No reason to fear collider

I felt compelled to respond to Charles Mulvet Jr.’s Oct. 14 letter “Collider tests are like playing with fire.”

Mr. Mulvet expresses concerns that high-energy particle collisions like those taking place in the Large Hadron Collider in Europe could put the earth at risk, but these concerns are unfounded. Naturally occurring cosmic ray collisions with our planet have been taking place at levels 100 million times more powerful than the LHC for billions of years, to no ill effect.

Mulvet also implies that having artificially induced high-energy collisions will lead to more dangerous physics than naturally occurring ones via cosmic rays, but this too is false. That’s because the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia was already conducting experiments almost identical to those now being done at the LHC. These collisions were in a similar energy range and were carried out continuously for over 20 years, and we’re still here.

And the “worst” case scenario — the creation of a black hole that could suck up matter — isn’t really that bad at all. According to our best calculations, if such a black hole were created by the LHC, it would be about 10 to the power of 28, or a 10 followed by 28 zeros, times smaller than a proton. So if such a “planet-eater” was created by the LHC, it would have such little size and mass that it would take 3 billion years to eat up a single gram of Earth’s mass!

Finally, Mulvet goes on to argue that the scientists could be wrong, so why should we risk it? My answer: if we allow this kind of thinking to dominate, we can kiss all of modern science and its related technology, like the Internet, goodbye. And without the Internet, how would these Luddites complain about science?

Matthew Lowry

Vernon Hills