The Large Hadron Collider and the End of the World

Let us take a break from bi-coastal lawyers and frozen bigfoots, and look to the world of legitimate science (and VERY LONG POSTS).

MAD SCIENCE, that is!!!

On September 10, 2008, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27 km long particle accelerator located on the Franco-Swiss border, is set to begin the first of what are hoped to be many fundamental experiments into the nature of matter. Current efforts by workers at the structure have included circulating superfluid helium around the structure, lowering the LHC’s temperature temperature to 1.9 K (about -271 °C, or “Fuckin’ Cold”, as Physicists would say), these low temperatures being necessary for the upcoming experimental phase of the research.

What is the LHC, and more to the point, WHY is the LHC?

To answer the first question, the LHC was commissioned by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (which somehow, comes out to the acronym CERN, probably because they’re speaking europeanese or somethin’. Damn ferners, acceleratin’ OUR particles…). The LHC is a big ass particle accelerator, which pretty much does what it says; it accelerates particles. However, the special thing about the LHC is HOW fast it accelerates those particles. By the time the little bastards have circled through the tubes in the LHC, they will be travelling at around 0.99999c or so. That c, on the end of that 0.99999 is the same c as in the ol’ E = mc2 equation, that is, c is the speed of light. So this particle accelerator will, um, accelerate a particle to ALMOST the speed of the light (or, as Physicists would term it, “Fuckin’ Fast”).

The picture below was nabbed from Google Earth, and shows the extensive research facilities maintained by CERN, including the underground LHC, located in the middle of the picture. Nice digs, for sure.


Anyway, WHY would we want to chuck particles around that fast, you ask? Well, why don’t we let the good people at CERN tell us that? The following text was gleaned from the CERN LHC website:

The LHC was built to help scientists to answer key unresolved questions in
particle physics. The unprecedented energy it achieves may even reveal some
unexpected results that no one has ever thought of!
For the past few decades, physicists have been able to describe with increasing detail the fundamental particles that make up the Universe and the interactions between
them. This understanding is encapsulated in the Standard Model of particle
physics, but it contains gaps and cannot tell us the whole story. To fill in
the missing knowledge requires experimental data, and the next big step to
achieving this is with LHC.

More specifically, the LHC has been built to try to understand what makes “Mass” by trying to identify the Higgs Boson, a predicted but hitherto unobserved fundamental particle. Additional research will try t o understand what Dark Matter and Dark Energy are (which together make up 96% of the known universe), what happened during the first few seconds of the universe after the Big Bang, and why there is antimatter but no or very little antimatter left. These are lofty, if somewhat obscure and heady, goals, right. Human knowledge and understanding march on unimpeded, right?

Well, not entirely.


There are some out there who seem to think that the operation of the LHC will result in the destruction of the Earth. Among these, a group calling themselves Citizens Against The Large Hardon Collider seem to have the slickest website. I pulled the following statement from their front page:

Citizens Against the Large Hadron Collider is a non-profit organization
established for the purpose of using legal action to prevent the operation of
the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) until further safety tests are conducted.

The LHC is a particle accelerator located on the France/Switzerland
border; it has been dubbed the largest, most expensive, most powerful experiment
ever attempted, certainly dwarfing all particle colliders ever built before,
both in terms of size and power.

Some experts fear that the risk of operating the LHC disproportionately outweighs anything science might gain from this experiment. It is not possible to know what the outcome of the experiment will be, but even CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) scientists concede that there is a real possibility of creating destructive theoretical anomalies such as miniature black holes, strangelets, and deSitter paces transitions. These events have the potential to fundamentally alter matter and destroy our planet.

So, two points on the ol’ Anti-LHCer’s statement here. Point 1) “experts” is a pretty meaningless phrase. Experts in what? World Destructology? Doomographers? Particle Physics? Who knows? The statement doesn’t really cite anything, so we are left to mentally fill-in-the blanks on the whole “experts fear…” line. A perusal through their website shows that they have a “WHAT EXPERTS SAY” link, which mostly seems to reiterate the position of Anti-LHC group member/founder, Walter Wagner (and also states nobel-prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek as suggesting a similar doomsday scenario; more on this falsehood later), as well as letters, some from journalists, some from “concerned citizens.”

And as a second bit of nonsense, Point the Second): CERN does NOT acknowledge a “real possibility” of blowing up the universe. In fact, CERN’s LHC Safety link makes their position VERY clear: there is no danger from the LHC. So that is a falsehood, in fact, and just one of numerous half-truths and outright lies in the LHCdefenders website.

Beyond that statement, what are the Anti-LHC guys worried about, exactly? Well, they tell you at their risk link, which states micro black holes and strangelets as their big concerns. Of course, the LHC Safety site explains how those things, as well as many other possibilities are not in fact a threat to the Earth.

The anti-LHC crowd seems to be pinning much of their arguments against the LHC on the fact that the energy involved in the operation of these experiments is greater than any experiment previously attempted. In other words, the scale of the LHC experiments are what make them dangerous; the energy involved is such that the possibility of a catastrophic “oops” is that much greater than that ever attempted by humans before!

How does the LHC respond to this concern? By pointing out that, YES, the LHC is the biggest, best, and most energetic particle collider humans have ever made; HOWEVER, it is MUCH LESS powerful than the NATURALLY OCCURING phenomena they are trying to emulate. Cosmic ray collisions in space occur that involve higher energy, more matter, and with much greater frequency than the piddly-little LHC experiments. If the products of these processes were destructive to planets, stars, or galaxies, THEN THERE WOULD NOT BE ANY STARS, PLANETS, OR GALAXIES around for us to see! What the LHC is going to do is nothing new; nature has been doing it for billions and billions of years. What is new is that humans are finally going to be able to see it happen, and therefore gain some understanding of how these processes work. Just to reiterate, I’ll link to the LHC safety site once again. Read it, and see that everything is A-OK.


BUT WHAT ABOUT THE “EXPERTS FEAR”?

Indeed, what about the experts fear? Let’s start off by looking at the founder of the Citizens Against the Large Hadron Collider, one Walter L. Wagner. According to the bio link posted at the Coast to Coast AM site (where ol’ Walt has been a guest), Wagner has some interesting but obscure credentials. For instance, he refers to himself as a Doctor, but apparently never went to graduate school (at least, not in physics, which sort of limits his credentials in that area).

Oh, and he also had the exact same concerns regarding the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Last time I checked, the world hadn’t exploded when they were running that machine.

Another prominent name listed on the LHC website, under their Expert link, is Dr. Frank Wilczek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics. So I guess he’s sort of a big deal. His name is mentioned in the same breath as ol Walt Wagner there (interestingly, AFTER Walt’s own name. Feel a little vain, much?). Anyway, I was shocked to see his name there. Afterall, Wilczek is a real-live MIT physicist, and one who won the Free Trip to Stockholm, no less. Mighty powerful credentials!

However, through the power of the internets, I was able to find out that the inclusion of his name with the anti-LHC folks is an ignorant mistake at best, and an outright distortion of the truth at worst.

According to Dr. Wilczek’s own website, the LHC will not blow up the universe. Additionally, in this link, we learn that the Scientific American letter attributed to Wilczek was actually a heavily edited work that Wilczek wrote IN RESPONSE to a letter about a particle collider blowing up the world. What Wilczek was trying to say was that there is no cause for concern regarding micro-black holes killing us all. So either Wagner doesn’t understand enough of physics to realize that this is what Wilczek was saying, or he is just lying and is willfully misrepresenting a Nobel Laureate’s position. Which is it Wagner, are you stupid, or just a liar?

The LHC is an unprecedented opportunity to study in controlled conditions, albeit at lower energies, some of the fundamental processes in the universe. Hopefully, this will allow us to gain a better understanding of the basic nature of matter, and how the initial moments of the Big Bang helped to shape the universe as we see it today.


The anti-intellectualism of the Citizens Against the Large Hadron Collider, most likely born out of ignorance and the prideful assumption that the rest of the world doesn’t understand things as well as they do, will not stop fundamental research. The true tragedy, of course, is that the scientific community has done such a poor job of representing themselves, their work, and its importance, that this anti-intellectualism has been able to thrive. The LHC is not going to destroy the world; rather, it will clarify our view of the world, and let us develop a better understanding of how the universe works.