1) Higgs boson

2) Magnetic Monopole

3) Strangelet

4) Miniature Black Hole [aka nano black hole]

In 1987 I first theorized that colliders might create miniature black holes, and expressed those concerns to a few individuals. However, Hawking’s formula showed that such a miniature black hole, with a mass of under 10,000,000 a.m.u., would “evaporate” in about 1 E-23 seconds, and thus would not move from its point of creation to the walls of the vacuum chamber [taking about 1 E-11 seconds travelling at 0.9999c] in time to cannibalize matter and grow larger.

In 1999, I was uncertain whether Hawking radiation would work as he proposed. If not, and if a mini black hole were created, it could potentially be disastrous. I wrote a Letter to the Editor to Scientific American [July, 1999] about that issue, and they had Frank Wilczek, who later received a Nobel Prize for his work on quarks, write a response. In the response, Frank wrote that it was not a credible scenario to believe that minature black holes could be created.

Well, since then, numerous theorists have asserted to the contrary. Google on “LHC Black Hole” for a plethora of articles on how the LHC might create miniature black holes, which those theorists believe will be harmless because of their faith in Hawking’s theory of evaporation via quantum tunneling.

The idea that rare ultra-high-energy cosmic rays striking the moon [or other astronomical body] create natural miniature black holes — and therefore it is safe to do so in the laboratory — ignores one very fundamental difference.

In nature, if they are created, they are travelling at about 0.9999c relative to the planet that was struck, and would for example zip through the moon in about 0.1 seconds, very neutrino-like because of their ultra-tiny Schwartzschild radius, and high speed. They would likely not interact at all, or if they did, glom on to perhaps a quark or two, barely decreasing their transit momentum.

At the LHC, however, any such novel particle created would be relatively ‘at rest’, and be captured by Earth’s gravitational field, and would repeatedly orbit through Earth, if stable and not prone to decay. If such miniature black holes don’t rapidly evaporate and are produced in copious abundance [1/second by some theories], there is a much greater probability that they will interact and grow larger, compared to what occurs in nature.

There are a host of other problems with the “cosmic ray argument” posited by those who believe it is safe to create miniature black holes. This continuous oversight of obvious flaws in reasoning certaily should give one pause to consider what other oversights might be present in the theories they seek to test.

I am not without some experience in science.

In 1975 I discovered the tracks of a novel particle on a balloon-borne cosmic ray detector. “Evidence for Detection of a Moving Magnetic Monopole”, Price et al., Physical Review Letters, August 25, 1975, Volume 35, Number 8. A magnetic monopole was first theorized in 1931 by Paul A.M. Dirac, Proceedings of the Royal Society (London), Series A 133, 60 (1931), and again in Physics Review 74, 817 (1948). While some pundits claimed that the tracks represented a doubly-fragmenting normal nucleus, the data was so far removed from that possibility that it would have been only a one-in-one-billion chance, compared to a novel particle of unknown type. The data fit perfectly with a Dirac monopole.

While I would very much love to see whether we can create a magnetic monopole in a collider, ethically I cannot currently support such because of the risks involved.

For more information, go to: http://www.LHCdefense.org

Regards,

Walter L. Wagner (Dr.)

Phil Plait has just blogged about NASA’s recent string of fuck-ups. According to the latest news flash, NASA does the following:
–Let’s astronauts fly drunk: http://www.space.com/news/070727_nasa_drunkastronaut.html

–Embezzles money from the govt: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/space/5000072.html

–Employs questionable contractors to build critical components for spacecraft: http://www.thestar.com/News/article/240490

They plan on launching that equipment in two weeks.

At this rate, we’ll be lucky to even HAVE a manned space program by the end of the year! After all of this, I just find it *bitterly* ironic that 5 out of 8 of the protagonists in ‘Sunshine’ are American.

I’ve a quick question about something that was said in there, if you’d be kind enough to pass it on to Brian…..

The narrator said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that at the very first moments after the big bang, matter triumphed over anti-matter, allowing life to exist.

What’s to say that we wouldn’t have existed made out of anti-matter, and it be what we call matter that is the ultimate destructor (if that’s a reasonable description) that anti-matter is to us?

I don’t know if you’ve ever read the SF book “Cities in Flight”, by James Blish, but the last section of that book involves (look away now if you don’t want any spoilers) them seeing the edge of the universe encroaching in, as an anti-matter universe grows on the other side of it. In his book, the anti-matter universe was said to be travelling backwards in time, so what was actually happening was the destruction of two universes, both going different directions in time….

Would it be possible for a universe to be made of anti-matter? Is it not (and this is me as an utter lay-man talking here) just the inverse of what we see as matter? And therefore able to have the same properties, as long as it doesn’t come into contact with matter?

Interested to find out how much of this is in my mind from reading too many books, and how much is actually something that James Blish, writing in the 1970’s, understood the current thinking about…

Thanks