Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho of Hawaii seem to have been smoking too much stuff lately. I’m saying this because on March 21, they filed a lawsuit in a district court in Honolulu, Hawaii against the European Center for Nuclear Research or CERN. This lawsuit seeks to place a temporary restraining order on CERN’s latest and greatest project ever: the Large Hadron Collider. And what is it that the L. H. C. does, you ask? Oh, nothing. It just recreates the Big Bang. You know, that awesome explosion that started the Universe?
For those that don’t know (or haven’t read Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons), a large hadron collider has the ability to supercharge protons up to seven trillion electron volts and then afterwards let them collide to recreate the energies and conditions resulting from a “Big Bang.” CERN aims to further understand these forces and presumably apply them for the good of mankind, but the two concerned complainants are worried about something else occurring in the aftermath: black holes that could quite possibly eat up the earth, and even the whole universe. What?
CERN says it has done a lot of previous testing and can attest to the L. H. C.’s complete harmlessness. And the Safety Assessment Group was even set up to do another anonymous review of the said project last year. But still, Wagner and Sancho won’t give up easily, even though the party they are trying to shut down is at least a few thousand miles away, in Geneva, Switzerland.
Now I know most people would have mixed views regarding this matter, but judging from the popularity of Sci-Fi pop culture movies and the like, I think more people would agree with the complainant’s arguments, at least at first. And from what most of us were taught back when we first learned of it, isn’t a Big Bang supposed to naturally cause a black hole to appear anyway? I’m no Physics major, but judging from the facts, I think it’s quite safe to say that there really will be a black hole after the blast. But then again, people at CERN say that there should be absolutely no cause for panic, as the large hadron collider is tested to be problem-free (both by in-house physicists and trusted third-party experts). But for now, no one can say for sure what the effects will be after this projects is initiated. Will a black hole grow and eat earth, or worse, the universe? Will the colliding particles release so much energy that will it tap the inner core and send all volcanoes across the world exploding? No one really knows. Maybe it will just turn out the lights.
Read [NY Times] Image [Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times]
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