A new type of controversy at the LHC

Physicist working at CERN arrested : Nature News

This news broke last week, but I wasn't sure if the guy arrested was working on the LHC or not. Seems he was:

He is believed to be a postdoc at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) who, since 2003, has been performing data analysis on one of four major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator.

French antiterrorism police arrested the 32-year-old researcher together with his 25-year-old brother. The duo is suspected of passing along information about possible terrorism targets inside France to members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb — the North African wing of al-Qaeda.

There is no evidence that his work at CERN is connected to terrorism, according to laboratory spokesman James Gillies. All work at the laboratory is published in the open domain and is not military in nature, said a CERN statement.

Hey, maybe some al-Qaeda operative reads my blog and thinks mini black holes from the LHC have potential as a terrorist weapon. (Well, I did refer once or twice to the fact that some physicists talk of evaporating black holes having similar power to atomic bombs.)

It is also possible that my fretting about mini black holes contributed to a premature loss of virginity (this even happened in my own home town!).

Of course, given the number of readers this blog maintains, it's just as likely that I caused the election of Pope Benedict.