The Edge of Science, part 1: the system works

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1 Commentby   |  09.02.10  |  Fun, Physics News

We spend a lot of time talking and writing about being on the cutting edge of science.  We tell colleagues, students, and (mostly importantly) funding agencies that we are dealing with the newest equipment, the biggest atom smasher, the latest technique, and the results hot off the press.  For various reasons I’ve been interested lately in the other edge of science.  For the next few posts I hope you’ll come with me on a journey to the backwaters, the murky regions, and some deep dark spooky places.  Let’s jump off the back edge of science and see what we find.

There is a recent article in the excellent physics magazine Symmetry (available free online, thanks to support from the Department of Energy and Office of Science) about the dismissal of a lawsuit in appeals court.  To get you interested, my favorite quote from last week’s article is:

Accordingly, the alleged injury, destruction of the earth, is in no way attributable to the U.S. government’s failure to draft an environmental impact statement.

Before we get to the details, we need a little background to introduce the star of our story.  Meet Walter Wagner–lawyer, high school teacher, and former physics lab technician.  In 1975 he worked on a project claiming to discover a magnetic monopole produced from cosmic rays (PRL 35 487, 1975), a claim which was later revoked in 1978.  (It is hard to believe nowadays that you could publish a single event in Physical Review Letters and claim something…)

Apparently that experience whetted his appetite for seeking fame and glory, because he next reappears with a letter to Scientific American in 1999 claiming that the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (yes, the atom smasher where we do some of our research) could destroy the Earth in any number of fascinating ways.  Franck Wilczek, a Nobel laureate and the unfortunate recipient of the letter, summarizes the odds of a doomsday scenario as “absurdly small”.  Wilczek’s claim is based on the idea that the Earth and Moon still exist despite being pelted by high energy cosmic rays for billions of years.

After a ridiculous amount of media sensationalizing, the story culminated with the Daily Show sending Steve Carell, before he became a movie star and left to start a paper company in Scranton, to investigate.  He called the story “The Big Hole” in reference to the (effectively zero) odds of creating a black hole and sucking the galaxy into Long Island.  [Insider’s note: in the Daily Show piece they never actually set foot in RHIC.  All the footage is from the National Synchrotron Light Source–a completely separate facility.]  In response, Walter Wagner filed two lawsuits to stop RHIC from reaching full energy, both of which were dismissed in court.  Back to the present day, Wagner is still up to his old tricks.  He filed another lawsuit in 2008 in U.S. courts to stop the Large Hadron Collider.  After being dismissed and appealed, says that the appeal was dismissed again for multiple reasons.

So why does this story belong on the fringe of science?  Consider that the Earth and Moon are routinely hit with cosmic rays from outer space with energies up to and beyond 10^20 eV.  (For the experts, it is interesting to note that experimental data reports cosmic rays above the GZK cutoff).  The collision between a 10^20 eV proton from space and a stationary proton in Abilene, Texas has a center-of-mass energy of approximately 500 TeV.  This is about 36 times more powerful than the proton-proton collisions at the LHC, which should eventually reach 14 TeV.  We cannot possibly reach energies in the lab that match the energies of these naturally-occurring collisions.

This brings us to Walter Wagner’s greatest achievement: being interviewed by John Oliver on the Daily Show’s report of the exact same story, but this time at the LHC.  (I would give you a link here were it not for a few unfortunate PG-13 moments.)  In the interview Wagner is asked about the odds of a doomsday scenario at the LHC.  Wagner’s argument is a sublime mixture of beautiful simplicity and staggering ingorance:

Its a 50-50 chance: you have something that can happen and something that won’t necessarily happen, so its either going to happen or not happen, and so the best guess is a 1-in-2 chance.

Of course, a media feeding frenzy ensued with Wagner’s absurd claims reported as facts.  For his side of the story, I direct you to lhcdefense.org.

In short, since Nature hasn’t killed us already, we don’t have any hope of destroying the Earth in a physics lab.  On the other hand, terrible journalism and science teachers like Walter Wagner may some day be the end of us all.

-Dr. D

1 Comment

  1. MN Owatonna Lawyer
    5:08 pm, 01.29.11

    This is a interesting post. I think you make a good point. Thanks for raising attention to this. I have appreciated looking over your blog.

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