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about a particular newly identified class of scenarios in which not just particle physics, but gravity itself, is modified, and would produce new phenomena at LHC energies. One interesting potential consequence of these theories attracted a good deal of attention, especially from people outside the physics community. This was the possibility of microscopic low-energy black holes. Such tiny extra-dimensional black holes might actually be produced if ideas about additional dimensions of space, such as those that Raman Sundrum and I had proposed, turn out to be correct. Physicists had optimistically predicted that such black holes—if created—could provide one verification of such ideas about modified gravity.

Mind you, not everyone was so enthusiastic about this possibility. Some people in the United States and elsewhere worried that the black holes that could be created might suck in everything on Earth. I was often asked about this potential scenario after my public lectures. Most questioners were satisfied when I explained why there was no danger. Unfortunately, however, not everyone had the opportunity to learn the whole story.

Walter Wagner, a high school teacher and a botanical garden manager in Hawaii, who is also a lawyer and was a nuclear safety officer, together with the Spaniard Luis Sancho, an author and self-described researcher on time theory, were among the most militant of the alarmists. These two went so far as to file a lawsuit in Hawaii against CERN, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the American accelerator center Fermilab, in order to hinder the LHC’s start. If the goal had been simply to delay the LHC, you might think sending a pigeon to drop a piece of baguette to gum up the works would have been simpler (this actually happened, though the bird was ostensibly an independent agent). But Wagner and Sancho were interested in a more permanent forestalling of the LHC’s operation, so they pressed on.

Wagner and Sanchez were not the only ones who worried about a black hole crisis. A book by public interest trial attorney Harry V. Lehmann, which seemed to concisely summarize the concerns, was entitled No Canary in the Quanta: Who Gets to Decide If the Large Hadron Collider Is Worth Gambling Our Planet? A blog about it concentrated on fears from the September 2008 explosion and questioned whether the LHC could safely start again. The chief concern, however, centered not on the technology failure that was responsible for the September 19 mishap, but on the actual physical phenomena that the LHC might produce.

The purported threats that Lehmann and many others described about the “Doomsday machine” focused on black holes that they suggested could lead to the implosion of the planet. They worried about a lack of reliable risk assessment in light of the reliance on quantum mechanics in the LHC Safety Assessment Group’s study—given claims by Richard Feynman and others that “no one understands quantum mechanics”—as well as uncertainties due to the many unknowns in string theory, which they thought to be relevant. Their questions involved whether it is permissible to risk the Earth for any reason, even when risks are supposed to be tiny, and who should take charge of deciding.

Though the instantaneous destruction of the Earth is certainly more apocalyptic a concern, in reality, the latter questions are more appropriate to other discussions—such as those concerning global warming. Hopefully this chapter and the next will convince you that your time is better spent worrying about the depletion of the contents of your 401(k) than fretting about the disappearance of the Earth by black holes. Although schedules and budgets posed a risk for the LHC, theoretical considerations, supplemented by careful scrutiny and investigations, demonstrated that black holes did not.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean the questions shouldn’t have been asked. Scientists, like everyone else, need to anticipate possible dangerous consequences of their actions. But for the question of black holes, physicists