Black Holes at the LHC - The CERN Safety report
Earlier this year there has been a bit of confusion about potential dangers of switching on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. A lawsuit in Hawaii brought old fears back on the front pages of newspapers again, that the Earth may possibly be destroyed by strangelets, magnetic monopoles, instabilities of the vacuum, or black holes created in the high-energy proton-proton collisions planned at the LHC. We had discussed the actually non-existing danger posed by micro black holes in our posts Black Holes at the LHC - What can happen? and Black Holes at the LHC - again.
Yesterday, CERN has finally published the official report by the LHC Safety Assessment Group (LSAG). A CERN press release announces that the CERN Council looks forward to LHC start-up, and that the new report, updating a 2003 paper, incorporates recent experimental and observational data and confirms and strengthens the conclusion of the 2003 report that there is no cause for concern. Today’s New York Times quotes from the abstract of the technical paper by Michelangelo Mangano, CERN, and Steven B. Giddings, UCSB, which is one of the pillar of the LSAG report that [...] indeed, conservative arguments based on detailed calculations and the best-available scientific knowledge, including solid astronomical data, conclude, from multiple perspectives, that there is no risk of any significance whatsoever from such black holes.
Read more here.
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