The Big Bang

Legal scholars start licking your chops: The fate of the known universe, or at least the known solar system, may lie in the hands of the ever-expanding jurisdiction of the United States Federal District Court in Hawaii. Last March, former nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner, along with Luis Sancho, petitioned for a temporary restraining order against the United States Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation, and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in order to stop the building and operating of CERN’s new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The reason for halting the construction the LHC is quite simple: the LHC, when normally functioning may lead to the destruction of the entire earth.

The specific concern filed by Wagner and Sancho is that according to some theories, the LHC, by fracturing atoms into smaller and smaller parts, may create one of three exotic yet dangerous possibilities. The first option is a strangelet, a small particle that makes other atoms strangelets until it “eventually [converts] all of Earth into a single larger ‘strangelet’ of huge size.” If you don’t like the prospect of being turned into exotic atomic material without your consent, then perhaps you should consider what’s behind door number two: magnetic monopoles, which “catalyze the decay of protons and atoms” leading to “a runaway reaction.” However, my personal favorite is option number three: a micro black hole. According the complaint filed in court, the growing micro black hole would eventually envelop the entire planet, “converting earth into a medium-sized black hole, around which would continue to orbit the moon, satellites, the ISS, etc.” The initial conference on the case will be heard on June 16, but I personally can’t wait for the new “ripped from the headlines” pilot of Law and Order: Micro Black Holes Unit.

CERN claims that it is actually not trying to turn the earth into a medium-sized black hole. On a question and answer forum, CERN explains, “The LHC has not been built to create black holes,” and goes on to explain that despite its evil-sounding acronym name fit for a James Bond terrorist organization, “CERN’s scientists also have families, parents, children, and friends,” which we can assume they don’t want to turn into strangelets.

While these arguments appear convincing at face value, I decided to hedge my bets and prepare for disaster. A routine search of the United States Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Web site yielded no information of how to prepare for micro black holes. So instead, I’m following the DHS’s basic recommendation of building an emergency kit that includes three gallons of water, pliers, moist towelletes, and “books, games, puzzles or other activities for children.” With any luck, I’ll be prepared for whatever micro black holes may come.

End of the world scenarios are not new. Wagner filed a similar complaint in 1999 and 2000 to prevent the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory from going online. The collider, which has been functional since 2000, has yet to produce a black hole.

During the Trinity Test of the original atomic bomb, Enrico Fermi playfully offered a wager on “whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world.”

Although this time around the formation of micro black holes is highly unlikely, Wagner and Sancho do raise the serious question of how much chance is acceptable when it comes to destroying the earth. At some point—not necessarily this point—experimenting with powerful force in biology or physics can become reckless. Kurt Vonnegut, in his novel Cat’s Cradle, which is about the destruction of the Earth by a substance called ice-nine, asks, “What hope can there be for mankind when there are such men…to give such playthings as ice-nine to such short-sighted children as almost all men and women are?”

Nick Bostrom, writing in the recent publication of the Technology Review, hypothesizes that the reason humans haven’t heard from intelligent space-faring life is that all of them have been prevented either by a barrier that would prevent them from getting to our stage of development (i.e. conditions needed to start life) or by a barrier that destroyed them before they could begin spreading into space (i.e. they built a LHC). If the barrier is the latter, then humanity could be in store for a bumpy future.

Wagner and Sancho’s lawsuit, while improbable, is not frivolous. After all, the one time we got it wrong would easily outweigh all the previous times we were overly cautious. Most likely, when the LHC goes online later this year, nothing will happen, which I will hear about from my basement with my jugs of water and a game of Scrabble.

Steven T. Cupps ’09 is a biological anthropology and economics concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears regularly.