To smash together protons moving at 99.999999% of the speed of light
7 May 2008The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator at CERN, Switzerland, is going to fire up this summer. I’m very excited, and much more optimistic than the guy who - as reported recently on Mental Floss - is suing CERN because he believes that their experiments might create a black hole that destroys the planet.
Check out that Mental Floss link, above, for a superb 15-minute video from physicist Brian Cox about the LHC and what mysteries of the universe they hope it will reveal: namely, the confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson and possible verification of supersymmetry. The bottom of that page also has some nice photos.
Sexy science, for sure.
LHCConcerns.com will pay $500.00 US to the best proposal that can reasonably prove 5% or less Risk of Planetary destruction from Micro Black Holes.
The contest will conclude in a vote by site visitors on all reasonable proofs received, all proofs will be published and the contest will end not sooner than May 20th. (LHCConcerns will make the final call on best proposal that reasonably proves 5% or lower risk from micro black holes being created by the Large Hadron Collider).
You may prove that ANY ONE of the following or provide any other reasonable Proof or method to prevent Micro Black Holes from being created by the Large Hadron Collider or prove that they are harmless!
1. The Large Hadron Collider will not make micro black holes.
2. Micro black holes created will be sent safely into space.
3. Micro black holes will evaporate.
4. Micro black holes will take more than [500 million] years to accrete the Earth. (Very Generous, but if you can only prove a lesser time frame, then the prize will be reduced proportionately…
5. Any form of cosmic ray argument that proves 5% risk or lower.
6. Find a way to make the Large Hadron Collider safe from creating micro black holes (we already requested different speed collissions or different mass collisions, LSAG told us it was not possible, they already thought of it).
It is harder than it looks, the LHC Safety Assessment Group (LSAG) could not produce a safety report… (CERN and LSAG are still using the 1999 RHIC safety report that does not even address what might happen if micro black holes were created, because they did not know that it was possible at that time. We are also being extremely generous on the 500 million years, since life on Earth might be possible for billions of years.)
JTankers
LHCConcerns.com
If I needed $500, believe me, I’d have a go.
The vast majority of scientists think that the LHC will be perfectly safe; I believe them. Billions of much higher-energy cosmic rays are hitting the earth (and the rest of the universe) all the time, and we’ve never observed a micro black hole (MBH). CERN has done two safety assessments already and have just finished a third. And even if a MBH was created, the same quantum rules that predict its creation would predict its evaporation.
The potential rewards are definitely worth the potential risk. At least there’s some humour to be had in all this.
But what happens if Higgs was wrong and its a top quark condensate instead of a boson?