Doomsayers fear wormhole invaders could result from 'Big Bang' experiment

Scientists are a curious lot. So curious, in fact, that they want to know more about what happened some 13.7 billion years ago to give birth to galaxies far, far away and the planet we call our home.

A particle acceleration experiment by the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) that began Sept. 10 in Geneva could go a long way toward helping them find out.

But if certain doomsayers and critics of the $9.2 billion project are to be believed, the experiment could suck us all into a giant black hole or allow beings from other dimensions to invade Earth via newly opened "wormholes" in the fabric of space and time.

In a layman’s nutshell, the experiment is attempting to simulate the “Big Bang,” which many cosmologists believe explains the origins of the universe. The Big Bang is believed to have occurred nearly 14 billion years ago. One specific goal of the CERN project is to learn more about the so-called “Higgs boson,” which Scottish physicist Peter Higgs believes gave mass to matter and thus made the universe as we know it possible.

The experiment involves forced collisions of particle beams at speeds approaching 186,000 miles per second – the speed of light – inside the tightly sealed Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Gerardus t’Hooft, who shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics with Martinus J.G. Veltman, told Reuters news service that he would like to be surprised.

“What I would like to see is the unexpected,” t’Hooft said, adding that he hopes the experiment “will show us things we didn’t know existed.”

That is precisely the fear of those who have doubts about the experiment’s safety.

According to The Speculist (www.blog.speculist.com), Russian mathematicians Irina Aref'eva and Igor Volovich of Moscow’s Steklov Mathematical Institute, think that the energy produced by forcing the collisions could allow visitors from the future to drop in and say hello via wormholes that will result from the experiment.

A wormhole is a sort of bridge or tunnel through spacetime, allowed but not necessarily predicted by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. It is basically a 'shortcut' through space and time. If spacetime is viewed as a 2D surface, a wormhole bridge can be formed if the spacetime fabric is folded.

Other critics don’t fear wormhole disasters as much as they fear black-hole oblivion or some heretofore unexplored connection with the Mayan calendar, which abruptly ends in 2012. The Web site lhcconcerns.com features discussions related to what might happen if the experiment goes awry.

One contributor even invokes the prophecies of Nostradamus to remind readers that something could go wrong. The quatrain he cites has something to do with fleeing Geneva and “Black Saturn,” but the writer then admits that the details of this particular Nostradamian forecast escape him.

A safety review statement issued by CERN earlier this month didn’t give too much weight to what Nostradamus may or may not have prophesied about the experiment. “The LHC is safe,” it declared, “and any suggestions that it might produce a risk is pure fiction.”

The project started with a particle beam being shot in just one direction on Sept. 10, 2008, at 0700 GMT. If all goes well, experimental collisions could begin sometime in the autumn. If something goes wrong…well, don’t say that Nostradmus didn’t warn you.

CERN Web site:

http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/Welcome.html