Earth Could Be Crushed to The Size of a Soccer Field by Particle Accelerator Experiments, Says Astronomer
Martin Rees,
a well-respected British cosmologist, made pretty bold statement late last year
when it comes to particle accelerators: there's a small, but real possibility
of disaster.
Particle
accelerators, like the Large Hadron Collider, shoot particles at incredibly
high speeds, smash them together, and observe the fallout.
These high
speed collisions have helped us discover lots of new particles, but according
to Rees, this isn't without its risks.
In his 2018
book, called On The Future: Prospects for Humanity, he gives some pretty bleak
outlooks.
"Maybe
a black hole could form, and then suck in everything around it," he
writes, as Sarah Knapton reported over at the Telegraph. "The second scary
possibility is that the quarks would reassemble themselves into compressed
objects called strangelets."
"That
in itself would be harmless. However under some hypotheses a strangelet could,
by contagion, convert anything else it encounters into a new form of matter,
transforming the entire earth in a hyperdense sphere about one hundred metres
across."
That's
approximately 330 feet, or around the length of a soccer field.
And that's
not all. The third way that particle accelerators could destroy the Earth,
according to Reese, is by a "catastrophe that engulfs space itself".
"Empty
space - what physicists call the vacuum - is more than just nothingness. It is
the arena for everything that happens. It has, latent in it, all the forces and
particles that govern the physical world. The present vacuum could be fragile
and unstable."
"Some
have speculated that the concentrated energy created when particles crash
together could trigger a 'phase transition' that would rip the fabric of space.
This would be a cosmic calamity not just a terrestrial one."
Sounds
frankly terrifying. But should we really be worried? Surely the smart people at
the LHC can clear this up.
"The
LHC Safety Assessment Group (LSAG) reaffirms and extends the conclusions of the
2003 report that LHC collisions present no danger and that there are no reasons
for concern," CERN writes on their website.
"Whatever
the LHC will do, nature has already done many times over during the lifetime of
the Earth and other astronomical bodies."
And this is
an important point – cosmic rays are basically natural versions of what the LHC
and other particle accelerators are doing. And these rays hit Earth constantly.
The team
behind the LHC have an answer for strangelets as well.
"Could
strangelets coalesce with ordinary matter and change it to strange matter? This
question was first raised before the start up of the Relativistic Heavy Ion
Collider, RHIC, in 2000 in the United States," they explain.
"A
study at the time showed that there was no cause for concern, and RHIC has now
run for eight years, searching for strangelets without detecting any."
Even the
late, great Stephen Hawking gave his blessing to the particle accelerator:
"The
world will not come to an end when the LHC turns on. The LHC is absolutely
safe. ... Collisions releasing greater energy occur millions of times a day in
the earth's atmosphere and nothing terrible happens," said Hawking.
In a way,
Rees is correct. We're not 100 percent sure, and might never be. But as he
explains, many scientific advances can have risks, but that's not to say we
need to stop entirely.
"Innovation
is often hazardous, but if we don't forgo risks we may forgo benefits," he
writes in On The Future.
"Nevertheless,
physicists should be circumspect about carrying out experiments that generate
conditions with no precedent, even in the cosmos," Rees writes.
"Many
of us are inclined to dismiss these risks as science fiction, but give the
stakes they could not be ignored, even if deemed highly improbable."
We'll leave
that gargantuan task to the particle physicists.
A version of
this article was first published in October 2018.
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