WHAT EXPERTS SAY
On May 14, 2007, Ms. Elizabeth Kolbert published an article in The New Yorker about the LHC entitled “Crash Course”, which described her visit and interview with the LHC management. Excerpts of her article are below.
www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/05/14/070514fa_fact_kolbert?currentPage=1
CERN’s chief scientific officer, Jos Engelen, is from the Netherlands. He serves under the director general, who is from France, and alongside the chief financial officer, who is from Germany. … Among his responsibilities is dealing with the frequent calls and letters CERN receives about the possibility that the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] will destroy the world. When I asked about this, Engelen picked up a Bic pen and placed it in front of me.
“In quantum mechanics, there is a probability that this pen will fall through the table,” he said. “All of a sudden, it will be on the floor. Because it can behave as a wave, it can go through; we call that the ‘tunnel effect’. If you calculate the probability that this happens, it is not identical to zero. It is a very small probability. But it never happens. I’ve never seen it happen. You have never seen it happen. But to the general public you make a casual remark, ‘It is not identical to zero, it is very small,’ and …” He shrugged.
Worries about the end of the planet have shadowed nearly every high-energy experiment. Such concerns were given a boost by Scientific American – presumably inadvertently, in 1999. That summer, the magazine ran a letter to the editor about Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, then nearing completion. The letter suggested that the Brookhaven collider might produce a “mini black hole” that would be drawn toward the center of the earth, thus “devouring the entire planet within minutes.” Frank Wilczek, a physicist who would later win a Nobel Prize, wrote a response for the magazine. Wilczek dismissed the idea of mini black holes … but went on to raise a new possibility: the collider could produce strangelets, a form of matter that some think might exist at the center of neutron stars. In that case, he observed, “one might be concerned about an ‘ice-9’-type transition,” wherein all surrounding matter could be converted into strangelets and the world as we know it would vanish. …
“I know Frank Wilczek,” Engelen told me. “He is an order of magnitude smarter than I am. But he was perhaps a bit naïve.” Engelen said that CERN officials are now instructed, with respect to the LHC’s world-destroying potential, “not to say that the probability is very small but that the probability is zero.”
I asked Engelen how he would explain the project of particle physics to a non-physicist, or if he thought such an explanation was even advisable. “We simply want to know what the world is made of, and how,” he said. “What is in here” – he rapped on his desk with his knuckles – “and how these particles in here constitute a table.”
The day that I met with Engelen, I also spoke with deputy head of CERN’s physics department, Michael Doser. … Depending on how the universe is constructed, extra dimensions, mini black holes, and the source of so-called “dark matter” may all be revealed at CERN. Any black holes created, Doser was quick to assure me, would be entirely benign.
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[Note: It is not possible to calculate the probability of creating a mini black hole, a strangelet, or any other theoretical particle. Such calculations would require empirical data to draw upon, and none exists presently.]