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Article: World To End In August (Maybe)
Article: World To End In August (Maybe)

Video: World To End In August (Maybe)
Video: World To End In August (Maybe)

World to end in August (maybe)
From New Zealand Herald.co.nz via Associated Press
Wednesday July 02, 2008

Sceptics claim switching on the supercooled magnets could create a doomsday event that would destroy the Earth. Photo / AP

Sceptics claim switching on the supercooled magnets could create a doomsday event that would destroy the Earth. Photo / AP

* World to end in August (maybe) +video

The most powerful atom-smasher ever built could make some bizarre discoveries, such as invisible matter or extra dimensions in space, after it is switched on next month.

But some critics fear the Large Hadron Collider could exceed physicists' wildest conjectures.

Will it, they wonder, spawn a black hole that could swallow Earth? Or spit out particles that could turn the planet into a hot, dead lump?

Ridiculous, say scientists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known by its French initials Cern - some of whom have been working for a generation on the US$5.8 billion ($7.6 billion) collider.

"Obviously, the world will not end when it switches on," said project leader Lyn Evans.

David Francis, a physicist on the collider's huge Atlas particle detector, smiled when asked whether he worried about black holes and hypothetical killer particles known as strangelets.

"If I thought this was going to happen, I would be well away from here."

The collider is a ring of supercooled magnets 27km in circumference attached to huge barrel-shaped detectors. The ring, which straddles the French and Swiss border, is buried 100m underground.

The machine isn't expected to begin test runs until next month, and ramping up to full power could take months.

But once it is working, it is expected to produce some startling findings.

Scientists plan to hunt for signs of the invisible "dark matter" and "dark energy" that make up more than 96 per cent of the universe, and hope to glimpse the elusive Higgs boson, a so-far undiscovered particle thought to give matter its mass.

The collider could find evidence of extra dimensions, a boon for superstring theory, which holds that quarks, the particles that make up atoms, are infinitesimal vibrating strings.

The theory could resolve many of physics' unanswered questions, but requires about 10 dimensions - far more than the three spatial dimensions our senses experience.

The safety of the collider, which will generate seven times as much energy as its most powerful rival, at Fermilab near Chicago, has been debated for years.

Physicist Martin Rees has estimated the chance of an accelerator producing a global catastrophe at one in 50 million - long odds, but about the same as winning some lotteries.

But a Cern team this month issued a report concluding that there is "no conceivable danger" of a cataclysmic event and a panel of five prominent scientists not affiliated with Cern, including one Nobel laureate, has endorsed its conclusions.

Critics of the collider filed a lawsuit in a Hawaiian court in March seeking to block its startup, alleging that there was "a significant risk that ... operation of the collider may have unintended consequences which could ultimately result in the destruction of our planet".

One of the plaintiffs, vphysicist and lawyer Walter L. Wagner, said Cern's safety report, released on June 20, had several major flaws, and his views on the risks of using the particle accelerator had not changed.

Yesterday US Justice Department lawyers representing the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation filed a motion to dismiss the case.

The two agencies have contributed US$531 million to building the collider, and the Science Foundation has agreed to pay US$87 million of its annual operating costs.

"There is an army of scientists who know what they are talking about and are sleeping soundly,' said project leader Evans.

- AP

Link to this article: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10519409