Crazy as it sounds, there's a scientist in Hawaii who fears it may just be so:
More intriguing are the quantum possibilities, raised by Doctor Arkani-Hamed, who told a nervous New York Times reporter that 'because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening'.
The Collider, he mused, "might make dragons that might eat us up."
Quantum dragons?!? Whatever will we do? The Geeks at the Brisbane Times have the proper, gamer response to such an event:
I however, remain bullish on the quantum dragon question. I doubt there is a dragon problem that couldn't be addressed by the liberal application of heat seeking missiles.
Booyah! Ok, setting aside for now the cool vision of Raptor jetfighters versus quantomfire-breathing dragons, the more intriguing possibility is the opening of a gateway to, well, infinite worlds:
An exciting side issue to Wagner's lawsuit, is the possibility raised by other less... uh, flamboyant... scientists that the collider might be a first step to opening up a grand highway to other universes. Granted, some of them would be hostile, because the laws of nature which make life possible here might be written entirely differently on the other side of the portal. Or, the universal clockwork might tick in the same way, but human history could have turned out very differently, a favourite example being a universe where the Nazi's won the Second World War.
Potentially, an infinite variety of such worlds could exist, and sure, you wouldn't want to go blundering into a universe populated by supernazis, but how cool would it be to grab up a whole bunch of alternate Earths which were entirely empty of people; the same planet, but unoccupied by troublesome tenants.
The possibilities are potentially endless. And if there really is an infinite number of them, that means there's nothing to prevent each of us getting our own private world.
And you thought the housing market was in trouble before!
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I must admit that I'm disappointed that a Raptor jetfighter did not mean one of these: http://www.aking.missingsaddle.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/Velociraptor.jpg.
Wagner himself is some sort of Eternal Champion of Anti-Physics; he tried a similar lawsuit in '99. A report convened then to study the risks of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven concluded that "nature has been conducting the relevant safety test for billions of years by colliding heavy-ion cosmic rays with the moon...[and that the] creation of a black hole is 'effectively ruled out by the persistence of the Moon' " (Bob Parks, What's New: http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/).
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