That experiment was allowed to proceed because a safety study concluded that the energy levels of the experiment were far too small to cause a hazard.
Unfortunately, subsequent research by physicists at the University of California-Santa Barbara, Stanford University and Brown University showed that it was theoretically possible that much lower energy levels could create black holes. One paper even suggested that something with the energy level of the LHC might generate one black hole per second.
even if, the black hole would be tiny and would evaporate harmlessly. This was consistent with a theory of physicist Stephen Hawking. The evaporation argument was widely viewed as sound, and the LHC continued on track.
But later, some top scholars began to publish papers questioning the evaporation hypothesis. The issue is far from decided.
High-energy cosmic rays constantly bombard Earth and collide with particles in the atmosphere. If those collisions were going to create a black hole, then Earth would already be gone.
When a cosmic ray rocketing toward Earth collides with a particle, the result of the collision would most likely be blasted into space. That means a black hole created by such a collision might be well beyond our galaxy before it is large enough to harm anything. In the LHC, by contrast, the result of collisions between two particle beams might stay put and cause significant trouble.
Oxford University’s Toby Ord, a philosopher by training, adds one last concern. It may be that the models that we use to make predictions about the possibility of catastrophe are themselves flawed.
…
Whatever the likely benefits from this experiment, it is impossible that they would be significant enough to justify accepting a cost that includes a real risk of the Earth’s destruction.
As science progresses, the possibility climbs ever higher that the fondest dreams of scientists might entail risks of planetary destruction – whether it’s the next physics experiment at even-higher energy or a genetic experiment that might unleash the perfect disease. The best science explores things far from our understanding. How can we know that things we do not understand will not kill us?
Right now, the world’s governments have no mechanism to coordinate rational thinking about these risks.
2010-01-11 | achtphasen | 10:12:52 | 
| 3 comments
Dear Mr. James Greiff, Kevin Hassett, Laurence Arnold and Steven Gittelson
as i was unable to find '“Send Comment” in the sidebar display to send a letter to the editor', i am writing this e-mail to you, first to thank you very much for breaking the silence about not exludable risks arising at the LHC.
As your recent publication in BusinessWeek ( http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-10/atom-smasher-exposes-hole-in-earth-s-defenses-kevin-hassett.html ) is of very importance to possibly change the minds of authorities responsable for the savety of our lives and the lives of the generations to come, i just at this moment republished an extract of above mentioned webdocument at http://www.achtphasen.net/index.php/2010/01/11/p1463 (another URL: http://www.achtphasen.net/index.php/2010/01/11/businessweek_atom_smasher_exposes_hole_i ).
In the hope you will grant me the right to republishing extracts of your splendid resumee of the experimentators risk-neglectioning over decades, i do not urgently attend an answer of yours - only in the case you should not agree with me, republishing extracts of your publication, a short e-mail telling that you do not agree would be apreciated an sufficient to make me delete my blog-entry asap.
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Further i like to send you three more URLs (of which the first one is) where you could find some (official) stultificationing of drs. Plaga and Rossler: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html (all down the site just above the downloadsection) - there CERN still today presents the calculations of Plaga and Rossler as erroneous - but CERN just did not actualize this very populistic desinformations since summer 08 until today Jan. 11. 2010, 11h00' CET.
Dr. Plaga answered already Fri, 26 Sep 2008 and explicated his warnings again on Sun, 9 Aug 2009. ( http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.1415 ) His document: "On the potential catastrophic risk from metastable quantum-black holes produced at particle colliders" is an important one - pls. download the pdf: http://arxiv.org/pdf/0808.1415v3
Dr. Rossler published, 20 Jan 2009, a second version of his calculations, where he corrected some error of his previous paper - until today his gothic-R-theoreme with the probably most frightening scenario is NOT disproven: http://www.wissensnavigator.com/documents/Chaos.pdf
Both warnings/calculations are NOT disproven.
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It might be, the following could be of interest to you too:
the collisions at the LHC will happen in extremly much higher density as by nature: the density of the collisions at the LHC will be 10'000'000'000'000'000'000'000'000'000 (10^28) higher than ever has been due to cosmic rays onto Earth's stratosphere!
http://www.achtphasen.net/index.php/plasmaether/2009/08/21/r_u_vergleich_lhc_cr
(Not even in super-novae there are happening collisions in such a high-density as at the LHC - the outcome of such natural highenergetic collisions in lhc-like densities is a neutron-star: extremly condensed matter - not barebale for any kind of organic life).
And there are dangers beside of eventual Micro-Black-Hole-mass-productioning: collisions in highest density with highest energies will create (semii-stable) quark-gluon-plasma-conditions where all kind of not forseeable recombinations of quarks will happen ---> Earth could eventualy get transformed into a piece of strange matter or explode because of high concentrations of top or other strange-quarks.
It would be foolish to say there must result any dangerous catalytic outcome resulting of those quark-gluon-plasmae - but on the other hand it is just not true, when CERN and his specialists are claiming there wouldn't for sure be any risk at all. Cern's famous 0%.
...
They obviously are bluffing; they themself just can not know, what there will be in those 'unchartred waters' behind the 'new frontiers' of physics.
I apologize for my english, thank you for reading.
Yours, sincerly,
Marc Fasnacht
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2010-01-11 | 11:06 Permalink
2010-01-21 | 21:36 
