LHC will not shred Earth

This 2007 photo shows the magnet core of the world's largest superconducting solenoid magnet, part of the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator. Some 2,000 scientists from 155 institutes in 36 countries worked together to build the particle detector, which is scheduled begin operation Sept. 10.

The sheer scale of the LHC project has cause concerns about the danger of the intensely powerful particle collisions planned by CERN. However, a new report published on today provides the most comprehensive evidence available to confirm that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)'s switch-on poses no threat to mankind. Nature's own cosmic rays regularly produce more powerful particle collisions than those planned within the LHC, which will enable nature's laws to be studied in controlled experiments.

The LHC Safety Assessment Group have reviewed and updated a study first completed in 2003, which dispels fears of universe-gobbling black holes and of other possibly dangerous new forms of matter, and confirms that the switch-on will be completely safe.

The report, “Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions,” published in IOP Publishing's Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, proves that if particle collisions at the LHC had the power to destroy the Earth, we would never have been given the chance to exist, because regular interactions with more energetic cosmic rays would already have destroyed the Earth or other astronomical bodies.

The Safety Assessment Group writes, "Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programs on Earth—and the planet still exists."

The Safety Assessment Group compares the rates of cosmic rays that bombard Earth, other planets in our solar system, the Sun and all the other stars in our universe itself to show that hypothetical black holes or strangelets, that have raised fears in some, will in fact pose no threat.

The report also concludes that, since cosmic-ray collisions are more energetic than those in the LHC, but are incapable of producing vacuum bubbles or dangerous magnetic monopoles, we should not fear their creation by the LHC.

(AP Photo/Keystone, Martial Trezzini)

More information is available here, http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html

SOURCE: Institute of Physics

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