Friday, December 09, 2005

I should not joke about particle accelerators

The Potential for Danger in Particle Collider Experiments

See the link above, for a fairly recent, and credible sounding, explanation of how the new CERN accelerator may really mean the end of the earth.

Why is this not attracting attention? Has anyone mentioned the Fermi Paradox in relation to this issue too?

UPDATE: interested readers should have a look at my long Jan 06 post on this here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Why is the issue of black hole creation at colliders not attracting attention? Hubris, I think. Smith Dharmasaroja predicted the recent tsunami in 1998 but was ignored until it happened.

If anyone checks with a physicist, most will tell some easy reason why disaster is unlikely. Unfortunately, safety recedes. First mini black hole creation required impossible energy. But now black hole creation at colliders is predicted by string theorists. Then they were sure to evaporate via Hawking radiation. But now a major paper questions Hawking radiation. [Helfer, "Do black holes radiate?" Reports on Progress in Physics. Vol. 66 No. 6 (2003) pp. 943-1008-- abstract at http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/0304042] Finally, an analogy between colliders and cosmic rays is supposed to assure safety. But the analogy is not precise. [See this link http://www.risk-evaluation- forum.org/prob.htm ]

David Brin mentioned the Fermi paradox in this context.