Safety of Particle Collisions at The Large Hadron Collider - Large Hadron Collider

Large Hadron Collider

In the run up to the commissioning of the LHC, Walter L. Wagner (an original opponent of the RHIC), Luis Sancho (a Spanish science writer) and Otto Rössler (a German biochemist) expressed concerns over the safety of the LHC, and attempted to halt the beginning of the experiments through petitions to the US and European Courts. These opponents assert that the LHC experiments have the potential to create low velocity micro black holes that could grow in mass or release dangerous radiation leading to doomsday scenarios, such as the destruction of the Earth. Other claimed potential risks include the creation of theoretical particles called strangelets, magnetic monopoles and vacuum bubbles.

Based on such safety concerns, US federal judge Richard Posner, Future of Humanity Institute research associate Toby Ord and others have argued that the LHC experiments are too risky to undertake. In the book Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century?, English cosmologist and astrophysicist Martin Rees calculated an upper limit of 1 in 50 million for the probability that the Large Hadron Collider will produce a global catastrophe or black hole. However, Rees has also reported not to be "losing sleep over the collider," and trusts the scientists who have built it. He has stated: "My book has been misquoted in one or two places. I would refer you to the up-to-date safety study."

The risk assessments of catastrophic scenarios at the LHC sparked public fears, and some scientists associated with the project received protests - the Large Hadron Collider team revealed that they had received death threats and threatening emails and phone calls demanding the experiment be halted. On 9 September 2008, Romania's Conservative Party held a protest before the European Commission mission to Bucharest, demanding that the experiment be halted because it feared that the LHC could create dangerous black holes.