Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Nihilism Update II

Here's the MSNBC take on the possible "not w/ a whimper, but w/ one hell of a bang" human-caused end of everything, or our poor suffering planet, at least. Juicy parts:
Black holes aren't Wagner's only worry: He also is concerned that when the collider creates a soup of free-flying quarks, some of those quarks might recombine in a hazardous way — creating a stable, negatively charged "strangelet" that could turn everything it touches into more strangelets.

The lawsuit also suggests that magnetic monopoles — basically, magnets with only a north or a south pole, but not both — could be created in the collider and wreak havoc.

General scientific consensus is "no," but we can hope, can't we?

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