UA physicist caught up in doomsday hype

A University of Alabama physicist’s paper on the subject of the collider has unintentionally become fodder for doomsday prophets who say it could potentially destroy the Earth.

Benjamin Harms’ paper, published six years ago, theorized that the machine could be powerful enough to create micro black holes stable enough to escape.

The paper pulled Harms into the fray this summer after a German scientist used it to back up his argument against flipping on the collider. The German paper that cites Harms and his co-author is used in one of the European lawsuits, although Harms said the lawsuit is unnecessary.

On Wednesday, Harms said his paper was misinterpreted. It was meant to address the capabilities of the collider but was not focused on disaster, he said.

Published in the International Journal of Modern Physics in 2002, the paper theorizes that micro black holes could be produced in the high-energy collider and, if created, be stable enough to escape. But unlike collider opponents, Harms said there is no evidence the micro black holes would grow as they engulfed matter, eventually gobbling the Earth after years of heating the ground below.

“I don’t think the black holes are going to create a problem,” he said. “I’m not worried. There is no credible calculation to show these microscopic black holes could grow.”

If the micro black holes escaped the collider stable enough to travel farther, Harms said they would either float away into the atmosphere or sink through the earth before floating away. The potential black holes would be so small, their gravitational pull wouldn’t reach even the other subatomic particles nearby, he said.

“As far as they are concerned, the matter of Earth would be so far beyond their horizon, they would just pass through,” Harms said.