by Richard Kane   

Discoveries from the Large Hadron Collider have been coming in so fast that the scheduled closing for maintenance has been postponed by researchers.

Doomsday warnings concerning the Collider have of late been limited to sites that emphasize danger warnings and sites specializing in Collider news except a piece by Hollywood screen-writer Elisabeth Young (Google her name) comparing it to a James Bond film where the villain threatening to heat the earth to 10 trillion degrees and 10.5 trillion volts of electricity, unless he gets his gold or diamonds.

Instead of calling this grim news for Otto Rossler’s attempts to stop the LH Collider, I say it means it is time for non-scientists to get involved.

Exploration and science have always been extremely dangerous business. One laboratory in the earlier race to try to achieve absolute zero was closed by a local community after several research assistants helping with the experiments lost their eyesight due to exploding glass vials. More recently in the 20th century, a retired scientist was forbidden to continue to do research in a residential community, due to dangerous chemicals laying around. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to repeat the google search. I hope someone else can link to the sites. Anyway cold research lead to fascinating results and led me to the unique conclusion that actually reaching absolute zero could be extremely dangerous, www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3501_zero.html
Perhaps scientists will combine absolute zero research with black hole research to create situations that would never exist naturally turning the universe, not just our small piece of it into a giant laboratory.

As matters now stand research that might be dangerous beyond one country is hard to deal with. Only France and Switzerland where the collider particle racetrack is located and the UN has any authority to declare an experiment, that most scientists say has a chance in less than a million in destroying the earth, may be too dangerous. Ban Ki-moon the head of the UN has so far been full of praise for the Collider research.

Let’s say there was an auto race or a marathon where most of the participants ended up in some way injured or killed. Society would scream “how horrible” and refer back to ancient Roman Gladiators in the Colosseum. Yet think of those honored for being the first to visit the North, than later the South Pole. I never thought negatively of such honors, but now that my mind is fixating on why society is, for the most part, ignoring present research doomsday dangers, I now oppose honoring such foolhardy races for such little purpose. I still honor Jesse Lazear who put himself in a room with infected mesquites to prove Yellow Fever was spread by mosquitoes. But why do we honor a race that led to so many people freezing to death, getting to the poles a year or two before the next exploration team?

Insecticide was genetically inserted into corn restricted only to corn fed to pigs. But the winds and natural cross-pollination means that Mexican peasants today are getting allergies from the insecticide in their corn tortillas. People mistakenly fear biting into food purposely generically modified with hardly a clue that the danger is where these intended modification spread unintentionally in unforeseen directions.

The case against black hole research is as follows. Normally without any noticeable mass a micro black hole can follow cosmic rays though the earth like light passing through glass spheres, but if stationary in the earth they would slowly gather matter, and gravity would drift them to the center of the earth where conditions would be more ripe to gather matter faster. If no black holes seem to be created. Scientists could ticker around developing larger ones before they notice it. It is conceivable that the eventual random passing of matter near by could even allow a black hole to take a million years to start gathering matter though gravity at an advanced pace. It would be possible for somewhat close to 1% of the small stars and planet gravity masses to be black holes without astronomers knowing it. Ten years ago small asteroids that could destroy several cities passed near the earth before scientists knew it. Almost stationary objects are hard to detect, totally invisible ones even harder.

On July 16, 1946 strike one, of the doomsday experimental clock, struck. History changed. Not August 6, when Hiroshima was bombed. The war in Germany was over, so fear that Germany would get the bomb first was no longer present. Yet the explosion of the first Atomic Bomb went off anyway despite fear and some alternate calculations that it might consume the whole earth. Soldiers at the site were taking morbid bets whether Utah or the earth would be destroyed. Historians need to focus on July 16 1946. Now with the Hadron Collider it is strike two of the doomsday clock. A projection of a chance in a million is ridiculous. But it is more than possible that the Hadron Collider like the first atomic explosion won’t destroy us, but the willingness to take the risk if unchecked will lead to a strike three of doomsday-science-clock.

I remember hearing of people eating DDT to show how safe it is, but many penguins in far away Antarctica had offspring with shells that were dangerously thin. What gave someone the right to tell an American farmer not to risk the lives of penguins in far away Antarctica, the same authority could be applied to stopping the Hadron Collider until humankind understands more of what it is doing.

It’s nowhere near a chance in a million, but my prediction is more than fifty-fifty that if that if the future finds and honors anyone around that was trying to stop the first atomic explosion, and more recently if Otto Rossler, Elisabeth Young, and myself are treated like heroes, science won’t destroy the world. But if the entire earth and our part of the Universe is continuously used as a laboratory, something will end up destroying us.

PS. Actually I feel a little guilty comparing myself with Otto Rossler who made so many advances in quantum theory, and his endless efforts to postpone to a later century, and perhaps another planet, black hole research. But no renege scientists by themselves can save us without the help of a few Hollywood screen writers, and a few renegade politicians here and there. It’s our earth not just for the scientists to argue about. Everyone reading this, let’s pressure UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to do his job when it comes to reviewing the safety of scientific experiments that encompass the whole earth.

By Richard Kane