The theoretical possibility that a new and more powerful atomic particle accelerator could generate a “black hole” capable of swallowing the earth should trigger the requirement for an environmental impact statement before U.S. agencies can participate in the research, according to a federal lawsuit filed last month by a Big Island man.
The “black hole” scenario is only one of several doomsday possibilities described in the suit filed by Big Island resident Walter L. Wagner of Pepeekeo and Luis Sanchez, a Spanish science writer and occasional visitor to Hawaii. Named as defendants are the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and Fermilab, a federal nuclear laboratory, which are involved in an international scientific partnership with the European Center for Nuclear Energy Research (CERN) to build and operate the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at an underground site along the border of France and Switzerland.
The suit describes a science fiction-like range of unintended consequences, including so-called “black holes” that could accumulate inside the earth “and eventually devour it”, or a “runaway fusion process (reminiscent of the fictional ice-nine) in which all the nuclei in the planet were converted to strange matter”.
The suit alleges theoretical risks have been known and discussed in the scientific community at least since 1999, but have been brushed aside by the scientific establishment.
The suit asks that the experiments be delayed long enough to provide time for concerned scientists to review a new safety and risk study undertaken by CERN last year in response to concerns raised. The new study was supposed to be finished by the end of 2007 but has yet to be released.
Wagner and Sanchez are representing themselves without benefit of an attorney, apparently indicating a lack of organizational support for their assessment of risk. Neither man appears to be a professional physicist or research scientist. Sanchez is a Spanish science writer who describes himself as “a system scientist specialized in Cosmology and Time Theory”. The suit describes Wagner as “a nuclear physicist with extensive training in the field,” but lists only an undergraduate degree with a minor in physics.
In a telephone interview, Wagner said he was employed as a research associate in cosmic radiation research after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, and later attended law school. He is a retired nuclear safety officer for the Veteran’s Administration who enforced safety regulations of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy.
The lawsuit is supported by affidavits filed by several others, including a professor at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, and a trained British brewer now employed as a safety officer in the concrete industry.
A spokesman for CERN has called their claims “absolute nonsense”, according to published accounts.
A statement on the LHC web site says: “Some people have expressed concerns about the safety of whatever may be created in high-energy particle collisions. However there are no reasons for concern.”
Wagner told Honolulu Weekly that administrators at CERN initially said it was silly to worry the experiments could produce micro black holes.
“About three years later, they switched positions and now say black holes could be produced but don’t worry, they’re going to almost instantly evaporate,” Wagner said.
“Their public face says, don’t worry, none of this could happen. But they know we’ve already demonstrated that argument is fallacious, and in fact they’re doing a new safety study to examine the issues we have raised,” he said.
“I’ve talked with a number of different physicists with good credentials who acknowledge that there’s a problem. There’s some reluctance to do it publicly for fear of hurting their reputations, but they privately communicate with me,” Wagner said.
The huge particle accelerator at the center of the controversy is housed in a tunnel 12-1/2 feet in diameter that runs in a circular track almost 17 miles long and is buried from 165 feet to nearly 600 feet underground.
It is the uncertainty of what might happen when particles collide at over 99.99% of the speed of light that sparks both the intense scientific interest in the experiments and the alarm expressed in the lawsuit.
“In layman terms, what CERN is doing is asking each of us, and all of mankind, to play a game of Russian Roulette with two bullets; one for the creation of black holes, and one for the creation of strange matter,” Sanchez wrote in an affidavit.
Another affidavit by Paul Dixon, Professor of Psychology at UH Hilo, describes his conversations with Department of Energy scientists.
“They have always acknowledged to me that there is some small risk in their work that such ‘doomsday’ scenarios might prove to be a possiblitiy, but that they thought their personal goals outweighed that risk,” Dixon wrote.
‘They did not wish to work for Ma Bell”, Dixon wrote, referring to the notoriously stodgy and risk-averse telephone monopoly that existed prior to the court-ordered breakup of ATT in 1984.
-Ian Lind
|