WHAT EXPERTS SAY
In response to the recent, August 8-9, 2007 U.S. Coast to Coast AM radioshow with host George Noory interviewing Dr. Wagner, the following letter was received from an astute listener:
August 11, 2007
Dr. Walter L. Wagner
LHC Defense
P.O. Box 881
Pepeekeo, HI 96783
Dear Dr. Wagner,
Please accept this $10 donation (enclosed) toward your planned lawsuit to delay the start of operations of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) until a proper safety evaluation can be made by an independent committee of scientists and safety consultants. I trust that it will be joined by many similar contributions, especially as a result of your excellent interview on Coast to Coast AM this past week. In the words of one pundit, commenting on a similar problem, “A planet is a terrible thing to waste.” Echoing the concerns of Britain’s Astronomer-Royal, the same might be said for a bio-compatible universe.
From the information provided on your website, as well as some of the linked websites, it’s clear that the main renewed concern relating to the LHC stems from the fact that the assumptions upon which previous safety assurances were given have increasingly been shown to be of highly questionable validity. This surely calls for a new safety assessment by an independent body, perhaps under UN auspices.
Looking at the problem more broadly, it may well be that high-energy colliders, by their very nature, pose an unacceptable risk, especially as their energy is increased. The black-hole problem (and maybe the strangelet problem) could potentially be dealt with by making a design change to assure that the resultant collision products have sufficient residual kinetic energy to escape earth’s gravitational field. But the space-time collapse problem, while a less probable outcome, has no such “engineering” solution. Even moving the whole shebang to outer space (or an “expendable” moon) would not provide a solution.
The use of high-energy colliders to probe the structure of matter has rightly been compared with smashing a watch and examining its parts to determine how a watch works. This, while crude, may be fairly effective as long as the smashing doesn’t destroy all the watches – and watchmakers – in the world, as well as possibly destroying the time-continuum which the watch is designed to measure.
Yet I realize that you’re up against a Promethean drive toward power through knowledge. One of the callers to Coast expressed it well in citing the example of Dr. Edward Teller’s development of fusion weapons. So far, we’ve been fortunate in not fulfilling the quote, reportedly made on the eve of the Alamogordo fission bomb test, by Dr. Oppenheimer from, as I recall, the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become the destroyer of worlds.”
Put another way, Nobel’s physics prize may, in the end, wreak more destruction than Nobel’s dynamite. Unfortunately, there might be nobody left to appreciate the irony.
Anyway, good luck in your effort,
Yours truly,
John ________
Houston, Texas
[anonymous until permission from author received]