Threat LHC

2008/09/13 Galarraga Aiestaran, Ana - Elhuyar Zientzia

• Fisika

This belief has spread much over the Internet and some have taken it very seriously. For example, recently a physicist named Markus Goritschnig, with the help of other scientists, announced his intention to bring the LHC to trial, to the Strasbourg Human Rights Court!

This is not the only complaint against the LHC. In fact, the United States also participates in the experiments to be carried out at the LHC and, in March, at the Hawai court, physicists Luis Sancho and Walter Wagner requested the paralysis of the LHC.

Followers of this type of issue will already know Wagner because a letter published in 1999 in the scientific journal Scientific American provoked a great revolt. On that occasion he also warned of the danger that in the RHIC of the United States (Brookhaven Laboratory Heavy Ion Relativistic Accelerator) black microcycles will occur. And, as now, in the newspapers, one could read the titles that announced the disaster. Here is an example of the London daily The Sunday Times: "Big Bang machine could destroy the Earth," that is, the Big Bang machine can destroy the Earth.

Finally, the RHIC was launched in the middle of 2000, since then numerous experiments have been carried out… and the world is still the same as before. Wagner, however, did not cease and is now facing the LHC alongside Sancho.

Luis Sancho is a Spanish physicist and writer who, in an interview granted by the Spanish daily adn.es, equated the launch of the LHC with the invitation to his home of the "tyrannosaurus of the galaxy". According to him, his experiments in LHC are the same as those that destroy stars and galaxies in the universe. Therefore, believing that they are not dangerous to Earth is a terrible "pride", and Sancho has no doubt: If they carry out the experiments they want to carry out in the LHC, in the next 10 years the Earth is more endangered than in surviving.

That is why Sancho and Wagner denounce the court in Hawaii. The European Nuclear Research Organization (CERN), a laboratory with LHC, is accused of intentionally hiding the risk of experiments, which is considered a criminal negligence. In addition, he was accused of wanting to carry out an experiment with great probability of provoking genocide.

The rest of scientists, however, do not share the opinion of Sancho, Wagner and Goritschnig, but believe that the LHC will represent alternatives to dangers: to know the secrets of matter, to know more about the creation of the universe than now, to understand dark matter...

Risk is not an opportunity

The LHC accelerator is the largest and most powerful in the world. (Photo: CERN)

Thus, it has been tried to explain what LHC is, what experiments they are going to perform and what they expect. But it has not been enough and they have had to respond to the complaints. The CERN itself published an ambitious security report five years ago. Five scientists outside the CERN, including a Nobel Prize, ratified the report's conclusions. The risk of the experiments that were intended to be carried out was analyzed and it was assured that they were safe.

Now they have had to do another study and the conclusion is the same, so the denunciations have no basis. Since the CERN, solid arguments have been presented, based on the laws of physics, but at least one of them is easily understandable by little knowledge of physics: "LHC has produced more than a million experiments on Earth and the planet is still alive."

Since the CERN it is recognized that in theory there is a small possibility of creating black minicles. However, they explain that for this purpose very special conditions are needed, since at least, in addition to the dimensions we know, there should be some other in the Universe, and scientists still do not.

Anyway, according to those of the CERN, although in an experiment one of these black minicles was produced, it would have nothing to do with the black holes that occur when the stars collapse. Surely it would disappear immediately, and if it persisted, it would be so tiny, there would be nothing on a radio in which matter could be absorbed (that radio would be very small).

Many other scientists have ratified what was said by CERN and are waiting for the results of the experiments that begin. And it is that they have a hope that supposes a great advance in physics. The LHC accelerator is the largest and most powerful machine in the world. It is a circular tube of about 27 kilometers, buried in the limit between Switzerland and France, at a depth of 50-175 meters.

The objective of the accelerator is to generate collisions of great energy between the particles. Physicists will detect and analyze the results of collisions to investigate the original particles. Among other things, they expect to detect the Higgs boson. We will undoubtedly know the results, because we do not believe that in any of these experiments the Earth disappears.

Published in Gara