Penumbral Lore; the Shadows of Science

Now that I’ve gone over the very basics of Quantum Theory, it’s time to talk about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is currently being built on the outskirts of Geneva, and it spans the Swiss/French border. The last of the ‘warm’ magnets have just been installed. It will be powered up in May of this year, and the first high energy collisions will happen this summer.

Future posts will talk more about what experiments will become possible, given the new technology. The ones which excite me the most at the moment are those which might move String Theory into the realm of experimental physics.

For this post, however, I’m going to bring up some of the objections to the LHC. The most notable are at the Large Hadron Collider Defense Site. The perceived risks of the LHC as expressed there are:

• Miniature Black Holes: the concern is that any miniature black holes created at the LHC would be moving slowly enough to be trapped by earth’s gravitational pull. In theory, Hawking radiation would bleed them away faster than they could ‘grow’, even in an atmosphere, but how solid is that rate?*
• Strangelets: Theoretically, there may be forms of matter which are more stable than normal matter, which might be created in the LHC. If such matter is created, and interacts with normal matter, will it trigger a ‘phase shift’ in normal matter.

Cerns response to these potential threats (check .pdf downloads for in depth discussions) seems, to my layman’s eyes, to be reasoned and thoughtful.  It also deals with metastable vacuum decay (which is related to string theory), and points out that the conditions created in the LHC are not more extreme than those in the observable universe, so if they could trigger vacuum decay we’d all be dead already.   There are two documents, one for US, one for Europe, and they’re worth reading.