Collider sparking wonder — and fear

The world's most powerful particle collider is up and running, but the Large Hadron Collider will idle along at 1/14th of its peak, speed-of-light specs for the next several weeks.

In the meantime, a debate continues amping up. It's the buzz among skeptics in the blogosphere and has been the muse for at least one hip-hop poet. No matter whom you ask, the LHC is already a pretty inspiring piece of equipment.

Opponents have been moved to predictions of doomsday scenarios that regard it as a 17-mile-long catalyst to catastrophe. Being bunkered 300 feet below the border of France and Switzerland safely beyond the layman's view has only fueled the fears that it's a $10 billion money pit with enough power to literally create a black hole.

That's a sentiment that is not shared among physicists, including those in Utah, who regard the LHC as a doorway to a new era of basic science research they've been anticipating for more than 20 years.

Utah made a bid for the Superconducting Super-Collider in the mid-1980s but lost out to Texas, which also ultimately lost, too, when Congress pulled the plug due to a price tag that would rival expenditures for the NASA space program. The new accelerator/collider at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), was Europe's answer to the SSC.

Switching on the LHC is not a eureka moment for physicists, but having a machine capable of bringing the cosmos into the lab comes pretty close

What might be learned or how the future could be affected by what it reveals really isn't the point right now, and its potential danger is being overstated to say the least, said Utah State University physicist Stan Larson, noting that having the capacity to go the deepest humans have ever been able to probe into the nature and behavior of the basic matter of all life is a marvel in itself.

Many calculations have been done by hundreds of scientists around the world about the possible creation of black holes by the LHC, Larson said. "There have been no significant disagreements in the results of all those calculations — if a micro-black hole is created by the LHC, the expectation is it will escape from the gravitational field of the Earth and travel out into space, he added.

"Nature reaches the energies covered by the LHC every day, right here on Earth," he said. "The Earth is constantly being bombarded by cosmic rays — high energy particles from outer space that reach energies similar to and in excess of the energy of the LHC every second of every day. That being the case, if it is easy and plausible to make black holes, then Nature is already doing it every day right over our heads."