Well, no, the worst scenario would be the nucleation of a lower energy vacuum, a so-called vacuum metastability event. That one wouldn’t only destroy the earth, but an ever-expanding (at about the speed of light) region of the universe.
But, if these things actually could occur (if, in other words, our universe exists in a metastable ‘false’ vacuum state), I’d think it highly unlikely that our universe has made it thus far – there’s plenty of interactions happening (for instance the oft mentioned cosmic ray incidences in our very own atmosphere) that make our little particle accelerators look like firecrackers, and not even the cool, big kaboom kind, but rather the somewhat disappointingly fizzling things you give to your kids so they finally shut up.
And regarding the black holes, Hawking radiation stands on far firmer theoretical grounds than the large extra dimensions needed for their creation to even be possible, so I’d be plenty surprised (and exited) if they will be actually discovered.
If anybody’s still worried, though, Sabine Hossenfelder at Backreaction does an admirable job at dispelling them with (by now) a series of blog entries, the latest of which can be found here (it links to the previous entries that are pretty much all worth the read).
The existence of Hawking radiation is hypothetical insofar as we have not (for obvious reasons) been able to observe it up close; however, it does offer a widely-accepted mechanism for why we don’t see a lot of sub-stellar mass primordial black holes hanging about after being formed from perturbations in the initial expansion after symmetry breaking, and the paradoxes of black hole thermodynamics as postulated by physicist Jacob Bekenstein. It’s not just Bekenstein and Hawking who came up with the notion, either; contemporary Soviet scientists came to essentially the same conclusion.
As for the LHC creating black holes or other catastrophically unstable exotic particles, the Earth is regularly bombarded with cosmic particles with energies many orders of magnitude larger than the LHC can create, and in fact if we could predict exactly when and where this happens we wouldn’t have to go to all the trouble building the bloody thing to begin with. So far, the world hasn’t yet ended from such an impact, although admittedly it is only about 4.3 billion years old, so there is time yet.
In view of this thread I think everyone here should sign this petition to get the LHC scientists to say, “Commence primary ignition” on its initial startup.
I really hope I do not need to explain that bit of pop culture here.
What’s really scary is that science education has atrophied to the point that a ludicrous notion like this should have escaped the hopefully-medicated fringe. Or to be rather more specific, it’s not a failure of science education so much as a combined lack of lay curiosity and basic critical thinking skills.
I mean, come on – the people who are concerned about this are, in essence, saying that one of the following laughable scenarios is true:
[list=a][li]The scientists are dummies. There they are, cheerfully assembling their machine, without any idea what they’re doing until Joe Nobody comes along and says, hey, guys, don’t you know your machine might destroy the world? Whereupon the scientists are supposed to say, “Hey, thanks for the warning, Joe Nobody! We never thought of that!”[/li][li]The scientists know very well that the machine has a good chance of destroying the world, but they don’t care; inquiries into basic knowledge are worth taking any risk. Or perhaps their egos outweigh the survival of humanity.[/list][/li]Now, is either of these scenarios even fractionally more likely than “I don’t know what I’m talking about, maybe I should go spend an hour at the library”?
Your point is well taken, but I think we really need to put this into perspective. Scientists are not superhuman. They can make mistakes. They can make huge mistakes. For a long time, cocaine and heroin were sold to people in drugstores and scientists thought this was OK. People used to eat mercury and “colloidal silver” and all kinds of other horrible shit and doctors thought it was fine and dandy.
It was scientists who were responsible for the Tuskegee experiments.
It was scientists who were responsible for all the Nazi’s human experimentation. Hitler’s racial science and Josef Mengele’s atrocities were carried out with full complicity of many of Germany’s top scientists.
It was scientists who invented biological warfare, VX gas, and the atomic bomb.
Don’t put scientists on a pedestal. They can be as deeply flawed as any other human being, except when they are, the consequences can be disastrous for humanity.
*There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.*
[right]–Douglas Adams, The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe[/right]
And this is pretty much what Cervaise was talking about. By your logic, everyone should get rid of their VWs, because Germans have made horrible things happen before, and for all we know every VW is tainted with potential evil.
