¿Es la tierra un lugar seguro para el LHC (CERN)?.

Resumen

John Ellis, physicist at CERN and member of the LHC Safety Assessment Group (LSAG) [1] ended with the title of this paper the presentation of LSAG Report Conclusions in the meeting celebrated at CERN on August 14th 2008. The 2008 Report [2] strengthens the safety conclusions from the 2003 Report [3], in light of additional experimental results and theoretical understanding, concluding that “there is no basis for any concern about the safety of the LHC”. The aim of this paper is to present some simple calculations so that the non specialistic readers can have sufficient data to verify that the LHC experiment is absolutely safe. In fact, nature is continuously creating LHC-like collisions when much higher-energy cosmic rays collide with the Earth's atmosphere, with the Sun, and with other objects such as white dwarfs and neutron stars. If such collisions posed a danger, the consequences for Earth or these astronomical objects would have become evident already. We also introduce some calculation about microscopic black holes. If they appear at all, these black holes would exist for "about a nanonano-nanosecond," so that they would have no effect of consequence.