The 2008 LSAG Safety Report
The 2008 LHC Safety Report from CERN’s LHC Safety Assessment Group is out.[1][2]
The CERN Scientific Policy Committee (SPC) was asked by the President of the CERN Council to examine the documents produced by the LHC Safety Assessment Group (LSAG) and to provide Council with an independent opinion on the conclusions stated in those documents. Their stamp of approval is contained in the document SPC REPORT ON LSAG DOCUMENTS. The report has not been externally validated, but the report has been released so that the world’s scientists are now able to critically review and validate this report.
Quote from the SPC committee: “A powerful argument applicable also to higher energies is formulated making reference to observed neutron stars, but this argument relies on properties of cosmic rays and neutrinos that, while highly plausible, do require confirmation, as can be expected in the coming years.”
The SPC committee does not appear to recommend delaying high energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider until after these safety theories can be confirmed.
The new report argues that when a stray cosmic ray matter particle collides with Earth or a Neutron star, dangerous black holes are not produced.
The report confirms that neutral micro black holes that might be created from cosmic ray impacts with Earth would exit Earth at near the speed of light. And Dr. Otto Rossler appears to argue that a micro black hole should be neutral unless it captures a charged particle such as an electron in orbit around the micro black hole. Capturing a charged particle in orbit around the black hole appears unlikely to be possible while traveling through Earth at relativistic speeds, and might not be possible in a Neutron star.
The Safety Report appears to argue that a micro black hole could become charged by consuming charged quarks, but that might be a controversial assertion, since once matter passes the event horizon of a black hole, it should no longer have effects outside of the event horizon, so the black hole should remain neutral.
The safety report also asks us to accept what appears to me to be a questionable assumption, that a cosmic ray particle collision with Earth must produce a micro black hole if any possible collider collisions might produce one.
“cosmic rays do not produce such [dangerous] black holes, and hence neither will the LHC“.
The report appears to require that a single cosmic ray particle impact with Earth or a Neutron star must produce the same results as any possible collider conditions, including colliding thousands of tightly packed protons and Lead to Lead nuclei head on at 99.9999991% of the speed of light with powerful magnets to focus the energy and exactly opposing momentums that might create dangerous black holes at rest with respect to Earth.
The LHC may create for the first time on Earth, slow moving micro black holes that might be captured by Earth’s gravity, and since evaporation (Hawking Radiation) is disputed, and fast growth of charged micro black holes is predicted, I am still concerned, and very interested in what the world’s scientists will conclude after studying this report in detail.
JTankers,
Co-Admin,
LHCFacts.org
(See comments below for re-posted comments from Enrique Fernandez, chair of the CERN Scientific Policy Committee and Fabio Zwirner, member of the CERN Scientific Policy Committee and coordinator of the SPC review panel)
Tags: Large Hadron Collider, LHC, LSAG, Safety Report
June 27th, 2008 at 3:32 am
Reposted from: Safe from black holes
The comment by James Tankersley contains false and misleading statements on the SPC report. The selected quote refers to the possibility of extending the complete safety proof, that has been provided for the LHC, to colliders of much higher energies that could be conceived for the distant future.
The conclusions of the SPC report on the LHC are quite clear: “To summarize, we fully endorse the conclusions of the LSAG report: there is no basis for any concerns about the consequences of new particles or forms of matter that could possibly be produced at the LHC.”
Enrique Fernandez
chair of the CERN Scientific Policy Committee
Fabio Zwirner
member of the CERN Scientific Policy Committee
and coordinator of the SPC review panel
June 27th, 2008 at 3:44 am
I am not sure what SPC Committee chair Enrique Fernandez and coordinator Fabio Zwirner are arguing at sciencenews.org - Safe from Black Holes.
The 2008 LSAG Safety Report argues that the planet will not be destroyed by micro black holes based on empirical evidence from neutron stars that relies on properties of cosmic rays and neutrinos, that the SPC Committee validates as highly probable but requires confirmation.
Are Enrique Fernandez and Fabio Zwirner arguing that the properties of cosmic rays and neutrinos prove safety from micro black holes created by the Large Hadron Collider, but are only highly probable and require confirmation with respect to micro black holes created from higher energy colliders?
Is the argument that the Large Hadron Collider will prove safety from micro black holes when it begins operations and nothing bad happens, but that future higher energy colliders will not have empirically proven safety yet?
I would prefer that confirmation of safety happen prior to operation of the Large Hadron Collider.
Thank you,
James Tankersley Jr
Co-Admin, LHCFacts.org
July 4th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
The thing is being created to learn what they don’t know. How can they guarantee something bad won’t happen while stating that THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN beforehand? These mysteries are a tool of the devil to tempt us into bringing about the destruction of our eternal souls. Satan laughs as godless men of “science” take us into this evil trap. Survival tip for the underworld: Six-horned minotaurs of death do not want to be your friend.
July 29th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Here is the full paragraph:
“In particular, at the LHC energy, any danger for the Earth on time scales lower than or
comparable to the natural lifetime of the solar system can be ruled out on the basis of its
contradiction with the observation of white dwarf stars of known mass, age and other
properties. This conclusion, while entirely valid for the LHC, would need further work to
be extended to conceivable future colliders of much higher energies.
A powerful argument applicable also to higher energies is formulated making reference to observed neutron stars, but this argument relies on properties of cosmic rays and neutrinos that, while highly plausible, do require confirmation, as can be expected in the coming years.”
Selective quotation can get you anywhere.
What is your reference for the novel and bizarre idea that black holes violate conservation of charge? So far as I know all people who work on BH acknowledge the idea that they can be charged, and that if they form out of charged matter they keep the same charge as the matter they were made out of - like quarks or protons. (You are welcome to try and find anyone who disagrees, but I don’t think you will be able to.)
You should know the often made statement: ‘Black holes have no hair’. To be more precise, the only three pieces of information that remain as potentially extractable from a classical black hole are its mass-energy, angular momentum (spin) and charge. These are also conserved quantities in physics. If you are willing to consider violation of energy, momentum and charge conservation then you might also try and construct some novel disaster scenarios. However, you should also check whether this scenario would destroy neutron stars or white dwarves.
But basically the calculation has already been done in arXiv:0807.3349 (page 7). Since white dwarves exist, the fraction of a nucleon which is accreted by any hypothetical mini BH passing through (on average) must be less than 4×10^-5. Otherwise BH would be stopped inside white dwarves. But if the fraction is so small, it would take 10^19 years for the BH even to grow to the size of a proton.
PS the protons are not ‘tightly packed’. It is impossible to ‘tightly pack’ protons by magnetic focusing, since they repel each other.
August 18th, 2008 at 9:52 am
Just read another story on http://www.dailygalaxy.com
“But the only data CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has produced thus far is a thoroughly debunked urban myth—that the particle accelerator buried under the Swiss-French border will create an apocalyptic black hole.”
very concerned.