LHC Sci-Fi And Critics Buried In The Blogosphere

The British ATLAS Team inspecting their Stargate Portal, the higher-dimensional ‘shipping container’ ready for activation, beating the American LOST Team by 2.2 years. The Russians were the first to crack the top secret potential of the LHC Time Machine, but forgot to commercialize it.

Now the American LOST Team has the Hollywood edge, with millions watching every week, and an Internet frenzy that eclipses anything on real science. Fifty million hits on one LOST fan site alone. The LHC Money Train smokes, while mighty NASA bites the Martian dust.

It gets goofier with the new Dan Brown movie, Angels and Demons, and Tom Hanks, scheduled for launch May 15, 2009. Stealing antimatter from CERN to make a bomb to blow up the Vatican. CERN did produce antiprotons with the old LEP and even a tiny bit of antihydrogen, enough to blow up a jumbo cup of movie popcorn, though they’re not planning to produce any with the LHC, unless by accident, in which case it might blow up and uh-oh fuse some helium.

So the interest in the LHC is big, sideways. Considering its real world unknown potential to blow itself up with a super bosenova, and maybe Geneva, or produce a runaway black hole that might devour the planet, or strangelets, or magnetic monopoles or wormholes, there’s, oddly, little enough real interest outside the physics community.

The problem is, that apart from a few critics with scientific credentials who have gone public, those with some international clout, either support the LHC, like Stephen Hawking, or are working directly or are collaborating with CERN, about 8,000 or half of all particle physicists. The others are teaching or working at other labs. Some have their doubts about the wisdom of going ahead with the LHC, but they’re either obliged to keep them private to protect their jobs and reputations, or they voice their concerns during coffee breaks at committee meetings. For those physicists outside the CERN loop, CERN invites them to contact Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN physicist and quantum spin doctor, who handles serious objections at the LHC. He must be good. Complaints go in and like in a black hole, they never come out again.

With the mainstream media unwilling to investigate possible dangers at the LHC, that leaves the field open for anonymous and amateur scientists to criticize the LHC, about a dozen major websites and blogs geared to monitor the LHC, and comments posted on hundreds of news sites that run articles on the LHC, even on social bookmarking sites and anonymous blogs and blogs within blogs. Comments run from the abysmally dumb, to panic-stricken, to rumor-mongering, to honest complaining or just having fun with doomsday, though there is some erudite analysis, tantalizing but not easily verifiable. Here are a few worth reading.

From Physicsworld: vbarashkov June 24, 2008 2:58 PM
I doubt that is how a black hole can be formed, considering that as we know so far it takes an entire star to form one. Not only that, but for a black hole to form exactly how much must the two atoms be compressed. Certainly a lot more than they can be in a head on collision even at near twice the speed of light. If I had 20 ton iron sphere, and I compressed it to fit on a tip of a needle, the only thing it would do is explode with enough energy to destroy the entire planet. . .

Anyone seen a black 20 ton iron sphere? It was here a second ago? Never mind, Val found the vodka.

From Geekology: VtFarmboy - February 12, 2008 11:22 AM
I think Mr. Scott needs to get back to the enterprise. He's needed the Klingons are attacking and the warp drive dilithum crystals are decaying.

And Spock. Is that new compression algorithm ready? We need to beam up the LHC before it blows up. Professor Rössler wants it on the Moon right now.

From The Great Beyond, BlogsNature: Walt 06-18-08 01:00 AM
. . .The CERN-LHC website Mainpage itself states quote: "There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions..." This stunning admission is because they truly don't know what's going to happen. They are experimenting with forces they don't understand to obtain results they can't comprehend. If you think like most people do that 'They must know what they're doing.' you could not be more wrong. The second part of the quote reads "...but what's for sure is that a brave new world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator..." A molecularly changed or Black Hole consumed Lifeless World? The end of the quote reads "as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of the Universe." These experiments to date have so far produced infinitely more questions than answers but there isn't a particle experimentalist physicist alive who wouldn't gladly trade his life to glimpse the "God particle", and sacrifice the rest of us with him. . .

Walt has it right. Here is the actual embarrassing CERN webpage, Our understanding of the Universe is about to change...

From NatureNews: David Wenbert 06 May 2008
. . . 4. Perhaps the unqualified legacy of monumental failure and waste exhibited by the high energy and plasma physics community is instructive here. After more than 50 years of building ever larger and more powerful colliders and plasma reactors, at a cost of untold Billions of dollars, NO useful scientific breakthroughs have ever been recorded from either such device, and both a Fundamental Understanding of Matter, and Controlled Fusion Energy remain totally elusive. The abject failure of particle physicists to have achieved their objectives (i.e. discovering the Higgs Boson) with prior collider experiments - although widely predicted to have done so - indicates the low reliability of their certainty in the outcome of these experiments. Consistently wrong, over decades, in their assertions that 'the last big machine' would illuminate the structure of matter - or ignite a controlled breakeven reaction, for that matter - leaves us with no alternative but to conclude that the same physicists may be no more accurate in predicting the behavior of 'the next big machine. The math doesnt fix this, since each such project had 'good math' to contend it would meet its scientific objectives, and yet, repeatedly, failure ensued. The rich, deep, and unbroken record of failure in these "Big Physics" projects is a Red Flag that the warnings from the fringe on potential distasters should be heeded. The physicists who propound the reliability of their assumptions have yet to be proven right once, whereas, the alarmists only need to be right 'once'. The Precautiionary Principle would seem wisely applied in these collider debates.

Read the thread and Wenbert’s full comment, in response to a previous comment by Richard Dawson who wrote to CERN and got some answers he quotes from the CERN letter.

One important point on micro black holes, received no comments, but is worth another look. The unnamed CERN source wrote, “But since, in case they (mBH) really exist, there will be millions produced, this means that indeed a few of them would be stopped within earth and start accretion. This however does not mean that they will crush the earth.” This is the point most commentators have been worried about. The odd thing is that at first CERN ignored the possibility of black hole formation, then embraced it publically as the LHC Black Hole Factory, while in their latest safety report, the LSAG is busy swatting mBH as though they were CERN’s famous TeV mosquitoes. That embarrassing Safety at the LHC webpage has been deleted, replaced with a summary of the new LSAG report where Einstein has been resurrected, and therefore “. . . it is impossible for microscopic black holes to be produced at the LHC.” Mosquitoes however, linger on Are LHC Collisions Safe?

The best analysis ever was made inadvertently, by The New York Times, when they called the LHC, The Large Hardon Collider, which fits in well with Big Bang Theory, on everybody’s mind since the hit TV show.

Seriously, there is one dissenting group of physicists at CERN, forced to do retro cabaret or else get lepton, none other than those sexy control room bottoms from the biggest collider ever, Les Horribles Cernettes.

Superfluids, BECs And Bosenovas: The Ultimate Experiment At The LHC

The first BEC, a rubidium-87, at 3 temperatures, 400nK, 200nK and 50nK, each pile of atoms 1 mm wide, activity greater nearer absolute zero, NIST 1995

In a familiar world of solids, liquids and gases, we find the fourth state of matter, the plasmas of lightning to the aurora borealis and fluorescent tubes at the office. Further out, minor phenomena becomes the big event in space, our shining stars are plasma being fused producing light. Not until 1924 was a fifth state of matter considered possible. Intrigued by quantum statistics, invented by the Bengali physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose from observations of light, Einstein applied Bose’s work to matter. The Bose-Einstein Condensate(BEC) was born. Was there any truth to the theory, Einstein himself wondered, that matter that could condense at ultracold temperatures into something new?

Einstein’s theory was left hanging, as a mathematical artifact, until 1938. Fritz London, a German theoretical chemist and physicist, working on helium at the same time as the Russian Pyotr Kapitsa who discovered its superfluid state at just under 2.2 K, found it behaved like Einstein’s theoretical BEC. Subsequent research confirmed London’s insight. Both stable isotopes, ordinary helium-4, and the rare helium-3 at much lower temperatures, are quantum superfluids, behaving like matter-waves or superatoms, undifferentiated matter with vastly different properties from their gas state or their ordinary bottled fluid state. Now scientists had a way of studying laboratory tabletop quantum physics. These, the only two superfluids known with zero viscosity, have sparked intense interest, helium-4 a bosonic superfluid and helium-3, a fermionic superfluid. Bosons are force carriers like photons of light and fermions are the matter we can touch. A gateway opened which eventually led to the laboratory production of other BECs when finally ultracold states could be induced, starting in 1995.

Viewing superfluid helium in action, demonstrates the baffling counter-intuitive nature of quantum fluids and other BECs. Some of the stunning properties of superfluid helium were observed if not understood back in 1908 when the Dutch physicist, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, cooled helium-4 to -269 Celsius. Not only was there no resistance to flow, the superfluid could climb the walls of the vessel, like a film, always 30 nanometers thick, defying gravity, or pour through the smallest hole or fissure, or leak through some apparently non-porous matter.

Further studies showed that this superfluid, now called Helium II, behaved as a two-fluid model, partly in a low energy ground state, and partly in an excited state. With a little added heat and manipulation of the superfluid, an interaction of the two states was enhanced, producing a fountain effect, as though 2 fluids existed.

In our own Sun and countless other stars, hydrogen fusion produces helium, the second most abundant element, and is in turn eventually fused by steps into carbon-12. On Earth there isn’t much, a trace atmospheric gas but found in quantity up to 7 percent in some natural gas. It’s produced by nuclear decay, as from radium and polonium, dangerous alpha radiation releasing, in fact bare nuclei of helium that eventually pick up electrons and form stable helium isotopes.

Given an electric charge, helium can fluoresce like neon. Even rarer molecules of helium-3 have been produced in helium-4 during ionization. Superfluid helium is also a superconductor, 30 times more efficient than copper as well as a thermal conductor 300 times that of copper. And both helium-3 and helium-4 have been cooled to near absolute zero, helium-4 retaining its superfluidity, helium-3 crystallizing, yet still capable of movement like other BECs. Adding enormous pressure of 25 atmospheres and more, forces even helium-4 to act like other BEC ‘solids’.

If superfluid helium can tell us a lot about other ultracold BECs now being studied and produced by over 200 research teams worldwide, then BECs that also appear to be superfluids and have two coexisting states like the two fluid state of superfluids, could show us how superfluids behave. It’s more than satisfying the curiosity of pure research. BECs have been turned into atom lasers and BECs have produced bosenovas, an inexplicable phenomenon where BECs explode, releasing more than the energy present in the system and where about half of the BEC sample literally vanishes without a trace. Fascinating and worrisome in any lab working with small amounts of BECs, but superfluid Helium II BEC is being used in great quantities as a coolant in certain nuclear reactors and particle accelerators.

The possibilities of a giant BEC bosenova produced in superfluid Helium II haven’t been investigated. The matter is urgent as 120 T of superfluid Helium II are being used at the Large Hadron Collider at Geneva, whose energies far surpass any other collider’s, not only beam energies, but RF applied, extreme Tesla Fields by superconducting magnets, and electrical energies equivalent to the consumption of Geneva, powering the 27 km ring system. Startup of the LHC at 5 TeV per proton beam has been delayed to this September but for other technical reasons.

The problem too, is that BECs are new and strange. It wasn’t until 1995 that an ultracold BEC was produced by new methods of supercooling, in this case applied to a gas of Rubidium-87 to bring it near absolute zero. For physics it was a sudden explosion in the quantum world. A new field of study, Condensed Matter Physics, a new state of matter positively confirmed, but far from understood. Matter acting as one giant atom with the properties of a superfluid. Shared Nobel Prizes awarded in 2001went to the team leaders at JILA, the joint NIST project with CU-Boulder, Carl E. Weiman and Eric A. Cornell. A third share in the Nobel for a sodium-25 BEC developed independently went to Wolfgang Ketterle now at MIT. Research at MIT is on a massive scale with several big BEC labs, working in part on BEC atom lasers. Don’t worry, Ketterle has said, atom lasers only work in a vacuum and would only travel a meter without one. Nevertheless matter-wave lasers are bound to be improved. There’s always military interest and funding.

A bosenova explosion of rubidium-85, from a new burstmovie by NIST, 2008

What astonished some physicists was another BEC event in 2001, well beyond anything anticipated. The BEC discovery team at JILA produced a new rubidium-85 BEC. While an electromagnetic field was applied to cause a stronger attraction among the BEC atoms, the BEC started to shrink and then exploded like a supernova. The result was a release of particles in various streams, leaving behind a much smaller BEC remnant. The thermal energy released was greater than the energy in the BEC and about half of all the thousands of atoms of the rubidium-85 disappeared. The effect was at first nicknamed the bosenova, and still a total puzzle to this day. After 7 years of study, the latest research on whatever goes on in a bosenova, now referred to as a BEC loss, needs a “new microscopic BEC physics” to explain it, says N.R. Claussen et al of a joint BEC team at the U of Colorado at Boulder, in a paper published in February this year. A second team at UC-Boulder led by Elizabeth A. Donley published the following month, also could not account for the bosenova phenomenon nor the apparent loss of atoms.

Though the bosenova effect is staggering in its repercussions for the Standard Model, none of the more than 200 teams experimenting with BECs appear interested. The only study groups working seriously on bosenovas are those at JILA. Other research teams are looking for new BECs and a few are looking for applications of BECs to create things like better atomic clocks, interferometers or even studying light by teasing BECs with lasers to slow light down or stop it! In the future, quantum computing might use BECs and lasers. BECs could be big business.

What happens next at the LHC will be the next big experiment in a superfluid Helium II BEC. It’s not part of the design parameters, as physicists assume that the helium will be stable based on its use in the much smaller, much less powerful, up to 250 GeV per beam, RHIC collider in Long Island, NY. CERN’s interests lie in producing the Higgs boson at the LHC, perhaps micro black holes and quark-gluon plasma. Even in the much awaited CERN safety study released last month, there’s absolutely nothing on a possible bosenova implosion/explosion. Of course to test the safety of the enormous LHC to handle foreseen and unforeseen events you’d need another disposable one. But at least it is possible to subject Helium II to some of these high energies and hadron beams as a test. Not at the low energies of the RHIC, but at Fermilab’s Tevatron, currently the most energetic collider with 0.9 TeV per beam, though still far short of the power of the monster LHC at ordinary operating conditions of 7 TeV and ultimately 1,150 TeV collisions of lead ions at nearly twice light speed. Helium II could simply be used as a target by Tevatron beams to see what would happen, besides being exposed to high and fluctuating Tesla fields, ionized by electrical currents, subjected to some of the extreme conditions anticipated at the LHC.

The LSAG safety review at CERN, even their new report, is still a 4/5 majority internal assessment, and with an independent SPC Report/review of that review that’s still a CERN committee of 5 physicists, though the mainstream media is content with the CERN press releases, ‘No Danger That The LHC Will Destroy The Earth’, about everywhere. Though now black holes are now unlikely, but previously predicted to occur rapidly by CERN in the ‘LHC black hole factory’, but initially ignored, until a physicist wrote about the possibility in a letter to Scientific American that sparked the initial 2003 CERN safety assessment. There’s hard science and there’s French farce. Which one are we getting? Pushing the LHC big button as a test is a risky way to go. CERN has always insisted that small amounts of hadrons can’t do very much, but there’s an enormous amount of energy in the LHC and 120 T of BEC superfluid. There’s still a suit in the Hawaii courts to delay LHC startup because of safety concerns like black hole and strangelet production. Lately and since I first considered the possible dangers of superfluid helium in my article of March 7, 2008, ‘The Almost Thermonuclear LHC’, the plaintiffs, Dr Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho have announced they will seek an addendum to their suit to include bosenova risks at the LHC.

Seven years after the rubidium-85 BEC produced the first bosenova, we still don’t know what happened to half of the Rubidium-85 atoms that disappeared.

(This article originally appeared in the Alan Gillis Column, Big Science Gambles, published in ScientificBlogging.)


Baum, Michael. From Supernova to Smoke Ring: Recent Experiments Underscore Weirdness of the Bose-Einstein Condensate, NIST 2001
Boyle, Alan. Doomsday Under Debate, Cosmic Log, MSNBC 2008
Braun-Munzinger, Peter, et al. SPC Report On LSAG Documents, CERN SPC 2008
Claussen, N.R. et al. Microscopic Dynamics in a Strongly Interacting Bose-Einstein Condensate, JILA 2008
Donley, Elizabeth A. et al. Dynamics of collapsing and exploding Bose-Einstein condensates, JILA 2008
Ellis, John, et al. Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions, CERN LSAG 2008
Gillis, Alan. The Almost Thermonuclear LHC, The Science of Conundrums, 2008
Ketterle, Wolfgang. Ch 9, Bose-Einstein Condensation: Identity Crisis for Indistinguishable Particles, in “Quantum Mechanics at the Crossroads”, Springer Berlin, 2006
Schewe, Phil et al. Supersolid, Quantum Crystal, A Bose-Einstein Condensate in Solid, Physics News Update, The AIP Bulletin of Physics News, 2004

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