So it’s come to this: Death threats against physicists. About what? The earth-destroying Large Hadron Collider, of course.
Such is the angst that the American Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has even had death threats, said Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University, adding: “Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t—.” (BBC)
My sentiments exactly.
People are calling everyday, pleading with the LHC folks to stop plans to flip the switch next week, reports PR head James Gillies.
“They phone me and say: “I am seriously worried. Please tell me that my children are safe,” said Gillies. Emails also arrive every day that beg for reassurance that the world will not end, he explained.
“There are a number who say: “You are evil and dangerous and you are going to destroy the world.”
“I find myself getting slightly angry, not because people are getting in touch but the fact they have been driven to do that by what is nonsense. What we are doing is enriching humanity, not putting it at risk.”
A new report published today once again assesses the risk and conclude:
Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth - and the planet still exists.
Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes, so any black hole produced would be much smaller than those known to astrophysicists.” They also say that such microscopic black holes could not grow dangerously.
Not that I expect such research to quell the din of hysteria. As I posted in a comment, we now have such a gulf between what scientists understand and what average people believe – due in no small part to movies and religion – that people are more likely to believe doomsday scenarios than scientific research.