Corridors are deserted. Office doors are locked. Laboratories are quieter than usual. It can mean only one thing: Conference season is upon us and it’s time for scientists to shut up shop and take to the road, if only for a few days.
For more than a thousand physicists, the destination last week was the Palais de Congres in Paris, an enormous 1970s construction of jutting concrete and angled glass. Until Wednesday, the center will host one of the most eagerly awaited meetings on the scientific calendar. The International Conference on High Energy Physics has an impressive track record as the place where new discoveries are announced, but this time around there is an extra buzz in the air.
This is the first year that physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European particle physics lab near Geneva, will join researchers from other laboratories in unveiling their latest results. Talks at the meeting will cover a vast range of topics, from the performance of the LHC and other accelerators to quirks of the laws of nature and the hunt for the Higgs boson, the elusive particle said to give mass to the building blocks of nature.
One topic that will definitely not be discussed, at least not seriously, is whether the LHC might just destroy the planet. Thanks to a few vocal doomsayers and a run of unsuccessful legal cases, the exotic idea has become lodged in the public consciousness. It has probably done more to raise CERN’s profile than anything in the laboratory’s recent history.
Wild claims about the risks of the LHC received blanket coverage from the world’s media in the run-up to the machine being switched on last year. The nature of the catastrophe took on several guises. We heard that a black hole might appear beneath the Swiss countryside and steadily devour the Earth. Maybe planet-crunching entities called “strangelets” could pop into existence and reduce our hospitable rock to a sizzling ball no wider than Lord’s cricket ground. Or the universe might “collapse” into a more stable state, wiping out life here and anywhere else it might lurk in the process. Each of these scenarios, and more besides, were argued by a small number of conCERNed individuals to be clear and present dangers to humanity.
It has been called “the ultimate ecological catastrophe,” but even these strong words fail to convey the true horror and finality of a grim kind of natural disaster known to physicists as “vacuum decay.”
Forget pandemic viruses that wipe out humanity, asteroid strikes that devastate life on Earth and even black holes that devour the planet. Vacuum decay leaves the entire universe not only lifeless, but without any hope of life forever more.
Vacuum decay, which is happily only a theoretical prospect, occurs when part of the universe is knocked into a more stable state than it exists in today. This creates a bubble of “true vacuum” that expands at the speed of light. As the bubble grows, it reduces the energy locked up in the vacuum of space and rewrites the laws of nature.
In 1980, the late Harvard physicist Sidney Coleman published calculations that showed for the first time that vacuum decay was eternally terminal.
He wrote: “One could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated.”
The Large Hadron Collider is not the first particle accelerator to be framed as a doomsday machine. Particle physicists have been accused of gambling with the future of humanity since at least the 1950s, when forerunners of the LHC were being built. Mention world-ending scenarios to staff on the LHC, or its main competitor, the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago, and you can expect a roll of the eyes at best. Physicists have gone to great pains to explain why such fears are unfounded. The time could have been better spent by getting on with research.
Scientists have good reason to be weary of fanciful speculation over the safety of their experiments, but some academics claim there are valuable lessons to be learned from the LHC experience, ones that could save us from more realistic catastrophes before the century is out. Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, says that advances in fields such as weapons technology, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology (which has already given researchers the tools to create viruses from scratch) could lead to what he calls “existential threats.” These are catastrophes that play out on an unprecedented scale, ones that have the potential to bring an end to the human story, either by wiping us out completely, or by “permanently and drastically destroying our future potential.”
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