Expert: James Gort - 1/11/2011

Question
my question is could the hadron collider be causing all the bird and fish deaths. Could it be doing something to the atmosphere or the magnetic field. Also could it also be responsible for all the increase in floods and earth quakes. I am very concerned about all the things that have been happening sense it seam like this thing was started up. Thank you for you time
Sincerely,
Becky

Answer
Hi Becky,

The Super Hadron Collider was the cause of some concern by some people - such as possibly creating small "black holes" that would suck in the earth.  If it did create small black holes (and it could!), they wouldn't have any more gravity than a regular particle - at a large distance.  You'd have to get close enough to its "event horizon" - which means VERY, VERY close - to be sucked in.  So an electron MIGHT be sucked in IF IT WAS CLOSE ENOUGH, but certainly not a chair, and most definitely not the earth.

But back to floods and birds.  For the same reason that I mentioned, the collider could not have a "long distance" effect on birds or the weather or earthquakes.  Elementary particles simply do not leave the collider to interact with the rest of the earth, and even if they did, they'd be absorbed in a VERY short distance (less than a thousandth of an inch).  So that leaves radiation from the collider.  Again, most radiation is absorbed in the walls of the collider.  Any bit that escapes would be much less than we normally get from "cosmic rays" - they bombard us from space constantly.

So, something is causing some weird happenings throughout the world.  It could be random chance or some complicated sequence of events that we haven't yet understood.  But the collider isn't one of those events.  From what we know of the physics, it just can't happen.  So it's one less thing for you to be concerned about.

Cheers,

Prof. James Gort