Large Hadron Collider Sued

Posted: Fri Mar 28, 2008 11:43 pm

This is the kind of crap that really makes me laugh.

Forum Admin Joined: Aug 06, 2006 Posts: 1631 Location: UK

Count yourself lucky, they used to torture heretcis to death.

Posted: Sat Mar 29, 2008 2:21 pm

sonicbomb wrote:

Count yourself lucky, they used to torture heretcis to death.

I prefer exoheretic. It's a little more specific.

Seriously though, how can you sue for something you can't even prove exists? It's like, if I wanted to clear some property in North Carolina, but some group of nuts sued me for destroying the habitat of bigfoot.

Posted: Sat Mar 29, 2008 5:44 pm

There are far more likely scenarios for the end of the world question, eg Supervolcano, see

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/apr/14/research.science2

The black-hole-caused-by-LHC-experiment comes bottom of the list:

10: Earth swallowed by a black hole

Richard Wilson is Mallinckrodt Research Professor of Physics at Harvard University in the US:

"Around seven years ago, when the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider was being built at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, there was a worry that a state of dense matter could be formed that had never been created before. At the time this was the largest particle accelerator to have been built, making gold ions crash head on with immense force. The risk was that this might form a stage that was sufficiently dense to be like a black hole, gathering matter from the outside. Would the Brookhaven labs (and perhaps the entire Earth) end up being swallowed by a black hole created by the new accelerator?

"Using the information we already know from black holes in outer space, we did some calculations to find out if the Brookhaven particle accelerator was capable of forming such a black hole. We are now pretty certain this state of matter won't form at Brookhaven and that the Earth won't be swallowed when these particles collide."

Chance of Earth being gobbled up by a black hole in the next 70 years: Exceedingly low