Thread: May 2008 (LHC) Particle Accelerator - Miracle or Catastrophe?

Originally Posted by SolSkye

I wasn't talking about you O, but the dood does make a point...

These are scientists who are dabbling with something that has the potential to destroy our whole world. Who gave them the moral authority to put that before 7 billion lives? It's nice that they don't believe anything bad will happen but what good will a sorry or "oops" do when we've all been crushed to death under an unimaginable amount of force?

How will a particle accelerator destroy the world? They may be accelerating a small stream of protons at high energies in order to collide, but the mass and density of particles are small enough in order to for it to create the necessary collisions for enough data to be collected, and not cause runaway explosions or whatever. If something went wrong, the beams would most likely simply burst out of the containment ring and burn through several metres of iron and concrete before the system is quickly shutdown (an incident once occurred in the FermiLabs exactly like this... a beam managed to break out and it burnt through 1 and a half metre of reinforced concrete in a matter of nanoseconds). Scientists do build in safety measures into these particle accelerators, and I just can't see how an explosion or 'catastrophe' can result from something like a particle accelerator.