Monday, September 8, 2008

God created Dr. Lyn Evans in His image: should we be worried?

From Jonathan Petre with the Daily Mail...

The man behind the world’s biggest scientific experiment, which critics claim could cause the end of the world, is a Welsh miner’s son who has admitted blowing things up as a child.

Dr Lyn Evans, who has been dubbed Evans the Atom, will this week switch on a giant particle accelerator designed to unlock the secrets of the Big Bang....On Wednesday, Dr Evans will fire up the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile-long doughnut-shaped tunnel that will smash sub-atomic particles together at nearly the speed of light.

Built by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), the collider lies beneath the French-Swiss border, near the institution’s headquarters in Geneva, at depths ranging from 170ft to 600ft.

The aim of the £4.4billion experiment is to recreate the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang – the birth of the universe – and provide vital clues to the building blocks of life.

It will track the spray of particles thrown out by collisions in a search for the elusive Higgs Boson, a theoretical entity that supposedly lends weight, or mass, to the elementary particles. So important is this mysterious substance that it has been called the ‘God Particle’.

Scientists also hope to shed some light on the invisible material that exists between particles – dubbed ‘dark matter’ as no one knows what it really is – which makes up most of the universe.

But a handful of scientists believe that the experiment could create a shower of unstable black holes that could ‘eat’ the planet from within, and they are launching last-ditch efforts to halt it in the courts...

I hate when that happens! Hey, perhaps this is a good time to consider one's relationship with the One responsible for the first Big Bang. Have you accepted the grace of God?

One of them, Professor Otto Rossler, a retired German chemist, said he feared the experiment may create a devastating quasar – a mass of energy fuelled by black holes – inside the Earth.

‘Nothing will happen for at least four years,’ he said. ‘Then someone will spot a light ray coming out of the Indian Ocean during the night and no one will be able to explain it.

‘A few weeks later, we will see a similar beam of particles coming out of the soil on the other side of the planet. Then we will know there is a little quasar inside the planet.’

Prof Rossler said that as the spinning-top-like quasar devoured the world from within, the two jets emanating from it would grow and catastrophes such as earthquakes and tsunamis would occur at the points they emerged from the Earth.

‘The weather will change completely, wiping out life, and very soon the whole planet will be eaten in a magnificent scenario – if you could watch it from the moon. A Biblical Armageddon. Even cloud and fire will form, as it says in the Bible.’

Hmmm....If he had said it would take 3.5 or 7 years, it would have increased the probability. in my eyes, quite a bit.

1 Comments:

At September 9, 2008 at 4:37 PM , Blogger William Lang said...

I'm going to guess that the energy levels in the collider are not as large as those in astrophysical processes found in nature. And since the physicists are confident that the odds of these doomsday scenarios are extremely remote, I won't worry about the experiment, now or four years from now (not to mention 3.5 or 7 years).

It's curious that it's a chemist who is warning about the doomsday scenario. You have to watch out for those chemists. Pons and Fleischman, whose claims of cold fusion are now regarded as discredited, are chemists. And intelligent design proponent Michael Behe is a chemist.

But here's a doomsday scenario involving chemistry that could easily have already happened but for chance: Recall the global alarm over chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs); these were found to be damaging the ozone layer that protects us from ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. Of course, CFCs were banned, and (presumably) calamity was averted. But here's the really creepy part: What if chemists had used bromine instead of chlorine? The resulting chemicals (BFCs) would have served the same purpose as CFCs in applications such as refrigeration. But they would have been far more destructive to the ozone layer. The resulting catastrophe would have happened with no warning: the high UV levels would have destroyed ocean plankton, causing the collapse of oceanic ecosystems; there would have been a global epidemic of skin cancer and blindness (due to cataracts); and world agriculture would have been severely impacted. This would have happened before the cause was discovered (the discovery that CFCs damaged the ozone was somewhat serendipitous); if the chemists had used bromine, this would have happened about 30 years ago. The only reason chemists chose chlorine over bromine is that it is cheaper.

 

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