Stranger than truth

Apr 3rd 2008
From The Economist print edition

Not an April fool, honestly

IN THE weeks before Trinity, the first test of an atomic bomb, some of the physicists in the Manhattan Project fretted that their brainchild might set off a reaction that would burn up the Earth's atmosphere. Similarly, an experiment carried out in Long Island a few years ago, which was intended to produce a form of matter known as strange quarks, caused a few imaginative worrywarts to fear that the entire planet would be converted into subatomic particles called strangelets.

Neither of these things came to pass, of course. But that does not stop people continuing to worry that esoteric phenomena at the edge of physics might spell The End Of Everything in a satisfyingly B-movieish cataclysm. The twist in the latest of these scares is that the worriers seem to think that a court in Hawaii is somehow empowered to stop events happening half a world away, on the Franco-Swiss border.The bugaboo this time is black holes. A black hole is an object so dense (and thus with such a strong gravitational field) that nothing—not even light—can escape it. Not surprisingly, no such object has ever been observed directly. However, the indirect effects of black holes can be seen all over the place, and the universe would not make sense without them, so there is little doubt that they really do exist.

It would, nevertheless, be nice to have one to hand. And some physicists think that this will happen soon—when a machine called the Large Hadron Collider is switched on later this year. The LHC is the proud creation of CERN, Europe's main particle-physics laboratory, which is located near Geneva. It will create a zoo of new particles for those who study the fabric of reality to get to grips with. Among those objects may be some tiny black holes. The LHC's physicists are particularly excited by these because they will allow for the experimental examination of gravity. They may also allow Stephen Hawking, a well-known British physicist, to receive a much-deserved Nobel prize. That would almost certainly happen if he turns out to have been right in his prediction that tiny black holes will evaporate in a spectacular burst of energy that has come to be known as Hawking radiation.

Luis Sancho and Walter Wagner, however, are excited for a different reason. They fear that, far from evaporating in this way, any black holes created in the LHC will start sucking matter in—and will eventually swallow the Earth. This is despite the fact that if the LHC is, indeed, powerful enough to create such black holes, then so are the cosmic rays that continually bombard the Earth without noticeably sucking it into hideous doom.

This week, Mr Sancho and Mr Wagner put their fears before a federal district court in Hawaii, asking for an injunction on CERN to stop the LHC opening. They also asked, perhaps with a fractionally higher hope of success, that America's main particle-physics laboratory, Fermilab, be forbidden to furnish its European friends and rivals with equipment.

Mr Wagner, a former nuclear-safety officer who now runs a botanical garden on Hawaii, has form in this area. It was he who led worries about the Long Island strangelets, to the extent of trying to get a similar restraining order imposed on Brookhaven National Laboratory, where the strange-matter experiment was to be conducted. Strange matter also features in his worries about the LHC. But his behaviour suggests that strange matter comes in many guises, not all of them within the purview of physicists.

Physics and the law | Stranger than truth | Economist.com