Europe’s enormous $8-billion particle accelerator, to be activated as early as this summer, is generating both excitement and fear.
By John Johnson Jr.
Michelangelo L. Mangano, a respected particle physicist who helped discover the top quark in 1995, now spends most days trying to convince people that his new machine won’t destroy the world.
“If it were just crackpots, we could wave them away,” the physicist said in an interview at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, CERN. “But some are real physicists.”
What the critics are in such a lather about is the $8-billion Large Hadron Collider, a massive assemblage of iron, steel and superconducting wire 300 feet underground in a 17-mile-long circular tunnel on the Franco-Swiss border.
The most complex piece of scientific equipment ever built, the collider will send particles crashing into each other at just a wink shy of the speed of light, generating energies more powerful than the sun.
Scientists like Mangano believe that this instrument, when it begins operating as early as this summer, will peer into a looking-glass world that could contain entrances to extra dimensions and super-massive partners of the familiar particles that make up our world. One creature that must be hiding there, the scientists say, is the Higgs particle, one of the most exotic undiscovered objects since the yeti.
Critics think the collider could also spawn a black hole that will swallow Earth.
LaTimes
I have great respect for Dr. Mangano, though I disagree that his work proves safety.
ReplyDeleteOnly a very small number of physicists have studied the safety arguments in detail, and the results are very mixed.
Most of the reviews are linked to CERN, either CERN scientists, CERN Scientific Policy Committee members or scientists requested to comment as a favor to CERN.
Other fully independent physicists including senior Physics PHD Dr. Rainer Plaga wrote a paper refuting safety and proposing risk mitigation measures, currently ignored by CERN.
Visiting Professor of Physics Dr. Otto Rossler is an award winning and famous contributor to Chaos Theory and the founder of Endophysics. Dr. Rossler also refutes CERN's claims that white dwarf and neutron stars are susceptible to fast moving micro black holes, Dr. Rossler contends that CERN's experiment may pose an existential risk to the planet.
Dr. Rossler calculates that creation of micro black holes could be catastrophic to Earth in years, decades or centuries.
Former cosmic ray researcher, California math champion and Nuclear Safety Officer Walter L. Wagner discovered flaws with CERN's safety arguments. He calculates stable strange matter creation (particularly from Lead Lead collisions) and dangerous micro black hole creation has not been excluded and might as likely prove catastrophic.
LHCFacts.org
Wow, You must be like a science teacher or something! :)
ReplyDelete