Instead, CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, is being sued over uninformed fears that its Large Hadron Collider could produce a black hole, or “strange matter.”
Leading the charge of the Daft Brigade are Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho.
They’re suing a European organization in U.S. court under U.S. laws, including that CERN failed to file an environmental impact statement under the National Environmental Policy Act. I’m sure that CERN actually did the French/Swiss/European Union equivalent for its construction of the LHC.
And, proving there’s no statute of limitations on nuttery, Wagner filed similar suits in 1999 and 2000 to prevent the Brookhaven National Laboratory from operating the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Eight years later, it’s doing fine.
Wagner, who studied undergraduate physics (the story doesn’t say how much) at Berkeley, should know better.
But, because he doesn’t:
The new worries are about black holes, which, according to some variants of string theory, could appear at the collider. That possibility, though a long shot, has been widely ballyhooed in many papers and popular articles in the last few years, but would they be dangerous?
According to a paper by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking in 1974, they would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat. No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate.
NYT science reporter Dennis Overbye knows better, too. Where’s an explanatory note that nobody has seen a black hole that size even form? Or otherwise, a bit more perspective on the issue?
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