicists at the Large Hadron Collider, a giant particle accelerator at CERN near Geneva, have taken a bit of time off from trying to get their shiny new toy up and running to address concerns that it might inadvertently destroy the planet. Their conclusion? It won’t.

For those in need of an reminder, Walter Wagner, a Hawaiian botanist-cum-physicist indicted in February for identity theft, is suing the LHC and its partners because, he says, the particle accelerator could destroy the earth any one of a number of ways. It might create microscopic black holes that could swallow us all. Or it could make particles called “strangelets” that will turn the entire earth into a big blob of “strange” matter.

The new report rightly points out that there are plenty of places in the universe where particles collide at far higher energies than they will in LHC. There are also collisions right here in our upper atmosphere caused by cosmic rays—high-energy particles from deep space. So far at least, none of this has caused the planet to vanish.

To physicists, this whole debate is pretty silly, but it’s good that they’re taking the time to respond. Wagner and his cronies have been getting a lot of press, and it’s important that the public know that the LHC is the least of the world’s problems.

Image: CERN

– Derek Lowe‘s blog entries in the “”https://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/">Things I Won’t Work With" category

– the explosion at the National Institution of Higher Learning in Chemistry at Mulhouse (which killed chemistry professor Dominique Burget)

– Karen Wetterhahn’s tragic death in 1997

Chemistry just seems more dangerous than other scientific disciplines…

In the June 1st issue of Nature, Mark Peplow and Emma Marris investigated whether or not chemistry deserves its “reckless reputation.” They talked with a number of safety officers from several universities, many of whom think that the dangers of chemistry are a bit exaggerated:

“A lot of it is reminiscence to ‘the good old days’ of chemistry,” says Alan Kendall, safety officer at the University of Oxford, UK.

“There’s a public perception that is years behind the reality,” agrees Richard Firn, a biologist who chairs the laboratory safety committee at the University of York, UK. “Things have changed a lot in the past 10 to 15 years” … “People’s risk perception is skewed by the drama of an explosion” …

But Mark and Emma acknowledged that it was “surprisingly difficult to get national statistics on scientific accidents … [the UK Health and Safety Executive], for example, groups all its accident figures for schools, colleges and universities into a single number, making it difficult to discern safety trends or to tell if one type of lab is more risky than another.”

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)