Shutdown of the LHC, by Kevin Black

Reminds me of a science-fiction short story that I once read. A team working on a massive particle accelerator built to study some exotic low-energy particle kept having it break down every time they tried to use it. Even if everything was working perfectly, something would fail right before the crucial moment, and stop the experiment dead.

Months of replacing perfectly good parts went by, until they finally figured things out: They had been accidentally destroying the universe, due to the nature of the particles being studied.

There's a bit in "The Elegant Universe" about how at this point it's impossible to distinguish between real but weird physics and just crazy.

Proof via rigorous computer simulation:

  >>> from __future__ import LHC
  
    File "<stdin>", line 1
  SyntaxError: future feature LHC is not defined

They haven't actually started high energy collision tests yet, so... the black hole possibility is still there. Here's what might

happen (it's a flash but it shows the real possibility):

http://www.yaplakal.com/forum8/topic208652.html

The guys behind LHC say nothing like that will happen and suggest that nature conducts similar experiments in the Earth's

atmosphere every day. However Dr Wagner is pretty sure that nature does not collide two highly focused beams of particles with the

energies seen only when the universe was born. See his web site here:

http://lhcdefense.org/

The second argument of CERN is that even if a microscopic black hole appears, it will quickly evaporate due to hawking radiation.

However, hawking radiation is just a theory. Hawking changed his mind about black holes once, and there's not reason to think he'd

get it right this time. There's not reason to bet your life, the life of your children and the future of the planet based on a

word of one quantum physicist.

Even though the odds of the black hole appearing are not that high, did anyone ask you if you're willing to trust a bunch of

scientists with your life just so that they can test their theories?

I sure hope that the next time $6 bln dollars are spent by scientists it will be on finding cure for cancer and not the

hypothetical higgs particle. Last time quantum physicists produced something useful resulted in millions of people dead in

Hirohima, Nagasaki and Chernobyl.

The first high power experiments will be conducted end of 2008 or early 2009, so there's still time to stop this doomsday device.

I hope that anyone who cares about the future will take an action. Please suggest your ideas on how to do this (no violence,

please). Will injunction help? For example:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080123210737AA...

I hope that if enough of us do that, we will be able to save our planet.

It's time to play "I don't know crap about physics".

If events in the future can influence the present, wouldn't people in the future try to harness that to influence the past?

It's impossible to read the OP without thinking of the "future Dwight" prank from The Office.

According to Carl Sagan, the experiment will not produce much. I don't think they actually expect to produce micro black holes. The most 'interesting' probable result is actually a negative outcome. IE they fail to detect the Higgs boson. That would mean that the 'standard model' needs to be abandoned.

That's just looking at the Schrödinger's cat experiment from the point of view of the cat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_immortality

I suppose you could form a hypothesis and conduct and experiment that, if the hypothesis is correct, would cause something "miraculous" (i.e. statistically impossible) to happen in the present...

Well, I've only read the introduction of the actual paper, but they do start talking about God :)

It is ridiculous to imagine that a species that doesn't even have warp engines yet could destroy the universe.

TNG anyone?