The Almost Thermonuclear LHC

What could go wrong with 2 x 27 km of beam pipes? The engineering and theoretical worries have been addressed from many angles. CERN has constructed a remarkable machine with many key safety features built in. Speculations on what might happen when the LHC is switched on are all in the realms of theory and lessons learned and extrapolated from much less powerful colliders. No real guarantees on what to expect from a unique experiment. Beyond the public discussions, from my overview, there's one big thing that hasn't surfaced in seminars and published papers or the media.

At the LHC you've got all the ingredients for a two stage thermonuclear proton fusion and trigger for a helium fusion bomb. The protons are hydrogen stripped of electrons in the beam pipes and the helium is the coolant for all the superconducting magnets in the main ring and in the giant detectors like ATLAS.

The helium is an enormous amount of gas chilled and compressed down to 60 metric tonnes of superfluid helium. Protons are in abundant supply, circulating in the ring at 99.99% of light speed in opposite directions, in nearly 3,000 bunches of about a 100 billion per bunch per beam line or 6,000 x 100,000,000,000 or 600 trillion protons in the system.

These aren't ordinary protons. Because they've been accelerated to near light speed, each proton has 7 TeV of energy, or 7,000 times more energy than a proton at rest. Recall what Einstein said about bodies accelerated to speeds approaching light. They gain mass! And recall the Lorentz contraction. At these phenomenal speeds, bodies are foreshortened, appearing smaller than when at rest.

Has something so basic in physics been overlooked? A great number of very heavy protons, enormously compressed, at least 1200 million colliding every 25 nanoseconds, travelling at 11,245 laps around the ring in one second, so all 600 trillion would mingle within say ATLAS in less than a second. Of course not, but then what if there were more collisions and pileups, so that
the anticipated small fireball burned all the protons, expanding and overwhelming the detector, rupturing a helium line? At expected temperatures of the proton fireball, more than 100,000 times the core temperature of the sun, wouldn't that be enough to fuse the captured helium present?

Rather an unfortunate choice to use fusible helium as the coolant, like the location of the LHC near a big city, Geneva and much of the UN apparatus there.

Even if CERN did achieve a small fireball, a small helium leak would fuel the fusion reaction and you would have, not an LHC, but a nuclear fusion reactor. The enormous magnetic fields might contain the plasma for a while, but with the detectors not designed to be reactors and many combustibles present in the calorimeters, like silicon chips and fiber optics, any detector could burn from the inside out. To shut off the supply of helium would be difficult, depending where the valves are. It would be a runaway situation with helium flooding the test cavern in short order. Working at the world's largest cryogenic LNG plant in the 1980's, I have first hand experience of what can go wrong even when you have the best engineering and operations people. Since the plant was on a stretch of sandy beach, if something big went wrong, then we would have only blown up about $2 billion dollars and a beautiful high tech machine. Not Geneva or the UN or a lot of fine Swiss watches and a major banking center and who knows how many people.

This type of proton-helium nuclear explosion is certainly possible. Hydrogen bombs work in a similar way. An initial small nuclear explosion fusing a supply of low molecular weight gas. Thermonuclear bombs are currently the most powerful by far.

In order for the LHC to blow up, the question is whether or not there is enough proton mass present to produce a big enough fireball to rupture these tiny refrigerator freezer type channels in the detectors containing helium. In a worst case scenario would we have an explosion, a fireball, a nuclear explosion or plasma erupting? How would a helium fusion bomb compare with a hydrogen bomb? Just how massive could it be given a 60 tonne contained supply of helium. Could it all fuse and be far more catastrophic?

These are serious and important questions, not posed by the media or CERN, at least not publicly. We need an answer soon before the LHC starts up this summer. A lot of people's lives could be at risk. If there is or isn't a danger, we should have the facts and the math from CERN. Any physicists care to comment?

Science In A Conundrum

Everybody seems to think Science is a good thing and here to stay. It's right up there with the age old forces that drive the world into the future. Politics, Business, Culture and Religion, except that it is, if not a new idea, a recent application of it to everything. A new philosophy and method of dealing with the planet and our existence. It's a good candidate as the rival to all religions. It has all the trappings of one. Imagine 2,000 PhDs in one place like CERN, the veritable Vatican of Particle Physics.

Reminds me of a Chevy Chase movie, Fletch. Chevy on the lam, hiding out in a hospital, nervously putting on a lab coat and suddenly surprised by guys in lab coats, wondering how to act like a doctor, nodding Doctor, shaking the hand of, Doctor, How are you, Doctor, an exercise in Doctor flattery, desperate to fool them and join the club. Might have done the same skit in Oxford, where conundrum was coined, among the medieval Doctors of Theology, wearing one of their gowns. These Doctors of Theology then and the Doctors of Science have much the same allure. The jargon they share, a sanctimonious air a trifle condescending, and no appetite for criticism. Disagreeing with the other doctors could have got you burned at the stake. Especially if you were a layman with no grasp of their Central Dogma. Even Biologists today have a Central Dogma, as it is actually called: Life comes from life, though they must be arguing about it now.

There's the Standard Model for Particle Physics, extremely complex, much admired, though with a number of big holes that need patching with more theories. Quantum Mechanics, another backbone of Particle Physics that looks sound from every angle and even works, is a jungle of probabilities that a statistician might have dreamed up. Einstein had an early hand in it, but the more he worked on it, the less he liked it, calling it spooky. Its randomness after his theory of General Relativity just didn't make enough sense. No one since has been able to make these theories agree, not even Stephen Hawking. Perhaps Einstein is still right. He hasn't been proved wrong about anything. Quantum Mechanics, as he said, would be acceptable if it were completed by hidden variables. Interesting too that Einstein didn't pursue experiments to validate his theories, but many physicists have since. Certainly his stature was one of a prophet. But mere scientists aren't content with fireside theories scribbled on the back of an envelope.

Scientists want action today, like the Large Hadron Collider, $8.7 to about $10 billion worth, depending what formula you use. A quantum gamble by over 2,000 physicists at CERN essentially to prove or disprove a theory that is vital to another theory, the Electroweak theory, part of the Standard Model. They're looking for the theoretical Higg's boson, perhaps a big particle or a small particle, that confers mass on other particles. If they don't find it they might have to throw out the Electroweak theory and try something else. It might even mean going back to the chalk board like Einstein and start from a general theory to unify all four major forces, instead of 2 with the Electroweak. In the wings too, are String Theory and Supersymmetry, dying from lack of experimental funding. Incidentally, CERN will be looking for any sign of life in them, at the LHC.

This is big stuff, the Science we see and the Science we don't see much of. Today's Science rivals the power of the Church in its heyday that called for a Crusade to the Holy Land. Here a small army of physicists have called for a crusade of their own to find the Higgs, dubbed the God Particle, and capture it for a split second at least, even if it means possibly annihilating, not Jerusalem, but in this case Geneva, sitting beside the ATLAS experiment, the biggest one of all 4 big ones, just outside the 27 km Large Hadron Collider.

The Conundrum then is, do we trust an upstart Science, to steer us into the future? With Science itself battling conundrums, with no clear idea where it's headed, except towards some sort of progress, a promised land? For every step forward for Science, there are two steps back for it and us, usually costly and dismissed in a face saving way as a larger problem you wouldn't understand, requiring more study and funding. Cancer is now many cancers, a staggering discovery, billions of dollars later while cancer mortality overall hasn't changed statistically. Indeed overall numbers of cases have gone up due to modern scientific progress in things like day-to-day drugstore and hardware store chemistry and nuclear power plants. And what about antibiotics that turned scientists into demigods until drug-resistant and tougher pathogens surfaced and tarnished their infallibility. AIDS the new demon still isn't pacified 40 billion dollars later. Sounds like we finally have to buy Science and all the scientific dogmas and promises on Faith alone, like the Church.