New Report concludes the LHC won't eat the universe

Report concludes the LHC won't eat the universe
You can sleep easy in the knowledge that the world's most powerful particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, will not gobble us all up in the middle of the night. So says a new safety assessment released by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, based near Geneva, Switzerland .

The lab hopes this will quash relentless rumours that the LHC could create Earth-obliterating particles. Favourite examples are mini black holes and ravenous "killer strangelets" that could swallow our planet whole. Not to mention even more devastating vacuum bubbles that might destroy the whole universe.

So concerned are campaigners from Hawaii and Spain that they took out a lawsuit attempting to delay the start up of the LHC until a more thorough safety assessments were completed. It remains to be seen whether they will be satisfied with the new report from the LHC Safety Assessment Group, which reaffirms and extends the conclusions of an earlier safety analysis released in 2003.

These safety analyses are clearly vital. If we create technologies that might cook up oddities completely new to science, experts must investigate whether any of them might be dangerous.

But the universe is much better at doing high-energy experiments than we are. Ultra-high-energy particles whizz around the universe all the time, zapping the Earth, planets and stars. If particle collisions like those at the LHC could spawn devastating mini black holes and killer strangelets, they would have gobbled us all up long before now.

Hazel Muir, New Scientist contributor

new scientist

The full report is here

So we're to take another self imposed platitude from CERN.

This can't be good!

[edit on 24-6-2008 by schrodingers dog]

WHEW! Well, that's a relief. Now, if we can just quell that pesky interdimensional stranglet thang, we're golden.

I'm positively certain I'd absolutely HATE waking up as anitiquark mush.

reply to post by argentus


Argentus, you are the charm to my anticharm!
The important thing to remember here is:
The quantum numbers of the top and bottom quarks are sometimes known as truth and beauty respectively, as an alternative to topness and bottomness.
It's true.

Of course there's this from the renowned Dr. Baldev:

If LHC research fails, it may shrink the Earth?
MIL/IR, Apr 10, 2008. Nitin Raj


New Delhi, India – April 10, 2008 – IR Summary – Nitin Raj interviews Dr. Raj Baldev, Cosmo Theorist, and seeks his opinion whether the experiments being done by scientists on the mountainous outskirts of Switzerland to find the answer of origin of the Universe can prove dangerous to the life of Earth Planet?

Dr. Raj Baldev, Cosmo Theorist from India, gave his comments as under:

“Hundreds of scientists are busy are working deep under the Earth on the mountainous outskirts of Swtizerland to find out the answer how the Universe was born and what was that God Particle, which had existed before the Big Bang. It is such an answer, which I have already given in my book titled “Two Big Bangs Created the Universe” (Formed in Eternal Space), which was released in November 2003.

Dr. Raj Baldev said,‘The project is called LHC (Large Hadron Collider), the largest scientific instrument ever made, in one of the biggest experiments in particle physics beginning June. LHC is built in a circular 27 km-tunnel buried 50 to 175 beneath the Swiss-French border.

“It is a sort of progressing well, over $ 6.3 billion project funded by European Organisation for Nuclear Research or CERN. It is a dangerous game that the scientists are playing with the Earth planet. Experiments under a limit are welcome and not where the big risk is involved. The scientists may be confident that their experiment would succeed, but the high cannot be ruled out.

Dr. Raj Baldev continued, “The people are innocent; they do not know what the scientists are doing? They are only praising the feat of scientists innocently. But the scientists are fully aware that it is not a project without a grave risk to the life of the Earth.

‘Their experiment, if detracted, may endanger the life of the Earth Planet, partly or fully, no one can say with surety, it is an experiment that may or may not succeed. If the experiment fails, it may react dangerously, in what way, hard to say?
This experiment involves two counter rotating beams of protons, positively charged sub- atomic particle, moving around the giant ring through cables whipped up by magnets inside a continuous vacuum.

The scientists’ purpose is to crash particles such as protons moving into one another at nearly the speed of light, recreating conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang to see what happened thereafter, when the universe was born.
It is operating temperature is 1.9 degrees above absolute zero- about minus 271 degrees C as per Dr. James Gillies, the Head of the Communication Group at CERN. The scientists would further cool it down.”

Nitin Raj: What’s function of LHC?

Dr. Raj Baldev said, “At the center of the LHC there lies 7,000 kilometres of ‘superconducting’ cables, cooled to a temperature close to the absolute zero, so as to conduct electricity without resistance.

“This process is likely to take time upto June, allowing the first beams to be injected soon after, as per Dr. Robert Aymar, CERN Director, who is confident that the first collisions would follow two months later.”

Dr. Raj Baldev said, “These experiments will be recording data at high energies by the summer. These data are expected to answer some of the fundamental questions, such as the origin of mass or the nature of the mysterious “dark matter” that fills up a large part of the universe and so-called God Particle.

“When the work starts, the beams will be stored at high energy for hours while collisions take place. Each proton goes around the 27- km ring over 11,000 times a second. A nominal proton beam in the LHC is likely to have an energy equivalent to a person in a Subaru driving at 1,700 kph or an 88,000- tonne Nimitz- class aircraft cruising at 5.6 knots.”

Nitin Raj: India is also participating in the experiment, your comments please.
Dr.Raj Baldev: It is correct that India is collaborating with CERN and is supplying some of the main magnetic dipoles and other equipment. So far the participating scientists are concerned, not only India but also the scientists of almost all leading countries of the world are participating in this huge experiment which has been going on for several years and now, more or less, has come to the final stage.
Nitin Raj: What could be the risk in this project?

Dr. Raj Baldev: Supposing the scientists succeed and claim to find out something that in their opinion might be in existence, their research shall have two repercussions:

Firstly, LHC’s supercomputers monitoring billions of collisions at a time would be so rapid that they may not exactly be able to analyze the particle they are searching as per theory of Peter Higgs on God Particle.

Nitin: What’s Peter Higgs’ theory?

Dr. Raj Baldev: British Physicist Peter Higgs mentioned about Higgs Boson or the God Particle, he predicted almost four decades ago as a mean to explain how fundamental particles gain mass in the space-time continuum. Higgs now believes that it will be found by CERNs Large Hadron Collider, expected to become operational by the end of this year.

Dr. Raj Baldev continued: “As per Higgs, during the Big Bang event all matter had no mass, but that changed in only a few fractions of a second. A Higgs field might have stuck to the particles as they traveled through space, thus giving them mass.”

Dr. Raj Baldev continued:”But I do not agree with Peter Higgs. It is actually not the Big Bang that created the mass; the mass was created from the eternal space. I have explained the primeval particle that originally functioned and that is God Particle, and which they cannot detect.

"The apprehension to my mind is that to prove their success, the scientists may claim something typical which may destroy the belief of the people from God, if once they pretended to have found Primeval particle, or God Particle, it shall have an adverse affect on God Believers.

"Secondly and most importantly, if the experiment fails and dangerously reacts, it may shrink a part of the Earth, Dr. Raj Baldev concluded.

The question is, which part?

I just wanted to add this bbc article from June 23rd on the same subject.