[tt] [x-risk] Time: Collider Triggers End-of-World Fears

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from "Hughes, James J." <James.Hughes at trincoll.edu> -----

From: "Hughes, James J." <James.Hughes at trincoll.edu>
Date: Sun, 7 Sep 2008 22:11:36 -0400
To: existential at transhumanism.org
Subject: [x-risk] Time: Collider Triggers End-of-World Fears
Reply-To: For discussion of existential risks <existential at transhumanism.org>

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1838947,00.html

Thursday, Sep. 04, 2008

Collider Triggers End-of-World Fears

By Eben Harrell

>From the flagellants of the Middle Ages to the doomsayers of Y2K,
humanity has always been prone to good old-fashioned the-end-is-nigh
hysteria. The latest cause for concern: that the earth will be destroyed
and the galaxy gobbled up by an ever-increasing black hole next week.

On Sept. 10, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear
Research (CERN) laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, will switch on the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - a $6 billion particle accelerator that
will send beams of protons careening around a 17-mile underground ring,
crash them into each other to re-create the immediate aftereffects of
the Big Bang, and then monitor the debris in the hope of learning more
about the origins and workings of the universe. Next week marks a
low-power run of the circuit, and scientists hope to start smashing
atoms at full power by the end of the month.

Critics of the LHC say the high-energy experiment might create a mini
black hole that could expand to dangerous, Earth-eating proportions. On
Aug. 26, Professor Otto Rossler, a German chemist at the Eberhard Karis
University of Tubingen, filed a lawsuit against CERN with the European
Court of Human Rights that argued, with no understatement, that such a
scenario would violate the right to life of European citizens and pose a
threat to the rule of law. Last March, two American environmentalists
filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Honolulu seeking to force
the U.S. government to withdraw its participation in the experiment. The
lawsuits have in turn spawned several websites, chat rooms and petitions
- and led to alarming headlines around the world (Britain's Sun
newspaper on Sept. 1: "End of the World Due in 9 Days").

Should we be scared? No. In June, CERN published a safety report,
reviewed by a group of external scientists, ruling out the possibility
of dangerous black holes. It said that even if tiny black holes were to
be formed at CERN - a big if - they would evaporate almost
instantaneously due to Hawking Radiation, a phenomenon named for the
British physicist Stephen Hawking, whose theories show that black holes
not only swallow up the light, energy and matter around them, but also
leak it all back out at an accelerating pace. According to Hawking, if
tiny black holes occurred at CERN, they would evaporate before they got
a chance to do any damage. (Even if Hawking's theories prove to be wrong
- no one has yet witnessed black-hole evaporation - scientists at CERN
say the LHC's collisions are already known to be harmless: an equivalent
amount of energy is produced hundreds of thousands of times a day by
cosmic rays colliding with the earth and other objects in the cosmos -
always without incident.)

After taking in the results of CERN's report, the European Court
rejected Rossler's request last week for an emergency injunction that
would have stopped the LHC (it will still hear his lawsuit). The U.S.
suit is pending, but CERN spokesman James Gillies said that even if it
is successful the experiment will go ahead without U.S. participation.

"The U.S. court has no jurisdiction over our equipment. It could pull
American scientists out of the experiment, but that would just be a
great shame for them. The LHC presents no risk. What it does do is hold
the promise of substantially enriching humanity by providing insight
into the mysteries of the universe. It's a tremendously exciting time
for physicists here and around the world," he said.

Scientists believe the LHC's results will help fill in gaps in the
Standard Model, the far-reaching set of equations on the interaction of
subatomic particles that is the closest that modern physics comes to a
testable "theory of everything." For example, scientists believe the LHC
will produce a particle, the Higgs Boson, that will end debate over how
matter in the universe acquires mass. Or, it could even provide evidence
for more ambitious theories of the universe, such as string theory,
which unites quantum mechanics and general relativity, the previously
known laws of the small and large that are currently incompatible in the
Standard Model.

Despite these exciting prospects, however, physicists studying the
cosmos at CERN and other accelerators still face a fundamental dilemma:
to explain the awesome scale of their work while calming the public's
inevitable trepidation. There remains a credibility gap surrounding
high-profile physics, after all: The most tangible results of atomic
research in the last 50 years have been bombs capable of ending all life
on earth. CERN officials refer to the laboratory as the European
Laboratory for Particle Physics because they feel "nuclear" in the
literal translation carries negative implications, and tour guides at
the LHC are quick to point out that the accelerator has no weapons
applications.

But it's not just physicists whose work provokes strong and often
irrational fear, according to Professor Robin Williams, director of the
Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation at the
University of Edinburgh. He points out that the millennial anxiety about
scientific and technological breakthroughs predates particle physics.
When the locomotive was first conceived, for example, even some
engineers predicted catastrophe resulting from the human body's
inability to withstand the strains of high-speed travel. The word
"vaccine" comes from the Latin word for cow, "vacca" - the first
vaccinations, against smallpox, used bovine ingredients, leading to
widespread fear that the injections would turn humans into cows.

But Williams also believes that the flip side of such fear is faith in
the redemptive potential of science (there are equally irrational
websites about CERN, for example, that predict the LHC will create
wormholes to distant corners of the universe where humanity can escape
to other inhabitable planets). Williams wrote in an e-mail: "I have come
to see that in their early days, new technology and scientific
breakthroughs often serve as Rorschach tests - a phenomenon about which
we have little concrete understanding, onto which contemporary social
anxieties (and dreams) can readily be projected. As a result we find
(often polarized) utopian and dystopian visions being articulated."
Humanity will certainly survive the LHC's experiment, Williams added,
but so too will its darkest fears about its own destructive potential,
and hope for its future.




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