They say it won’t be four horsemen that spell the end of the world as we know it but the flick of a switch next Wednesday, when the Earth will be consumed from inside out and turned to a pile of grey goo. Doomsayers are so worried about the impending end of the universe that they have been to court to try to stop it.
But today their apocalyptic alarm bells were silenced by a report outlining just how safe it is to recreate the Big Bang somewhere in Switzerland.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - the atom-smashing machine built underneath the alps - has sent more internet-based harbingers of doom into a spin than it will have atomic particles whizzing around its 17-mile circumference when it is put into action next week.
They fear the energies released will be so powerful that a runaway black hole will be created that will engulf the planet, or produce “quantum strangelets†transforming the Earth into a dead lump of “strange matterâ€.
Walter L Wagner and Luis Sancho in Hawaii took their battle against the end of the world to court. They sought a temporary restraining order on scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, who they say have played down the chances that the collider could produce a tiny black hole, which could eat the Earth. They say CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.
The ‘end of the world is nigh’ suspicions have been so powerful that the scientists behind the LHC havepublished a report to allay their fears and convince them that the world will carry on as normal, even after the biggest and most powerful atom collider ever built is turned on in Geneva.
“Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth - and the planet still exists,†the report says.
Just outside of Geneva, 300ft below the Franco-Swiss border, the LHC will blast atomic particles around its circumference approximately 11,200 times every second, before smashing them headlong into one another.
Scientists have been using particle collision devices similar to the LHC for 30 years without incident, but the concerns over this device have arisen because it is the biggest and most powerful machine of its type to have been built.
The report, published to quell panic, was written by five CERN physicists. They were told to review a safety assessment written by colleagues in 2003 that also gave the project the green light.
The LHC is to start unleashing a beam of protons in the first stage of its commissioning process on Wednesday. The process has been delayed by a week - not because of safety fears, but because it is the only date the BBC’s Andrew Marr is available to present the event live on Radio 4.
Two parallel beams of particles, pulsing around the underground ring in opposite directions will be bent by superconducting magnets at four points to cause them to collide. Detectors in the giant chamber will record the resulting sub-atomic debris.
This invisible rubble could help resolve some of the biggest questions in physics, such as the nature of mass, the weakness of gravity and whether, as some suggest, there exist dimensions beyond our own.
The new Safety Assessment Report, published by the Institute of Physics in London, says that any black holes produced by the collider would be “microscopic†and decay almost immediately, as they would lack the energy to grow or even be sustained.
“Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes, so any black hole produced would be much smaller than those known to astrophysicists,†it says.
As for the hypothesised “strangelets,†the report referred to data from the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to say that these would not be produced by collisions in the LHC.
France has also asked a watchdog agency, the Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN), to carry out a safety appraisal of the LHC.
The European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, last month rejected a last-ditch legal bid to stop the LHC’s switch-on. The suit had been filed by a group of European citizens, led by a German biochemist, Otto Roessler, of the University of Tuebingen.
He had deduced it would be “quite plausible†to conclude that black holes resulting from the LHC experiment “will grow exponentially and eat the planet from the inside†across a devastating four-year period of decay.
But his views are very much in the minority, as Valerie Jamieson, deputy features editor of the New Scientist, explains on her blog.
“Scale the cosmic ray sums up to cover the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way and the 100 billion galaxies in the visible universe and you find that nature has already made the equivalent of 1031 LHCs. Or if you like, 10 trillion LHCs are running every second. And we're still here.â€
We look forward to reporting back to you next week. Probably.
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