CERN LHC = danger?

Lien: http://www.slate.com/id/2199664/

This is a quote from an article published January 21 2010 at Slate.com:

'The world's largest scientific instrument, the Large Hadron Collider, was switched on in Switzerland on Wednesday. A few people worried that the LHC would cause the world to be swallowed up by a black hole, especially when it starts to operate at full force in the spring. What would happen if you fell into a black hole?

Your body would be shredded apart into the smallest possible pieces. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, who wrote the definitive account Death by Black Hole, imagined the experience as "the most spectacular way to die in space." '

Lien: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/11/physicists-back.html

This is a quote from ScienceInsider published November 20 2009:

'a group called conCERNed international announced today that it had filed a complaint with the United Nations in Geneva seeking to halt operation of the collider, which the group says may create mini-black holes that could destroy the world. “What we’re saying is that they should stop the machine until [physicists] do a better risk evaluation,” says James Blodgett, a conCERNed member from Albany, New York. Blodgett agrees that the risk appears low but says that the potential for triggering an apocalypse requires far greater margins of safety.'

Lien: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/science/space/04collide.html?ref=science

This is a quote from an article in the New York Times, published 3rd August 2009 by Dennis Overbye:
'The biggest, most expensive physics machine in the world is riddled with thousands of bad electrical connections. Many of the magnets meant to whiz high-energy subatomic particles around a 17-mile underground racetrack have mysteriously lost their ability to operate at high energies.'

And later:
'But some physicists admit to being impatient. “I’ve waited 15 years,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a leading particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. “I want it to get up running. We can’t tolerate another disaster. It has to run smoothly from now.”'

And:
'“We could be doing physics at the end of November,” he said in July, before new vacuum leaks pushed the schedule back a few additional weeks.

“It’s not the design energy of the machine, but it’s 4 times higher than the Tevatron,” he said.'

Read the full article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/science/space/04collide.html?ref=science

Link: http://www.thisissouthwales.co.uk/news/Science-fiction-turning-fact/article-563352-detail/article.html

This is a quote from south.wales.co.uk published December 22, 2008:
'News that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was out-of-action following a major malfunction had leaked out, and the world wanted to know what that meant for the atom-smashing machine — from the assembled throng of reporters to an excited crowd at Swansea University, where the 63-year-old would later give a talk about his work.

For hundreds of years, advances in science have resulted in a mix of wondrous amazement and fear-tinged disapproval — from the row over human dissection to using nuclear energy.

In September, the European research agency Cern was at the centre of a fresh debate over whether the multi-billion Euro LHC was a risk worth taking.'

Read the full article at:
http://www.thisissouthwales.co.uk/news/Science-fiction-turning-fact/article-563352-detail/article.html

Link: http://physicsworld.com/blog/2008/09/could_the_lhc_do_the_bose-nova.html

This is quote from an article from Psysicsworld.org posted September 25th 2008:
'Superfluid helium and magnetic fields are both in abundance in the Large Hadron Collider so it’s not surprising that some doomsayers have suggested that explosions called Bosenovae could occur in the accelerator’s cooling system.

Such explosions were first seen about ten years ago when an ultracold condensate of atoms was subjected to a carefully-selected magnetic field, which caused the normally-repulsive forces between atoms to become attractive.'

Read the full article on:
http://physicsworld.com/blog/2008/09/could_the_lhc_do_the_bose-nova.html