I was excited last year as September approached and operation loomed and was very disappointed when the failure occurred.

Now I'm once again excited about what they might find. I'm guessing it will be different than anyone is predicting. Such is the nature of the physical world--especially the subatomic world.

Funny how we tend to make jokes about black holes and the earth being destroyed when we want to appear intelligent against the supposed idiots who are so dumb to think something bad could happen. Or maybe it just makes us feel better. It's easy to make fun of someone for being an "idiot" when the concept bothers them. It's also the only choice since odds are that absolutely nothing bad will ever happen any way. But the fact is, no one, not bloggers, nor scientists could know what could happen however unlikely. Even CERN experts have admitted it's a possibility however small. If you believe they know for 100% for sure, you are kidding yourselves. Of course only if nothing bad happens we'll all laugh at it later. Anyway, I'm interested to see what they find with it, assuming all goes well.

Apparently the sun creates similar experiments, but up to thousands of times more powerful every second. Similar questions were raised when the RHIC was introduced. I am not too worried :)

An experiment in haifa with a dumb hole - the analogous of a black hole, which has a supersonic fluid inner region that emits virtual phonons - have shown that phonons don't appear outside the event horizon and they in any case don't evaporate. It showed also that the black hole was formed by compressing in a boson state atoms. Thus, a boson state of quarks will create a pulsar, quark star or black hole at CERN, and the virtual photons won't evaporate the 'strange star' or 'top star' formed. Theoretical and experimental evidence is overwhelming but CERN, after all a Nuclear Industry company denies all evidence, affirms its quark cannon will collide 'cosmic rays' (false, we never saw a quark in cosmic rays) and the naive press of 'believers' in science believe all this without research... Good luck to all of you.

Paul Mann,
Would you please elaborate about your concerns? This is the first I read about a dumb hole being formed.

earth is not the sun

Yes R, here is a bit more on that:
The experiment was designed to quench all fears, to show that the ingenuity of man has no limits. It was an experiment that would recreate an inoffensive black hole of sound called a dumb hole. Once it was created it would be used to prove that the 2 smaller types of black holes known till date, (sound holes and primordial light holes), do evaporate by emitting energy particles, called 'phonons' in the case of sound holes and 'photons' in light holes. And so neither of them, in case they were manufactured here on Earth, would pose any risk to our lives.
A year ago alarms have sounded around the world because a similar experiment could recreate a black hole of light, the much more powerful version that feeds on stars and galaxies around the Universe. Critics said that if black holes were created and obeyed Mr. Einstein’s Laws, instead of those of Mr. Hawking, they could feed on Earth, causing a Nova explosion that would destroy the world, leaving behind only an ultra-dense rock of dark matter. They sued the Nuclear Company of Europe that was carrying about the experiment (called CERN) and got enough attention from the press as to cause a global alarm and visions of 'mad scientists' running amok in their secluded labs, as those the Nuclear Industry hadn't suffered since the cold war era. Finally, the experiment did not happen because the machine broke before making any black hole. And so the so-called 'black hole factory' is now scheduled to open this Fall, after a long year of repairs ... Enough time for Mr. Stenhauer to make his dumb hole at the Institute of Technology at Israel - an easier, weaker substitute, which could allow mankind to observe how black holes form in first place and then how they evaporate harmlessly. It would also dismiss the fears of critics, as the product of an excessive imagination at best, or a crackpot stunt made in search of celebrity at worst – which was the 'ad hominem' argument used by CERN and all kind of 'spontaneous bloggers' to dismiss them.
Since the Hawking radiation that evaporates black holes did not have any prove, after so much fuss, to quench all fears, physicists have carried out in the past year 2 new experiments, each of which was supposed to end all controversy. One was carried out by the Fermi satellite, a gamma-ray telescope launched last spring by NASA, with the most sophisticated burst detection equipment ever devised, able to observe black hole evaporation in the cosmos. The idea was simple. When black holes evaporate, they do it so fast as when they accrete a planet or star, provoking a sudden burst of light (the Hawking radiation in which its mass is supposed to convert). Because all mass becomes energy (E=Mc2), the result is a sudden, minuscule 'Nova' Explosion, even if the black hole is a small one. So the Fermi should easily detect their 'flares' in the Halo of the galaxy, where those black holes are supposed to form a dense cover of dark matter. 'Houston we have a problem' is reported to have said Mr. Tom Hanks, when asked during the shooting of 'Angels and Demons' to come back at CERN to switch on the machine. And indeed, Houston had an unexpected problem when Fermi returned all kind of images of gamma-ray bursts, but none had the signature of a black hole evaporating, backing the opinion of critics that consider Mr. Hawking’s ideas about black holes outlandish and in open contradiction with Einstein’s well tested work.
Those critics had asked in their suit a TRO (Temporary Restriction Order) on the machine, till the results of Fermi came back to Earth; but by the time those results had poured in, the suit had been dismissed by lack of jurisdiction over CERN. Still critics affirm Fermi is a clear prove that black holes don't evaporate. Physicists at CERN disagreed - perhaps the Fermi was not accurate enough or maybe it had not enough resolution or it was looking in the wrong places – they retorted. Critics said it had enough resolution, claimed a moral victory and appealed to a Federal Court at San Francisco, which is still arguing the case. But by the time this occurred the world was immerse in an economical crisis, which made the issue of our possible extinction as a species by a rogue black hole, quite irrelevant, compared to the daily fight for survival among foreclosures, loss of jobs and billion of $ in losses perpetrated by 'expert' rogue bankers. Only Mr. Buchanan in the New Scientist had the courage to compare both crises, insinuating that 'experts' have a clear record of errors they never recognize. Or as the Russian physicist Lev Landau put it, ''Cosmologists are often wrong, but never in doubt.''
For all those reasons, even if the news have somehow disappeared from the press, the experiment at Haifa was eagerly awaited by both, supporters and critics, as it was supposed to end the argument on CERN's safety once and for all.
How Scientists at Haifa achieved that feat? They basically followed Einstein's theory that black holes are 'frozen stars', which should have an ultra-dense substance that causes their attractive power.
So Haifa scientists used the laws of 'Bose-Einstein’ to pack densely a tiny group of atoms into a 'boson condensate'. And they succeeded, creating a supersonic hole, whose attractive power was so great that it absorbed all sound waves that surround it. Then they waited to see the Hawking radiation, expecting that the black hole would emit phonons back to the Universe in a burst of sound that a good mike could easily pick up. In the process the tiny black hole would evaporate and so CERN would be declared safe and get its funding going for decades to come.
And so a 'dumb' hole was created at Haifa and a mike put to it, this time to detect not a glare of light as the Fermi was supposed to observe in the cosmos, but a symphony of sounds.
Problem is the dumb hole has not produced any sound at all, any Hawking radiation, neither it has evaporated, giving for the second time in a few months experimental support to those critics, who argue CERN is acting as any 'Rogue Company' would act to hide an environmental crime – denying evidence of any danger, ignoring critics and courts and going ahead with 'business as usual'. Thus, critics affirm this is no longer a 'theoretical argument', which has been closed by those 2 experiments, but a complex case of industrial corruption; and a potential environmental catastrophe that dwarfs the problems of global warming and ‘should be addressed by politicians, not left alone to physicists’ working in the Nuclear Industry, as Miss Gillmore stated in her judgment of the case.

But even if critics have a point to make, as CERN's Chief Officer, Mr. Engelens, has indeed confessed to the New Yorker magazine the existence of a zero risk confidentiality statement, signed by CERN's employees1, it would be unfair to ignore that the evaporation of black holes is indeed a theoretical argument. And one of enormous importance for our understanding of the Universe that dates back to the times of Einstein and Bohr, when the first affirmed that the Universe was real, made of deterministic substances, because God didn't play dice, and the second retorted the Universe was Pythagorean, made of mathematical probabilities and Einstein had no right to say how God played it. In this argument, is where Mr. Hawking enters with his landmark article, 'The Quantum Laws of black holes'2 siding with Mr. Bohr. He affirmed then that Einstein ‘was double wrong’, as God plays dice twice, first creating mathematical black holes without substance and then evaporating them... Because particle physicists are quantum physicists, not relativistic cosmologists, it is probably truth that CERN's physicists do not want or expect any risk coming out of his black holes. They believe in Bohr and 'the quantum laws of black holes' of Mr. Hawking. But it is also truth that black holes are cosmological objects, not particles, ruled by Einstein's well proved Relativity laws that state expressly the 'relativity of all sizes'. So size does not affect in Einstein’s work the laws of black holes. So if Einstein is right, black holes will evaporate the Earth. And it is also truth that Haifa's experiments seems to show Mr. Einstein was right twice, because black holes were made of a substance, defined by Mr. Einstein – boson condensates - and they did not evaporate. Thus they followed the laws of Relativity not the laws of Quantum Entropy.
In this, Haifa's approach differed from CERN's quantum entropy theorists, as it followed Einstein's theories, perhaps because after all Einstein was also a Jewish scientist, and one assumes it must command more respect in Israel than at CERN - a company whose CEO is German and so it is its main stock-holder (the German Government, whose main institute of scientific research is called the Max Planck Institute, honoring the discoverer of quantum theory). The difference is important because if black holes are frozen stars made of an ultra dense substance, as Einstein claimed, they or similar particles could be easily made at CERN, which has built a quark cannon that will lump quarks, the densest matter of the Universe, into Bose condensates, one of which could become a black hole, strangelet, pulsar or quark star, able to accrete the Earth. On the other hand, if black holes are objects without substance, made of pure gravitational energy, as quantum physicists at CERN claim, they would be more difficult to make and easier to evaporate back into pure energy (Hawking's radiation). So they probably won't pose a big danger to the Earth.
Unfortunately at the time of Einstein's death, because we still didn't know about the existence of quarks, the idea that black holes didn't have substance became the dogma of quantum physicists, which had been arguing with Einstein about the 'mathematical nature of reality' and found in those mathematical black holes the ultimate prove that the Universe was 'probabilistic', 'mathematical'. Einstein denied this, as he believed in the fundamental principle of the experimental method called 'hylomorphism', according to which all 'information', including mathematical equations, must refer to a substance, in order to be real. After all, his friend Gödel had proved that mathematics were not real per se, but as all languages could create fictions. And so Einstein told quantum physicists that 'while I know when mathematics is truth I cannot know when they are real'. Frozen stars were in Einstein's thought those real black holes. If so, they will be made of quark condensates, and they won't evaporate as the ones at Haifa didn't evaporate; because quarks and atoms are dense forms of matter that cannot be easily made into photons or phonons.
Indeed, the experiment at CERN is one that carries a very deep argument about the nature of the Universe and, given the results observed by Fermi and Haifa, do represent a risk for mankind; since if Dr. Einstein is right again, we will very likely die. So it seems truly ‘dumb’ to take that risk.
And yet this time around the press, politicians and the public at large, has ignored the issue – only an article appeared in the Economist among the newspapers that create opinion - perhaps because the nightmare situation of a black hole showing up at Geneva and digesting this planet and all its inhabitants is so terrifying that nobody wants to consider such possibility or talk about it anymore. It is easier to think the matter is resolved. But it is not. Nor we can claim that the Nuclear Industry is so 'safe' that no risk is possible - we all know that the Nuclear Industry was responsible for decades of terror during the cold war. Critics in fact have retorted, claiming 'ad corpore' disqualifications towards the Nuclear Industry, citing the Chernobyl's catastrophe, which the Byelorussian government claims to have caused over 200.000 deaths of cancer, and the International Agency for Nuclear Energy considers to be nearly harmless with only 56 victims...
This, largely resolved dispute in favor of the Byelorussian government, yet considered also solved by the Nuclear Agency, shows how difficult is to differentiate truth from falsity in themes that are poisoned by large industrial interests, enormous sums of money and thousands of jobs at stake. CERN's machine is the most expensive mechanism ever made and it employs directly 8 thousand people and indirectly 66 thousand physicists around the world that expect to study its results. But again, while most physicists side with Hawking and very few side with Einstein, neither 'ad hominem' disqualifications nor matters of quantity are relevant to determine the truth in science. When Mr. Einstein received from a friend in Germany a book called '300 physicists against Einstein' he responded, 'if they were right, a single one with reason would be enough'. Einstein had already been cast aside by the German Physicists’ Establishment because he alone among all his peers denied the existence of a ‘mathematical substance’, aether, which was denser than steel, transparent and filled the entire vacuum but had never been observed – the sort of aberrant mathematical equations that lead Hawking to postulate his radiation, which contradicts many well-proved laws of science, including Relativity, hence must be treated as a speculation or ‘fringe theory’, not the standard theory of black holes, which is Einstein’s.
Obviously Einstein was both, alone and right in that occasion. He might be again alone and right in this case, as those who back his standard theories of black holes against Hawking’s radiation form a clear minority and seem to have lost the battle for the public opinion. In that realm, there is no doubt CERN deserves by its skills in marketing, if not the Nobel Prize, which will have to wait till those 66.000 collaborators across the globe find among the millions of particles that disintegrate the signature of an evaporating black hole, at least the Harvard MBA prize for its smart promotion of Higgs particle: CERN says Higgs particle will explain the meaning of the Universe, and so it sells it to the press as 'God's particle'. While critics adduce it is just a stunt, a redundant particle akin to the Top quark, which has similar properties, but it is already discovered... Curiously enough, the proponent of the ‘Top quark theory of mass’, Mr. Nambu, not Mr. Higgs, won this years Nobel Prize, pointing out again in the direction of critics. In any case, God has been always the best excuse for good marketing, though not the best name for good science. And indeed, the fact that most scientists and the press have sided with CERN is a prove of 'Say's law', one of the pillars of capitalism, which affirms that 'anything can be sold with good marketing', even a war or the extinction of the Earth – critics could say in this case.
All in all the issue seems now more clear than it was a year ago: CERN is obviously a very powerful company, an economical powerhouse, an institution that the scientific community cheers as the jewel of human ingenuity in the exploration of the microcosms of quantum particles it aims to create. It is the 'authority' of nuclear physics. While the critics of this company and experiment, mainly the people that appears at lhcfacts.org, lhc-concern.info and lhcdefence.org, are a minority, who have been exposed to public ridicule during the last year, and nobody wants to listen. And yet, stubbornly, against the desire of our physicists and mankind at large, which believes in their 'high priests' of science, 'reality' seems to side with critics in both experiments, the Fermi satellite and the dumb hole. And this, in science, which is not a religion but a process of rational discovery, is called the experimental method, the higher law that all scientists must respect. So, we, the people of this planet, perhaps should reconsider the theme of the black hole and listen for once to the petitions of those critics, which have been largely ignored except by the sensationalist press and some TV-comedians, which have made jokes about those black holes.
What do they exactly ask for? Basically some reasonable suggestions: first to halt the experiments at CERN during the winter season, when CERN normally doesn't work - as it runs a much more expensive electricity bill, consuming the equivalent energy to the entire city of Geneva. This is customary at CERN, to save money for the tax payer, but this year CERN has changed its schedule to rush the experiment in winter, despite a 10 million $ extra-bill, precisely to solve the issue matter-of-fact and quench further criticism… or blow us all.
Then, critics ad, during this winter, physicists should repeat the experiments on dumb holes at Haifa and self-similar labs around the Earth, now rushing into the creation of similar dumb holes. In this period also the Fermi satellite and a new array of sophisticated telescopes should be able to map out other regions of the Universe and discover the evaporation of black holes on the galaxy, if such evaporation exists.
Finally, critics also would like to argue the facts of those experiments not only in courts but in scientific magazines and the mass-media outlets they claim routinely only voice the institutional opinions of CERN.
Because CERN was initially planning to close down in winter and save the tax-payer many millions of dollars in an age of economical crisis, the idea of delaying those winter months CERN's bid to create black holes and other possible forms of quark matter, seems indeed quite reasonable. It will also help to clean up the 'act' of CERN, which should not rush-in by force an experiment that is, after Fermi and Haifa's results, clearly uncertain and poses a risk to Earth that no longer can be denied.
Nuclear Physicists tend to dismiss, after a century of cold war criticisms, those fears and have not given much thought to this issue. CERN also has diplomatic immunity, achieved during the Cold war to lure physicists working in America, as the people who sued them found to their surprise. So CERN did not appear at the suits against the company, adducing lack of jurisdiction, which judges granted. Yet it is difficult to accept that a Nuclear Company, able to produce such dangerous substances must have in a democratic world, impunity for its actions. So the Court also argued that the matter should be treated by politicians in parliaments, as it affects all human beings, not only physicists (Judge Gillmore in Sancho et Al vs. Doe et CERN). In other words, judges passed the ball to a higher authority, which didn't catch it.
And yet, if there is a scientific issue today that endangers the security of multiple nations and should be discussed seriously is this one; plainly speaking the first chance since the apparition of the homo sapiens that the human species can truly become extinguished. In that regard, even if CERN plays its cards with cunning intelligence and seems by all means unassailable to justice, to delay the experiment a few months more after so many years and save several million dollars, should not be a measure difficult to implement by the French or Swiss administration that provides the electricity to this corporation, with some consensual administrative agreement with all the parts involved. Contrary to belief such measure could greatly benefit the nuclear industry and science at large, because it would show that Nuclear Physicists do have a heart and care for life; that science after all is not a dogmatic, fundamentalist religion, but it has its experimental and theoretical methods of truth, which its practitioners ought to respect, regardless of personal agendas and industrial contracts. So far this respect for human and scientific values has not come clear in this issue, nor did it become clear during the cold war and the Chernobyl tragedy. Yet, to be able to doubt and to hear the 'other part' in a reasoned debate, without censorship of truth, is what has traditionally differentiated scientists from believers and should again differentiate the issue of CERN's black holes from other charged issues of our political and economical world. Science cannot be guided by greed, violence and individual agendas, as most of our society is, but must remain the idealistic, passionate search for truth that was meant to be when its Founding Fathers defined the laws of truth and the experimental method. Further on, if the issue could be discussed publicly, people and politicians could greatly benefit of this argument and learn many facts about cosmology, black holes and the nature of the Universe, which so far physicists, isolated in their cathedrals of thought, have been unable to explain to a wider audience.
We could indeed claim after the debate is closed that either:
- Black holes do evaporate and the experiment is safe, if Fermi-like satellites or new dumb holes show this to be the case. CERN will appear then as a serious, responsible scientific institution, which truly seeks the ideal of knowledge; and clean its name and that of the Nuclear Industry, now tainted by this and other previous, 'not so-safe' experiences. And Mr. Rolf Hauer, its CEO, could receive the Nobel prize of Physics for completing the astonishing task of creating such wondrous machine.
- Or claim that Mr. Steinhauer, from the Israel Institute of Technology, has saved the world, alerting mankind of an unexpected danger, by discovering that black holes don't evaporate. He could then receive both, the Nobel Prize of Physics and of Peace, showing that science, when working with responsibility, guided by the desire to improve the life and knowledge of the human kind, is always right.
On the other hand, if CERN keeps ignoring all critics and experimental results and carries out the experiment it will show that science is no longer the kingdom of reason but it has been polluted by the dogma of industrial ethics, so well described by Erich Fromm in his critic of the cold war:

‘Technological civilization is programmed by the principle that
something ought to be done because it is technologically possible.
If it is possible to build nuclear weapons, they must be built, even
If they might destroy us all. Once this principle is accepted, humanist
Values (something has to be done because it is needed by man) are
Dethroned and technological development becomes the foundation of ethics’

This might be indeed, the belief of many in our society in loved with technology, but we live in a democracy whose ethic foundations are precisely humanist values we must not ignore when the life of so many might be at risk. In that sense CERN's experiments are no longer only a question of making science happen, but also one of social responsibility that the public must be able to debate openly after what Haifa and Fermi have shown.
It is for that reason that this newspaper is giving a 'chance' to those critics to express their 'con-CERN', by inviting us, the most vocal of them, who have engaged in suits and put their professional careers on the line, to express in this article the risks they perceive for the Earth if the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) switches on this fall. This invitation is obviously extended to CERN's physicists in the hope they will properly respond and refute those arguments and show their flaws or acquiesce with their silence, in which case, we believe this matter should be taken seriously by the Governments involved.
When Teller invented his process to make Hydrogen bombs, he envisioned a bomb that could blow up Russia in a single strike. Physicists were all in favor of it, and Teller adduced the need for further knowledge about the processes taking place within the atom to convince Truman's presidency of the crash effort, but the next president, a military who knew better about the sometimes disguised goals of the military-industrial complex, Mr. Eisenhower, found rightly that such a bomb could destroy the entire planet; so he agreed with the Russians to halt the development of bigger bombs. Yet the Hydrogen bomb is only the II horizon in the evolution of Nuclear Devices. Those quark bombs the LHC will explore are cosmic, Mass Bombs, M=E/c2, the most potent explosives of the Universe. To make them here on Earth, even if the Nuclear Industry highlights the 'knowledge' they will bring to mankind, just as Teller did, will be indeed, a dumb thing to do. But often the most intelligent people are the dumbest of them all.