On the Big Island of Hawaii, the name of which I can never seem to remember, a former research physicist and retired Federal Safety Officer who specialized in the handling radioactive materials who currently runs a botanical garden, and his partner in the suit, a Spaniard named Sancho, have filed a Lawsuit in the Hawaiian US District Court to prevent CERN from operating the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator nearing completion on the border between France and Switzerland.
According to New York Times writer Dennis Overbye’s coverage of the suit, Walter L. Wagner and Sancho believe that the giant research instrument is actually a danger to the Earth, able to spin up all manner of ferocious theoretical subatomic monsters, such as long-lasting miniature Black Holes that could eventually swallow the planet, or generate “strangelets” which could convert all of the atoms of regular matter comprising our planet to “strange matter” in a runaway chain reaction, rendering Mother Earth a dense lifeless lump (any resemblance to The Author is unintentional). No word from the Plaintiffs if they would consider those results a Mortal Insult to Gaia, or simply make what’s left of this planet a lousy place to find a drink.
According to Overbye, this isn’t the first time Wagner has lowered his ‘Concerned Citizen Asks, What If’ lance at high-energy particle accelerators. Wagner filed suits in 1999 and 2000 against the Brookhaven National Laboratory in attempt to stop them from performing experiments using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The suits were dismissed, and the RHIC has been operating without incident for the past 8 years.
But I began asking myself some questions about all this, such as: What story could be presented to Wagner that would convince him to stop tilting at particle colliders, drop his suit and go back to his garden?
Suppose someone convinced Sancho to tell Wagner that the CERN Directors General signed an agreement with three Insurance companies for appropriate policies against any LHC accidents involving stable mini-Black Holes and Strange Matter?
Apparently, I think along the same lines as Overbye, wondering what professional oddsmakers (in this case, Insurance Companies actuaries) would think of this subsequent essay, “Gauging a Collider’s Odds of Creating a Black Hole.
Can this suit be settled out of court if the CERN scientists were able to get the appropriate insurance?
What would those policies look like, and who would pay for them? Would there be one policy for the CERN LHC itself, one for regular homeowners along the lines of earthquakes, floods and water damage, and one for the entire planet along the lines of auto insurance?
With that last: Do you try to save some money by sticking with a collision policy rather than comprehensive? How big of a deductible do you want to take?
Can you imagine an insurance adjuster assessing the damage to the world if it were partially damaged in a LHC Black Hole/Strangelet accident?
What about a hemisphere-bender versus a big accident where the cost to repair is worth more than the value of the planet? Do you total the planet out, have it towed away and use the money to start shopping for a new one?
Does the insurance company offer a rider to specify Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) repair parts - such as continents and mountain ranges - rather than Chinese knock-offs?
A lot to think about there.
Hmm. This makes me wonder if Wagner, Sancho or other concerned citizens will retain lawyers to consider further suits seeking injunctions against Global Warming, an asteroid strike or the Second Coming.
And I’d like to see the insurance policies on those.
On the other hand maybe I wouldn’t. Personally, I have a hard time facing reality. Giant windmills are a lot easier to deal with.
bc
Copyright by the author 2008, all rights reserved.
April 20th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
CERNs web site states that we have not been destroyed by effects of cosmic rays and micro black holes will evaporate.
However, cosmic rays travel too fast to be captured by Earths gravity, while collider particles smash head on and can be captured by Earths gravity. Einsteins relativity theory predicts that micro black holes will not decay but instead only grow, and Hawking Radiation contradicts relativity, is unproven and is credibly disputed by at least 3 peer reviewed studies.
The LHC Safety Assessment Group has been trying for months to prove safety without success. However science may still be a few years away from being able to prove safety or not.
Professor Dr. Otto E. Roessler, Theorist Dr. Raj Baldev and others are warning of a very real possible danger to the planet from the Large Hadron Collider.
If this experiment is so safe, why arent CERN scientists allowed to express any personal fears they might have about this Collider?
Alleged in the legal action: Chief Scientific Officer, Mr. Engelen passed an internal memorandum to workers at CERN, asking them, regardless of personal opinion, to affirm in all interviews that there were no risks involved in the experiments, changing the previous assertion of minimal risk. (Statisticians generally consider minimal risk as 1-10%).
If we delay for a safety study, some scientists at CERN may not be the first to discover some new science, and some Nobel prizes may be at stake.
But which would more wise, conduct a full and independent adversarial safety study first, or just turn it on now and discover science as quickly as humanly possible?
JTankers
LHCConcerns.com
April 20th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
The plot of Earth by David Brin was based on a runaway micro-blackhole that had gotten loose in the Earth’s core. Since some science fiction writer has already dreamed it up, that means that the real disaster will be completely different and much worse.
April 20th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
I’m certain that awfulness is on the way. Heck, I saw several stories about it in the newspapers just this past week. But as yellojkt has pointed out, it seldom arrives wearing exactly the costume that we’d envisioned. To make the claim that the “scientists” are just reckless wild men throwing caution to the wind is a bit disingenuous. It is, after all, the careful calculations of the scientists that are used to justify this lawsuit.
Apparently, the plaintiffs believe that any risk at all is far too much. I’m glad that they weren’t in charge of deciding whether the (potentially cosmically-contaminated) Apollo astronauts would be allowed back into Earth’s atmosphere. Or, for that matter, in charge of deciding what risky behavior I’d be indulged in my (admittedly) misspent youth.
April 20th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
“..different and much worse,” indeed.
Though it’s difficult for me to imagine a real End-of-the-World disaster that no one has dreamed up yet.
Oh, wait.
Has anyone written a book where nothing happens?
bc
April 21st, 2008 at 8:56 am
Wouldn’t firing up the LHC in the face of evidence that doing so *would* destroy the world be deemed an act of suicide by insurance adjusters and thus ineligible for any insurance payments?
Like A Good Neighbor, State Farm Is There. (You know, “There”: a little bit beyond the Schwarzschild radius.)
May 25th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
[…] This also puts an interesting spin on the recent lawsuit filed to prevent the LHC from operating. What if there was a secret plan for the LHC to actually generate a black hole and gobble up the entire Earth with it, pulling it out of space and time into some sort of stasis, to be restored in the future like a Model A Ford or Ted Williams’ head. And like many restorations (some might suggest ‘Pebble Beach Concours-level over-restorations’) of historic cars, they would make Earth better than it was originally by eliminating some of its shortcomings like non-synchronized transmissions, Global Warming and the Republican Party. […]