SansPretense

From the Fox News article (emphasis mine):

A British physicist has claimed he can explain the secrets of the Big Bang Theory, but his controversial experiment has scientists believing he could bring about the end of the world, the U.K.’s Daily Mail reported.

For centuries, scientists have sought unsuccessfully to unlock the secrets of the Big Bang Theory — a model explaining the birth of the universe. But 63-year-old Dr. Lyn Evans of Aberdare, England, popularly known as “Evans the Atom,” claims to know the answers, and will test his experiment on Wednesday by using a 17-mile-long doughnut-shaped tunnel that will smash sub-atomic particles together at the speed of light, the Mail reported.

Evans’ ambitions, however, have brought widespread concern among scientists who say the experiment could create a shower of unstable black holes inside the Earth, and subsequently bring destruction to the planet.
…

Really? Widespread concern? The experiment is controversial? What the hell is this nut case scientist doing that can destroy the world? Dammit, I don’t want to die on Wednesday. That’s Hump Day. At least wait until Monday morning of next week, right?

So I clicked over to the full article at the Daily Mail (this is the correct link from the broken Fox News link) since the Fox news article didn’t say much more than that. Guess what Dr. Crazy is going to do on Wednesday to destroy the world: he’s flipping a switch to turn on *da da dum* the Earth Destroyer 4000 Large Hadron Collider (LHC). I *knew* that they were referring to the LHC, but secretly, deep down, I was hoping for a lunatic scientist to destroy the world I did not want to believe that this was another perverted article about a very legitimate experiment supported by a lot of smart scientists who understand what the hell they’re doing. My beef here is with the Fox News article, as the Daily Mail article is actually a pretty good piece. Let’s start looking at the facts. (More below the fold.)

For those who didn’t catch it from the articles, Dr. Lyn Evans is the program director for the LHC. That means he’s an expert on particle physics and accelerator physics. He knows what he’s talking about. Let’s look at the critics mentioned in the Daily Mail piece, of which only the first one is mentioned in the Fox News article. This is from the Daily Mail piece, linked above, with emphasis mine:

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.

…

‘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.’

He said that attempts were still being made in the European Court of Human Rights to halt the experiment on the grounds that it violated the right to life. The court has, however, already rejected calls for a temporary delay in the project, and it is unlikely to come to a speedy decision about whether the CERN experiment should be halted for good.

Meanwhile Dr Walter Wagner, an American scientist who has been warning about the dangers of particle accelerators for 20 years, is awaiting a ruling on a lawsuit he filed a fortnight ago in his home state of Hawaii.

He fears the experiments might unwittingly create something he calls a ‘strangelet’ that could result in a fusion reaction that might ultimately turn the Earth into a supernova, or an exploding star.

But Dr Evans, the leader of the project, who has devoted 14 years of his life to building the vast particle accelerator, is dismissive of the doom-mongers.

…

He said that Prof Rossler was a ‘crazy’ retired professor who had invented his own theory of relativity.

‘We have shown him where his elementary errors are, but of course people like that just will not listen,’ said Dr Evans.

Meanwhile, Dr Wagner’s fears were ‘totally and completely’ unfounded. ‘There are thousands of scientists around the world who have been preparing this machine and they know what they are talking about, unlike these guys,’ he added.

Unlike those guys indeed. Rossler seems to be an accomplished professor according to Wikipedia, but he’s a biochemist. He is NOT an expert at particle physics. I can’t really call him a nut, but being an expert in chaos theory does NOT make him an expert on Relativity and particle physics.

“Dr” Walter Wagner, though, is a nut. Here’s his bio:

Walter Wagner graduated UC Berkeley with a Minor in Physics, and a Major in Biology. Later, he discovered a novel particle in a balloon-borne cosmic ray detector, initially identified as a magnetic monopole. Though its identity remains uncertain, it is definitely not within the standard repertoire of known particles. After a three-year break from science to attend law school, Dr. Wagner resumed work in Physics and Biology at the US Veterans Administration Medical Center in San Francisco, working in Nuclear Medicine and Health Physics. He then embarked on teaching Science and Mathematics, from grade school to college. Dr. Wagner developed a botanical garden in Hawaii, and continues involvement with several professional associations, including Health Physics Society and Society of Nuclear Medicine.

Where did he get his PhD from? It doesn’t even say that he has one, so I’ll assume that he doesn’t. Wagner was also behind previous lawsuits trying to get the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) shut down for similar doomsday fears. RHIC has been running for awhile, and we’re still here. Wagner, according to Discover magazine, (hat tip: Entropy Bound)is facing some criminal charges:

He may also be no stranger to lawsuits, The Register also noted, and is currently in a legal battle with the board of the World Botanical Gardens in Umauma, Hawaii, which he founded. “According to the Hawaii Tribune-Herald (free registration required), he and his wife were indicted last month by a grand jury on counts of identity theft and attempted theft relating to an alleged attempt to obtain $340,000 from the gardens company.”

He does claim to have participated in the discovery of a magnetic monopole back in 1976 (a google search revealed Wagner posted this reference to the discovery: “Evidence for Detection of a Moving Magnetic Monopole”, Price et al., Physical Review Letters, August 25, 1975, Volume 35, Number 8. Wagner’s name is not included in the author list, but I didn’t pull up the article to see if he’s mentioned in the acknowledgements.

Fox News did quite a distortion there when they painted the LHC as a doomsday experiment based on the claims of these two.

So let’s clear this up: the LHC will NOT destroy the Earth…regardless of what the seemingly more reliable Cracked.com had to say on the topic.