Skeptic Magazine on the Large Hadron Collider and Black Holes

Skeptic magazine recently had a rather thorough (and I thought disturbing) article on the Large Hadron Collider and scientific opinion concerning its safety. Here’s a quote from the article:

[I]n a recent version of the safety of the LHC posted on the CERN website, formation of a mBH is held to be impossible. The posting contains supporting statements from several noted scientists, including Nobel laureate physicist Vitaly Ginzburg, who added, “To think that the LHC particle collisions at high energies can lead to dangerous black holes is rubbish.”⁶  By contrast, according to a number of other scientists black holes will probably form, and they may or may not be threatening. The most noted of these scientists is Dr. Otto E. Rossler of the Max Planck Institute at the University of Tubingen, Germany, a chaos theory innovator and the author of some 300 scientific papers and several books. Rossler asserts that no one really knows what mBHs are and how they behave, but concludes that the chances are good that they would appear in the LHC experiments and calculates that they would expand to devour the Earth in 50 months.⁷ According to CERN physicists, Rossler’s analysis and understanding of the relevant theories are inadequate, and his conclusions false. In a paper treating extended dimensions, Marcos Maia of the University of Brasilia and E. M. Monte of the Federal University of Paraiba, conclude that mBHs at the LHC will occur and that they will be stable at five dimensions, constituting a danger to Earth.⁸ Finally, Savas Dimopoulos of Stanford University and Greg Landsberg of Brown University state that the LHC will be producing one mBH about every second,⁹ a view also held by the German astrophysicist Rainer Plaga.¹⁰