Viewpoint: the End of the World at the Large Hadron Collider?
New arguments based on astrophysical phenomena constrain the possibility that dangerous black holes will be produced at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. On 8 August, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN injected its first beams, beginning an experimental program that will produce proton-proton collisions at an energy of 14 TeV. Particle physicists are waiting expectantly. The reason is that the Standard Model of strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions, despite its many successes, is clearly incomplete. Theory says that the holes in the model should be filled by new physics in the energy region that will be studied by the LHC. Some candidate theories are simple quick fixes, but the most interesting ones involve new concepts of spacetime waiting to be discovered. Look up the LHC on Wikipedia, however, and you will find considerable space devoted to safety concerns. At the LHC, we will probe energies beyond those explored at any previous accelerator, and we hope to create particles that have never been observed. Couldn't we, then, create particles that would actually be dangerous, for example, ones that would eat normal matter and eventually turn the earth into a blob of unpleasantness? It is morbid fun to speculate about such things, and candidates for such dangerous particles have been suggested. These suggestions have been analyzed in an article in Reviews of Modern Physics by Jaffe, Busza, Wilczek, and Sandweiss and excluded on the basis of constraints from observation and from the known laws of physics. These conclusions have been upheld by subsequent studies conducted at CERN.
- Research Organization:
- SLAC National Accelerator Lab., Menlo Park, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC02-76SF00515
- OSTI ID:
- 1029922
- Report Number(s):
- SLAC-REPRINT-2011-075; TRN: US1105869
- Journal Information:
- Physics, Vol. 1; ISSN 1943-2879
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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