Harry V. Lehmann

No Canary in the Quanta: Who Gets to Decide if the Large Hadron Collider is Worth Gambling Our Planet? Harry V. Lehmann

Public interest trial attorney Harry Lehmann is on the case of what could become the greatest gamble our planet has ever faced. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is housed in a tunnel 17 miles in circumference, more than 500 feet underground, at the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It was built by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to collide opposing beams of protons at near light speed. LHC was shut down days after its September 2008 launch by a serious fault between two superconducting bending magnets. Now CERN claims it has repaired the original defects and resulting damage, so that it can "safely" fire up the LHC again. But this is the largest science experiment in our planet's history, and its "laboratory" is the planet itself. The stakes could not be higher. No Canary In The Quanta illuminates crucial questions that must be asked by the people of the world about what could be, if anything goes wrong, a true Doomsday machine.