While some people keep spending outrageous amounts of energy warning others about the End of the World in the form of euthanasia debates or through human and public health measures like the legalization of abortion, this 10th of September at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research located on the Franco-Swiss border, a group of enthusiastic nuclear physicists begun their experiments with the LHC, or Large Hadron[i] Collider, which highest potency (taking the form of beams of high-energy particles and their forced collisions) will only be reached on the 26^th of October 2008.

The LHC is a particle accelerator which has the shape of a circumference-tunnel with 27 kilometres of diameter, located 100 metres underground near the airport of Geneva. It will allow scientists to provoke proton collisions violent enough to cause the division of these elementary particles. The main official goals of the experiments in which the LHC will be protagonist? To replicate the events involved in the Big Bang at a different scale and help to explain the fundamental force which unites all the matter existing in the Universe – that is, to unveil the mystery of the structure of the matter, which Physics cannot explain yet. Also, quite prosaically, one or more small black holes (let’s say, the size of a needle hole, or a needle at most) will probably be created.

All these seem to be reasons for us to cheer one more significant scientific advance, even because CERN is, among other amazing discoveries, the original home of the World Wide Web and the responsible for the development of some important medical technologies. But let us look at this project more closely, or with a critical magnifying glass. After all, many of the CERN’s brilliant minds are busy with the LHC at this precise moment. It starts with a pair of denunciations made by two distinct groups of scientists who believe that there is a real risk involved in the experiments planned. One of these complaints was made directly to the European Court for the Human Rights, which verdict was simply that CERN’s scientists (and their sponsors, of course, including the European political institutions) could go ahead with the project.

It goes on with some facts: this particle accelerator is the most powerful in the world (although Americans have the Tevatron, plans to beat the LHC capacity already started across the Atlantic – it seems to be some kind of competition now). Particle acceleration structures involve amounts of energy incomparably higher than those associated with “common” nuclear plants, which means that the risks involved are literally hundreds of times higher. As mentioned, there is the Tevatron in Illinois, less powerful than the LHC (and if something would go wrong with Tevatron, for example, there would not be a single bacteria left alive in a region geographically equivalent to China).

No one has ever created the experimental conditions involved in the LHC project before, no one ever dealt with such high amounts of energy and no one created… black holes before. There seem to be some theoretical/practical clefts about black holes too: first of all, even if they are the size of a needle, they can grow. Second, scientists think that a certain type of radiation can evaporate them – but they are still not sure if such radiation exists. An analogy with cosmic rays is supposed to demonstrate the safety of the colliders – but that’s not sure either, and whether or not colliders can produce radiation is controversial. It is not sure how stable could the micro black holes produced be and, last but not least, the group of scientists who complained to the European Court for the Human Rights affirms that a black hole generated by the LHC is able to absorb the entire planet. Hummm… intriguing.

And it ends up with some interesting declarations. When asked about the practical applications of the LHC, Guido Tonelli, one of the physicists who are responsible for the project, answered: “Every time Physics discovers a new thing, our life gets better”. We could start arguing about this statement and the most obvious example comes to my mind in the form of a… mushroom. “Even considering that there could be mistakes, which is something not likely to happen with the best scientists in the world, we have to remind that there are more powerful explosions in the Universe and no catastrophe happens”, he adds. The complete interview is not very tranquilizing, and in the end one gets a strong feeling that Mr. Tonelli is trusting in his… luck just as others trust in God.

Meanwhile, the Italian writer Angelo Paratico, who’s releasing his “Black Hole” novel soon, about a test like the one CERN will be doing in a near future, refuses any parallelism between fiction and possible future sceneries involving the LHC, including any catastrophical outcomes: “The true problem is in the future, since [in America] they are already thinking about increasing the levels of energy involved (…) [What’s in question] are the limits and responsibilities of science. Nuclear physicists tend to be arrogant and they like to play almighty gods games. I think science should act with humbleness, accepting the limits imposed by the society”.