# Were there ever any apologies for the hysteria over the LHC? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 6, 2011, 6:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-ever-any-apologies-for-the-hysteria-over-the-lhc/602038 "2011-11-06T06:48:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![ZenBeam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/3ab097/32.png) [@ZenBeam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZenBeam)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2011, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-ever-any-apologies-for-the-hysteria-over-the-lhc/602038/21 "2011-11-09T00:15:17Z")
From context, he’s talking about the probability to “destroy the planet”, not just a fire at CERN or Brookhaven. He doesn’t, though, give links to the reports, or state what the precise definition used is. ---
**Author:** ![Manduck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/manduck/32/256_2.png) [@Manduck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Manduck)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2011, 12:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-ever-any-apologies-for-the-hysteria-over-the-lhc/602038/22 "2011-11-09T00:35:49Z")
> [@smithsb](#): > > CBS, AP, CNN, etc… won’t say that aliens are invading New Jersey; just that the World Weekly News reported that aliens have landed and Snookie has been abducted. Oh my god!! Is she okay?! ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2011, 5:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-ever-any-apologies-for-the-hysteria-over-the-lhc/602038/23 "2011-11-09T05:34:12Z")
> [@ZenBeam](#): > > ETA: Those quotes make the blog sound alarmist. To be honest, the full article sounds rather more alarmist, and borderline irresponsible, to me. First, they take an article as a jumping off point tnat doesn’t have anything to do with those black hole ‘concerns’, just to shoehorn in their rant; then, all assurances of the LHC’s safety are dismissed with a casual remark that ‘scientists can be wrong, too’, while speculations not even taken seriously by most scientists are accepted uncritically. Also, the allusion that safety assessments ought not to be believed because the scientists might have an agenda furthering their careers are borderline parody – even the most hardened careerist scientist realises that he need not worry about his career if the Earth is swallowed by a black hole. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2011, 3:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-ever-any-apologies-for-the-hysteria-over-the-lhc/602038/24 "2011-11-09T15:39:47Z")
There is a theory which states that if ever anybody 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[/RIGHT] Stranger ---
**Author:** ![mnemosyne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c4cdca/32.png) [@mnemosyne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mnemosyne)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2011, 5:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-ever-any-apologies-for-the-hysteria-over-the-lhc/602038/25 "2011-11-09T17:10:09Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Are you afraid of getting sucked in by a smallish starch molecule? :eyes bag of potato chips suspiciously: I get sucked in by _Lay’s_ all the time. ☹ ---
**Author:** ![Death\_of\_Rats](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a6a055/32.png) [@Death\_of\_Rats](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Death_of_Rats)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2011, 8:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-ever-any-apologies-for-the-hysteria-over-the-lhc/602038/26 "2011-11-09T20:40:06Z")
> [@smithsb](#): > > CBS, AP, CNN, etc… won’t say that aliens are invading New Jersey; just that the World Weekly News reported that aliens have landed and Snookie has been abducted. > [@Manduck](#): > > Oh my god!! Is she okay?! I’d be more concerned for the well being of the aliens. ---
**Author:** ![ZenBeam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/3ab097/32.png) [@ZenBeam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZenBeam)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2011, 10:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-ever-any-apologies-for-the-hysteria-over-the-lhc/602038/27 "2011-11-09T22:19:14Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > To be honest, the full article sounds rather more alarmist, and borderline irresponsible, to me. First, they take an article as a jumping off point tnat doesn’t have anything to do with those black hole ‘concerns’, just to shoehorn in their rant; then, all assurances of the LHC’s safety are dismissed with a casual remark that ‘scientists can be wrong, too’, while speculations not even taken seriously by most scientists are accepted uncritically. Also, the allusion that safety assessments ought not to be believed because the scientists might have an agenda furthering their careers are borderline parody – even the most hardened careerist scientist realises that he need not worry about his career if the Earth is swallowed by a black hole. I have less faith in scientists not succumbing to rationalizations. I think about the two Space Shuttle disasters. Both of those happened in spite of clear warning signs. But that said, see below. [QUOTE=ZenBeam] > [@Chronos](#): > > But really, the best refutation of the worries is this: Events at higher energy than this happen all the time, from cosmic rays striking the Earth. If there were _any_ way at all that such events could destroy the Earth, it would have already happened, long ago. The highest-energy cosmic ray ever observed had an energy hundreds of times higher than the LHC, and that’s just in the few decades since we’ve been observing, over very small regions of the Earth: There are a lot more like that that we miss. So while we couldn’t be sure whether the LHC would produce black holes (it would have been really great if it did, since we’d learn a heck of a lot from that), we _could_ be sure that even if it did produce black holes, they’d be safe. This isn’t quite sufficient, though. In the LHC, the collisions occur in the center of momentum frame, so the resultant byproducts could have a small enough velocity to remain with the Earth. For the case of cosmic rays, the center of momentum is much larger, and any unanticipated dangerous particles would still have a large enough momentum to escape the Earth’s gravity. You’d need to extend the argument to show that the particle sticks around often enough (multiple interactions after its creation, maybe?) to be sure that that has already occurred. [/QUOTE] A reference to a paper addressing just this objection was given in the comment section of that blog post. [_Astrophysical implications of hypothetical stable TeV-scale black holes_](http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.3381) (published in Phys. Rev. D, Aug. 2008). The authors try to thoroughly cover the what-ifs, with a minimum of assumptions. It’s almost 100 pages long, so I’ve only skimmed parts of it, but briefly, there’s a stopping distance required for the resulting particle to shed velocity, so the argument **Chronos** gave works up to about 7 TeV for Earth itself, and up to about 100 TeV based on the Sun still existing. They also cover a number of other possibilities. ---
**Author:** ![Roderick\_Femm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/roderick_femm/32/14875_2.png) [@Roderick\_Femm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Roderick_Femm)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2011, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-ever-any-apologies-for-the-hysteria-over-the-lhc/602038/28 "2011-11-09T22:29:49Z")
Just as a matter of interest, David Brin used something like this as a plot device in his book _Earth_. Someone somewhere created one or more tiny black holes (it’s been years since I read this, so I don’t remember the details) which fell into the earth and started bouncing around in there, creating so many tiny pathways that somehow turned into a neural network, making the planet sentient. So it’s all good, if it happens. Roddy [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-ever-any-apologies-for-the-hysteria-over-the-lhc/602038.md?page=1)