I’m at the Smart Monkey Cafe eating oatmeal and a muffin when my girlfriend starts laughing. She’s reading the New York Times National section. She has already shown me a picture for the article she is reading about the L.H.C. To scientists it is known as the Large Hadron Collider – a particle accelerator coming on line at C.E.R.N., a European research facility located in Switzerland near the French border. This particle accelerator will be the most powerful accelerator yet built, able to achieve collisions of 14 T.E.V. or tera-electron-volts (14,000,000,000,000 eV). Believe me – that is a lot of energy, an order of magnitude more than anything available today. The article, as it turns out, is about a couple crack pots who think that the these collisions will cause the end of the earth. Certainly reason enough to cause a laugh. I’ll cover them and their theories more later. That is not why she was laughing. You see, in the very matter of fact article, the New York Times, a venerable institution of exacting information, refers to it as the Large Hardon Collider. I don’t even want to go to that mental image. You can check out a picture of this article at Laura’s Blog because alas they have corrected their Freudian slip on their website.
Now back to th crack pots. These same crack pots tried to stop Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (R.H.I.C.) from operating. They argued that R.H.I.C. could produce black holes and other things that would destroy the earth. Guess what – in the years that R.H.I.C. has been operating, the earth has not been destroyed. Must have been lucky. Or not. One of my ABC’s of science fiction, Gregory Benford, in his book COSM wrote about R.H.I.C. having unexpected results that nearly destroyed the earth. It was partly making fun of those very crack pots that were trying to stop it.
High energy collisions occur in our atmosphere at the rate of 100,000 times a day. They are caused by very energetic particles traveling through space colliding with particles in our atmosphere. The earth has been around a very long time, so there have been a lot of high energy collisions that have not yet destroyed the earth. No one can rule out the possibility thanks to that pesky quantum mechanics, but the probability is so low that it is basically equivalent to impossible. Now those same crack pots want to stop the L.H.C. by suing C.E.R.N. in a court in Hawaii. They say that C.E.R.N. didn’t file an Environmental Impact Study as required by the National Environmental Protection Act. I might have mentioned that C.E.R.N. is in Switzerland and not Hawaii and also, therefore, not subject to the U.S. Environmental Protection Act. Seems the crack pots have not noticed that. Why people like this are allowed to waste the courts time or even space on the front page of the New York Times is beyond me.
Crack pots, I tell ya.
