Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2009/12/04/dr_dark_energy/

'Doctor Dark Energy': The Ultimate LHC eccentric?

Only Osama can stop 'collaptic devil particle'

By Lewis Page

Posted in Science, 4th December 2009 16:16 GMT

Nutjob Friday There are many interesting questions to be asked regarding the Large Hadron Collider, most powerful matter-rending machine ever assembled by the human race. Will it discover the elusive Higgs Boson? Will it open up an interdimensional portal into some mysterious continuum beyond our own? Will it, perhaps, destroy the world and/or entire universe in a deadly planetary soupening mishap?

But this is the Reg and this is Friday too, so we have chosen to focus on a related but different question. Namely, who is the world champion heavyweight eccentric LHC-fearing doomsday prophet?

It had been widely thought among connoisseurs of the tinfoilclad community's work that, taken all around, the world number 1 was probably Walter L Wagner. The colourful Hawaii-based botanist, lawyer, and soi-disant physicist even went so far as to mount a lawsuit in federal court attempting to get the Collider shut down, despite the fairly basic objection that US beaks have no jurisdiction over the machine.

But little has been heard from Wagner for some time. He has, too, had other things on his plate: an ongoing bitter legal battle with the board at his former workplace, the World Botanical Gardens in Hawaii, which has seen millions of dollars in damages awarded against him in civil cases and indictments on criminal charges. It's not the first time Wagner's been in trouble with the law, either: he did jail time back in the 1970s after violating restraining orders granted to a woman he was stalking.

We have had some contributions from Wagner's confederate Luis Sancho on the comments pages here, which are quite good of their type: but Wagner seems to have been the brains of that outfit, really. And the recent appeal by internationally allied doomsayers to the UN is a bit dull, too.

It's been left to one of the world's keenest amateur LHC watchers, Chris Stephens of LHC Portal fame, to come up with a new contender: and he has done so. Chris writes:

I have found the ultimate LHC Tin Foil Hatter. I know, I know ... that's saying a lot.

Chris offers for your consideration Ivan Gorelik. Here's his website, from which we've culled a few choice bits:

Attention! Magnetic trap of Devil!

Some theorists suggest that the Higgs bosons will be registered at the LHC ... Higgs boson had received a new name, "the God particle". We know that the most of particles have their corresponding antiparticles. So, if there is a particle of God, then there is a particle of Devil.

By adding the colliding energy, we can get the God particle and its anti-particle, the magnetic trap of Devil ... the magnetic hole captures the substance and transforms its rest mass-energy into another form of matter, - the magnetic field of the Devil's trap. Say me now, are we have the right to touch the particle of God?

Only Osama bin Laden can save us now

Mr Gorelik prefers to be known as "Doctor Dark Energy", and has qualified as a physics schoolteacher and an agricultural mechanization specialist. Before he realised the dangers of the LHC, he says he invented a compact nuclear fusion reactor just 1m across, powered by GraviThermal Coils of his own devising. "Nevertheless, professional scientists will hardly take me seriously," he complains. "Professionals as a rule just hate and laugh."

He goes on:

The thin shell of the Earth, together with us, will be ejected into cosmic space, but the rest of the Earth will turn into an electric current loop of several meters radius ... Half of Earth’s mass will be transformed into magnetic field of neutron hole, and another half will be transformed into radiation and kinetic energy of the released shell.

If the magnetic collapse starts, it will be impossible to stop it. It will end with ejection of the Earth’s shell into outer space.

Having appealed to Vladimir Putin and the Russian Academy of Sciences without result, Ivan has this week written to Russian prosecutors warning that the LHC will "lead to the magnetic collapse and to the collaptical explosion of the Earth" and demanding an international ban on any collision energies greater than 100 giga-electron-volts.

But Mr Gorelik isn't confident that the Russian authorities will act with sufficient resolution to "arrest Rolf Heuer and all his bigbangers". So he's turned to the only man who can save us now. You guessed who, of course: Osama bin Laden.

Ivan writes elsewhere:

Here is my madman ravings: Fasten your belts! We are ready to fly in icy comets to other planet systems in order to bust the panspermia. What is better: to nuke the LHC and CERNs headquarters, or to let the CERN to explode the Earth and throw out all of us into cosmos, as seeds of new civilizations? The letter to Osama bin Laden: “Dear terrorist! Give me an air-plane with couple of nuclear bombs. I’ll drop the first bomb at LHC and the second on the CERN’s headquarters. Otherwise, we all will die because the global terrorists from CERN want to create the magnetic trap of Devil.”

That seems to have most of the makings, all right. An eccentric inventor named "Doctor Dark Energy" appeals to Osama bin Laden to supply him with a nuclear bomb so that he can prevent scientists at an underground proton-beam facility from unleashing a satanic magno-neutron hole which will splatter all of humanity across the cosmos in a horrendous "collaptical explosion".

"Doctor" Gorelik certainly seems like a candidate for the Golden Tinfoil Crown of Fame, though we'll reserve judgement until we've seen who else may pop up in the comments.

We would just add, for anyone of a nervous disposition reading this, that the LHC will not destroy the Earth. There is some chance, according to reputable sources, that it will open up a dimensional portal, however, though almost certainly - in the same sense that it is almost certain the moon is not made of cheese - a disappointingly tiny and short-lived one.

In any case, revised plans from the LHC control room call for no collisions stronger than 450 GeV over the weekend. Such particle-tickling is old hat - has been surpassed many many times at the Tevatron in America and previously at the LHC - so even if your chapeau should be made of tinfoil, you can relax and enjoy your weekend. ®