LHC nonsense

In amongst all the gravitas of the end of the semester, here’s a bit of levity…

From the inimitable Bob Park (http://bobpark.org/) we see a spirited defence of the LHC in the face of a mighty stupid lawsuit from some dude in Hawaii!

1. LHC: A KNIGHT ERRANT TILTS AT HIGH-ENERGY WINDMILL.
Technology has changed in the 400 years since Cervantes first told the
story of Don Quixote. Windmills are now particle accelerators and the
knight’s lance is a federal court injunction, but the plot is the same.
It begins with a befuddled lawyer in Hawaii named Walter Wagner. Having
read far too much science fiction as a youth, Wagner fantasizes that he is
a physicist by virtue of an undergraduate biology degree with a minor in
physics. Accompanied by Sancho, his loyal TA, Wagner embarks on an
adventure to slay the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a doomsday machine that
he believes is posed to destroy the world by creating a black hole. He
seems to have forgotten the last time he tried this. In 1999 Wagner
warned that RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven
National Laboratory, must be slain lest it create a black hole
http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN99/wn072399.html . The then BNL
director, Jack Marburger, named a distinguished panel of physicists to
investigate. Their report noted that nature has been conducting the
relevant safety test for billions of years by colliding heavy-ion cosmic
rays with the moon. It concluded that creation of a black hole
is “effectively ruled out by the persistence of the Moon.”