Concerns have been raised in the media, on the Internet and through the courts about the safety of the particle physics experiments planned to take place at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator to date, built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, in Switzerland. The claimed dangers of the LHC particle collisions, which are expected to begin mid-November 2009, include doomsday scenarios involving the production of stable micro black holes and the creation of hypothetical particles called strangelets.
To address such concerns, CERN mandated a group of independent scientists to review these scenarios. In a report issued in 2003, they concluded that, like current particle experiments such as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the LHC particle collisions pose no conceivable threat. A second review of the evidence commissioned by CERN was released in 2008. The report, prepared by a group of physicists not involved in the LHC experiments, reaffirmed the safety of the LHC collisions in light of further research conducted since the 2003 assessment. It was reviewed and endorsed by a CERN committee of 20 external scientists and by the Executive Committee of the Division of Particles & Fields of the American Physical Society, and was later published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Physics G by the UK Institute of Physics, which also endorsed its conclusions. The report ruled out any doomsday scenario at the LHC: the physical conditions and events that will be created in the LHC experiments occur naturally in the universe without hazardous consequences.
Particle accelerator
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of protons (one of several types of hadrons) with very high kinetic energy. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, in Switzerland. The LHC's main purpose is to explore the validity and limitations of the Standard Model, the current theoretical picture for particle physics. The first particle collisions at the LHC are planned to take place shortly after startup in November 2009 at 3.5 TeV , once sufficient data has been obtained the machine will continue to run through 2010 at 5 TeV. The LHC will not run at its designed 7 TeV (14 TeV center-of-mass) until after the 2010 shutdown.
Safety concerns
In the run up to the commissioning of the LHC, Walter L. Wagner (an original opponent of the RHIC), Luis Sancho (a Spanish science writer) and Otto Rössler (a German biochemist) have expressed concerns over the safety of the LHC, and have attempted to halt the beginning of the experiments through petitions to the US and European Courts. These opponents assert that the LHC experiments have the potential to create low velocity micro black holes that could grow in mass or release dangerous radiation leading to doomsday scenarios, such as the destruction of the Earth. Other claimed potential risks include the creation of theoretical particles called strangelets, magnetic monopoles and vacuum bubbles.
Based on such safety concerns, US federal judge Richard Posner, Future of Humanity Institute research associate Toby Ord and others have argued that the LHC experiments are too risky to undertake, In the book Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century? , English cosmologist and astrophysicist Martin Rees calculated an upper limit of 1 in 50 million for the probability that the Large Hadron Collider will produce a global catastrophe or black hole. However, Rees has also reported not to be "losing sleep over the collider," and trusts the scientists who have built it. He has stated: "My book has been misquoted in one or two places. I would refer you to the up-to-date safety study."
These risk assessments of catastrophic scenarios at the LHC have sparked fears among the public, and scientists associated with the project have received protests. The Large Hadron Collider team revealed that they had received death threats and threatening emails and phone calls demanding the experiment be halted. On 9 September 2008 , Romania's Conservative Party held a protest before the European Commission mission to Bucharest, demanding that the experiment be halted because it feared that the LHC could create dangerous black holes.
Media coverage of safety concerns
The safety concerns regarding the LHC collisions have attracted widespread media attention. Various widely circulated newspapers have reported doomsday fears in connection with the collider, including The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Time. Among other media sources, CNN mentioned that "Some have expressed fears that the project could lead to the Earth's demise," but it assured its readers with comments from scientists like John Huth, who said that it was "baloney". MSNBC said that, "there are more serious things to worry about" and allayed fears that "the atom-smasher might set off earthquakes or other dangerous rumblings". The results of an online survey it conducted "indicate that a lot of know enough not to panic". The BBC stated, "the scientific consensus appears to be on the side of CERN's theorists" who say the LHC has "no conceivable danger". Brian Greene in the New York Times reassured readers by saying,"If a black hole is produced under Geneva, might it swallow Switzerland and continue on a ravenous rampage until the earth is devoured? It’s a reasonable question with a definite answer: no."
The tabloids also covered the safety concerns. The Daily Mail produced headlines such as "Are we all going to die next Wednesday?" and "End of the world postponed as broken Hadron Collider out of commission until the spring". The Sun quoted Otto Rössler saying, "The weather will change completely, wiping out life. There will be a Biblical Armageddon." After the launch of the collider, it had a story entitled, "Success! The world hasn't ended".
On 10 September 2008 , a 16-year-old girl from Sarangpur, Madhya Pradesh, India committed suicide, having become distressed about predictions of an impending "doomsday" made on an Indian news channel (Aaj Tak) covering the LHC.
Safety reviews
Concerns similar to those for the LHC were raised in connection with the RHIC particle accelerator. After detailed studies, scientists reached such conclusions as "beyond reasonable doubt, heavy-ion experiments at RHIC will not endanger our planet" and that there is "powerful empirical evidence against the possibility of dangerous strangelet production."
CERN-commissioned reports
Drawing from research performed to assess the safety of the RHIC collisions, the LHC Safety Study Group, a group of independent scientists, performed a safety analysis of the LHC, and released their findings in the 2003 report Study of Potentially Dangerous Events During Heavy-Ion Collisions at the LHC . The report concluded that there is "no basis for any conceivable threat". Several of its arguments were based on the predicted evaporation of hypothetical micro black holes by Hawking radiation and on the theoretical predictions of the Standard Model with regard to the outcome of events to be studied in the LHC. One argument raised against doomsday fears was that collisions at energies equivalent to and higher than those of the LHC have been happening in nature for billions of years apparently without hazardous effects, as ultra-high-energy cosmic rays impact Earth's atmosphere and other bodies in the universe.
In 2007, CERN mandated a group of five particle physicists not involved in the LHC experiments — the LHC Safety Assessment Group (LSAG), consisting of John Ellis, Gian Giudice, Michelangelo Mangano and Urs Wiedemann, of CERN, and Igor Tkachev, of the Institute for Nuclear Research in Moscow — to monitor the latest concerns about the LHC collisions. On 20 June 2008 , in light of new experimental data and theoretical understanding, the LSAG issued a report updating the 2003 safety review, in which they reaffirmed and extended its conclusions that "LHC collisions present no danger and that there are no reasons for concern". The LSAG report was then reviewed by CERN’s Scientific Policy Committee (SPC), a group of external scientists that advises CERN’s governing body, its Council. The report was reviewed and endorsed by a panel of five independent scientists, Peter Braun-Munzinger, Matteo Cavalli-Sforza, Gerard 't Hooft, Bryan Webber and Fabio Zwirner, and their conclusions were unanimously approved by the full 20 members of the SPC. On 5 September 2008 , the LSAG's "Review of the safety of LHC collisions" was published in the Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics by the UK Institute of Physics, which endorsed its conclusions in a press release that announced the publication.
Following the July 2008 release of the LSAG safety report, the Executive Committee of the Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) of the American Physical Society, the world's second largest organization of physicists, issued a statement approving the LSAG's conclusions and noting that "this report explains why there is nothing to fear from par
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