The biggest machine ever built is run by a consortium of European governments called CERN. Its Large Hadron Collider accelerates heavy subatomic particles at near light speed around a circle 17 miles in circumference before smashing them together. Scientists then study the remains and obtain important clues about how the universe works.

The LHC occupies a huge donut-shaped tunnel looping across the Swiss-French border near Geneva. It is a neighborhood that pairs our most advanced tech just below alpine pastureland seemingly out of the children’s book Heidi. The bucolic setting belies the fact that experiments at the LHC (and at smaller accelerators around the world built earlier) could conceivably trigger what Harvard physicist Sidney Coleman once called “the ultimate ecological catastrophe.”

The LHC was built with a singular purpose — finding the elusive final link in the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Predicted in the 1960s, the long-missing Higgs boson, working through the conjectured Higgs field, endows other particles like protons and neutrons with mass. Without the Higgs, there would be no stars, planets, or people.

The race to discover subatomic particles really kicked off after World War II. Around 1970, some physicists became alarmed that the energy of particle collisions might push the fragment of the vacuum pervading the universe that is within the machine itself from the current low-energy state to an even more stable one. This vacuum decay could then start a cascade of change destroying the whole of creation. A later worry was that creating a Higgs boson could similarly end the cosmos through a change in the universe’s Higgs field.

Well, nothing happened with any of the particles scientists began to discover using colliders, and the LHC found the Higgs in 2012, completing the set. So seemingly less problematic is the merely local catastrophe resulting from the formation of mini black holes that then swallow the Earth. A few weeks before the LHC was switched on, physicist Sean Carroll calculated the chances of creating such a black hole as about .00000000000000000000000001 percent. That is exceedingly small, but there was not a notice-and-comment period in which the public was informed of the risk as well as any rewards that might result from discovering the Higgs. Indeed, the same has been true of other potentially dangerous experiments performed earlier.

Naturally these risks have led not only to (failed) federal lawsuits to stop colliders but also to a chapter in a book by Richard Posner, the prolific former Seventh Circuit jurist. In Catastrophe: Risk and Response, he proposes a permanent special advisory body of experts to inform the public debate.

Instead of a public advisory body, there were decades of secret meetings, as revealed in Ian Sample’s award-winning 2013 book Massive: The Higgs Boson and the Greatest Hunt in Science. Physicists have in fact recognized the risks of colliders and carefully researched and assessed them — just as they had with conjectures the atmosphere could catch on fire as a result of the Manhattan Project’s atom bombs. When it comes to the experimental accelerators that popped up after the war, physicists ended such secret debates time and again by noting that heavy particles in cosmic rays collide with the airless Moon at energies far higher than any current machine can generate.

Which isn’t to say there has been no public discussion. The fear of a black hole being created by an atom smasher looking for the Higgs became a media frenzy in 1999 after Scientific American published letters expressing concern. The editors had called on physicist Frank Wilczek to write a reassuring adjoining note. He concluded that black holes were unlikely to persist beyond a few seconds — but what should really worry the public are strangelets that might be produced by an experiment. Strangelets are a theoretically more stable form of matter. Much like in vacuum decay, making them could lead all adjacent particles to become strangelets, on and on again, ending the universe as we know it. A similar eco-
catastrophe was later laid at the feet of conjectured magnetic monopoles.

One study that was discussed only in the literature put the upper limit of the risk of a universe-ending event at the Brookhaven accelerator near New York City at 1 in 50 million. That is within an order of magnitude of a Superfund site post-cleanup risk goal, but vastly more people are in danger. Sample notes that a 1 in 50 million chance of killing everybody on the planet works out to “the equivalent of expecting 134 people to die” as the result of a subatomic experiment, not to mention destabilizing the entire universe.

Sample is hopeful that nothing is likely to go wrong with today’s technology. But it makes sense to widen the circle of decisionmaking along the lines of Posner’s public panel of experts — and to make all meetings open. There is also a need for a body of law to govern potentially dangerous experiments. And as Posner notes, for lawyers to play a useful role here, they need to become more scientifically literate.

Meanwhile, colliders are getting more powerful every year.

Notice & Comment is the editor’s column and represents his views.

Sturgis Cycle Rally an Expensive Public Health Disaster

The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally led to significant spread of the novel coronavirus in the event’s home state of South Dakota and in other parts of the United States. . . .

San Diego State University’s Center for Health Economics & Policy Studies used anonymized cellphone location data and virus case counts to analyze the impact of the 460,000-person event . . . believed to be one of the largest events held during the pandemic.

The consequences were “substantial,” the researchers concluded. By analyzing the parts of the country that had the highest number of Sturgis attendees and changes in coronavirus trends after its conclusion, they estimated 266,796 cases could be linked to the rally. That’s about 19 percent of the number reported nationally between Aug. 2 and Sept. 2, and significantly higher than the number state health officials have linked through contact tracing. Based on a covid-19 case statistically costing about $46,000, the researchers said, that would mean the rally carried a public health price tag of $12.2 billion.–Washington Post

Scott Pruitt’s $43,000 phone call

E&E News is an invaluable source for developments in environmental protection, with a staff devoted to attending hearings and sifting through documents to pierce the veil around the actors involved in policymaking. So it was amusing to see a straight news item announcing that the web site had obtained a grudgingly issued photograph of then Administrator Scott Pruitt’s sound-proof phone booth installed at great expense in a storage room that is part of the agency chief’s office. The web site also revealed that Pruitt had only used the facility for one phone call, and as of 2018, his successor, Administrator Andrew Wheeler, had not used the booth at all. Which means that at least as of that date, Pruitt’s single secure phone call cost the taxpayers more than $43,000.

The photograph was obtained via a March 2017 Freedom of Information Act request that was at first denied on the grounds that revealing the nature of the booth would be potentially dangerous to some unnamed individuals — “an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,” the agency said, which “could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of an individual.” E&E noted dryly, “EPA press officials didn’t respond to questions for this story, including whose privacy or life was at risk from the disclosure of the photo of the phone booth.”

The decision was appealed, and eventually the agency relented and released a photo. After seeing the image, the reason for EPA’s hesitancy is clear: there is a toilet in the foreground, although apparently not part of the soundproof booth. Why the agency didn’t crop out the commode will remain a mystery, but it is comforting to note that in addition to making phone calls in privacy within his office suite, the administrator can take care of business.

The article reveals that Pruitt admitted that the booth didn’t meet the high standards of a SCIF, a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, such as is used for presidential and congressional communications that must be secure. Pruitt’s one phone call, however, did go to the White House, as revealed by a Sierra Club lawsuit.

The agency insisted that “telephone conversations inside the booth could not be audible outside the booth from any side.” Which raises the question, why can’t the administrator make a confidential phone call from his or her desk? If the calls are not sensitive enough to require a SCIF, why not just chase all subordinates out of the room and close the door?

Any competent carpenter could install a stout door for the administrator’s office, blocking anybody from overhearing conversations, for a few hundred dollars. And if you rarely need to use the booth, maybe instead take a cab to the White House and speak to your contact in person, at a cost far less than what Pruitt paid for his single call.

The booth exceeded the $5,000 ceiling for such renovations provided for by law, and the agency failed to notify Congress as required. A good part of the article details the legal wrangling that came from the disclosure of the booth in news reports. As of September, the agency still was in violation of the Anti-Deficiency Act by not reporting the cost overrun, according to E&E News.