End of the World to be blamed on Welsh Scientist

Posted by Joshua S. Hill

April 22, 2008

The end of the world has never received so much attention as of late, thanks to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The newest, biggest and best particle accelerator is set to begin operation mid June of this year, in the 27 kilometer long tunnel, lying underneath France and Switzerland.

Run by the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), the £2bn giant particle accelerator has already been hit with lawsuits trying to shut it down, or at least postpone its opening.

And all because some people believe it is going to bring about the end of the world.

Former nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner and botanist Luis Sancho have filed a lawsuit in Hawaii, against the European built and owned accelerator (figure that one out), claiming that it could create strangelets, or create a black hole out of what used to be planet Earth. Either way, they say, Earth is going to be destroyed by this particle accelerator.

Just as the earth should have been destroyed back when Mr. Wagner filed a similar lawsuit against the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brooklyn, US, claiming that it too was the doom of the world.

Dr. Lyn Evans, a 63 year old from Aberdare, an industrial town in the county borough of Rhondda Cynon Taff in the district of Glamorgan, South Wales, is the man behind the designing and construction of the LHC, and he is adamant that the doomsday scenarios are false.

Evans notes that if micro black holes were a possible outcome of the particle acceleration, it would have already happened time and time again. He points out that the Earth has been bombarded with invisible cosmic rays for a long time, and particles within the cosmic rays were constantly colliding.

“If the LHC can produce microscopic black holes, cosmic rays of much higher energies would already have produced many more. Since the Earth is still here, there is no reason to believe that collisions inside the LHC at Cern will be harmful.”

However, regardless of the outcome of this law suit – a filing for a 4 month restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the accelerator until it is proved to be safe – the LHC has touched upon a sensitive topic; how can you estimate the risk of groundbreaking experiments, and who should make the decision whether they can go ahead.

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