Last spring, the Harvard Book Review received a letter requesting a review of a book called The Dominium, also enclosed, by an author identified only as Hasanuddin.  “Dominium” is the name for a new scientific model developed by Hasanuddin that claims to explain for the first time myriad astronomical phenomena such as dark matter, solar wind, and the Big Bang. More importantly, however, the model predicts that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) recently built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will create stable mini black holes.  The LHC is the biggest particle accelerator ever created, a 27 km circumference mammoth machine constructed 100 m below the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. The black holes it will create according to the Dominium theory — bodies so dense that nothing, not even light, escapes their gravitational pull — will then expand to consume the planet.

Hasanuddin is a high school science teacher who has had some training at MIT, NASA, and CERN, but the inspiration for the Dominium model can only be called revelatory. In the summer of 2007 Hasanuddin received visions and self-described “divine revelations” that sustained the writing of the book (and another) over just two months. The theory has been rushed to press, rather than taken through the slow-moving (but legitimizing) academic publication process because the LHC was scheduled to go online and thus end all life on earth, in May 2008.

For theoretical physicists, that date would not have been a moment too soon. The LHC will shoot beams of protons flying at 99.999999% of the speed of light directly into each other — generating the highest-energy collisions ever produced in the laboratory. From these collisions could emerge particles never before observed, especially one called the Higgs boson. If found, the Higgs will be the last puzzle piece in the Standard Model, the current theory for subatomic particles; if not found, physicists will have a lot to debate. Paranoid concerns about black holes obscure these facts: they keep us from appreciating the incredible feat of engineering that brought the LHC online, and draw our attention away from the mysteries of the universe that it may unveil.

Others besides Hasanuddin have worried that the LHC will create mini black holes — one lawsuit against the complex — which is an international collaboration of thousands of physicists from hundreds of institutions — has been filed in the United States District Court for the District of Hawaii, of all places, and another in the European Court of Human Rights — but Hasanuddin’s fears are perhaps the most extravagant. The Dominium model relies on a counterfactual hypothesis that an antimatter particle will exert a gravitational push, rather than pull, on a matter particle; the two will repel, rather than attract. In standard particle physics, for all matter there exists an equivalent antimatter. When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate; but both are subject to the same gravitational force, which is always attractive. Starting from the opposite hypothesis and five related premises, the Dominium model advances through “classical Aristotelian syllogisms” towards its apocalyptic conclusion. Hasanuddin claims that all arguments against the model have actually supported it, and has sought to promote it in science blogs, and — by writing to the Harvard Book Review — in traditional reviews.

No doubt Hasanuddin believes that the LHC will cause a doomsday; and no doubt the physics establishment does not, since the LHC went operational on September 10th, 2008.

Physicists generally do not leave things, especially the fate of the planet, to chance, and two large, independent reviews of the system found it posed no possible danger. Brian Greene, a physics professor at Columbia, wrote in the New York Times that the mini black hole issue is “a reasonable question with a definite answer: no.” If mini black holes were a problem, in fact, the earth would be long gone, since it is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays that cause collisions with as much energy as those that will be studied in Geneva. Before the LHC could do any more than test its tracks, however, a malfunction caused damage to about 100 of its 1600 magnets, entailing repairs that will last until the summer of 2009. Both physicists anticipating exciting results and critics fearing deadly black holes will have to wait.

Browsing in the Harvard Coop recently, I found The Dominium on the Physics shelf, next to a thick textbook on Newtonian Mechanics, the most accepted and verified body of physics.

I had to wonder, what is the filtering mechanism for the science that is written for the general public? There is an accepted system for peer review of scientific papers, but seemingly no oversight in popular science. One trusts editors, publishers, and booksellers to present accurate science. But then again, “accurate science” is debatable, especially once you leave the academic sphere; just consider the disputes over climate change, evolution, or the risk of genetically-modified crops. Or black holes: on the next shelf over was another recent book, this one by Stanford theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind, called The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics. If Susskind and Hawking cannot agree, I do not know whom to believe.

And there’s another problem with accurate science: the more accurate the theory, the fewer the people who will have the patience or background to understand it. Books need to sell, after all. Hawking’s classic A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, a best-seller for more than four years, includes only one equation, E = mc2, since Hawking was told that every equation would cut the readers in half. Hawking manages to stay true to the science, however, while popularizing it (maybe the black holes helped?). Greene, the Columbia physicist, has also been fairly successful at doing so; he is the author of The Elegant Universe, a popular book on string theory that was later turned into a NOVA series. Both books, however, require a good dose of the afore-mentioned patience. This is fine for some enthusiasts, but how do scientists engage other segments of the population — for example, children? Inspired by his own experiences telling scientific bedtime stories to his son, Greene has recently tried his hand at children’s books with Icarus at the Edge of Time, centered around, of course, a black hole.

The tale is a futuristic version of the Greek Icarus myth, in which Icarus flies too close to the sun against his father’s wishes, melting his wings and falling into the ocean. Icarus and his father remain, but the island of Crete becomes a starship on a centuries-long journey to the nearest star. The brash teenage Icarus, wanting to explore a black hole, ignores the warnings of his father and navigates his small spacecraft to within a centimeter of the black hole’s event horizon (beyond which there is no return). Icarus survives his adventure, but the starship he came from is nowhere to be found. The young explorer had not known that the immense gravitational pull near the black hole, by the effects of relativity, would cause him to experience time at a much slower rate than his father. A trip of a few minutes for him lasts thousands of years for the rest of the universe.

The most captivating parts of the book, however, are the illustrations, which are breathtaking real images of far-flung galaxies from NASA and the Hubble Space Telescope. Each page has one of these panoramas of the universe, showing a stunning array of celestial phenomena.  Unfortunately, the black hole inserts itself into these stunning pictures as well: a black circle superimposed on the center of each picture keeps us focused on the main plot vehicle.  Throughout the book the black circle grows larger as Icarus approaches it, eventually almost covering the image of space behind it. This is a poor choice, both scientifically and aesthetically. The flat black shape stands out starkly from the swirling hues of the newly formed stars, supernovas, and cosmic tornadoes in the background. And in trying to show the black hole to the reader, the image betrays the science — black holes cannot be distinguished from empty space, since no light escapes from them. Mainly, the black hole does not seem real, and it is precisely the real pictures of the heavens, provoking wonder and thousands of questions, that inspires me as a grown-up child. An actual Icarus would not have left his starship to explore a black circle, but would have jumped at the chance to explore the billowing Cone Nebula, the wispy Orion Nebula, or the colorful M82 Galaxy.

If his execution could have been better, Greene’s premise of exploring a black hole is compelling. To be honest, I would not have picked up the book otherwise. What fascinates us, draws us, to black holes? Black holes lie at the intersection of science and science fiction — they exist, we just do not know too much about them — and so they provide ample room for the imaginations of both author and reader. But there are many ideas in science — indeed, many other interstellar bodies, that are not well understood. The human relationship to a black hole, however, is immediately graspable: an encounter means sudden death, a fall into an infinite abyss. Black holes appeal to some deep-rooted human fear of a universal destructive force, and the stories told about them echo familiar tales. The cry that CERN physicists, by building a tool of never-before-seen-power, will engender grave consequences, could just as easily become another tale of Frankenstein, or of the Tower of Babel (as Hasanuddin explicitly mentions). Greene’s fable of traveling too close to the forbidden, of course, follows the Icarus myth. Black holes easily inspire stories. But it is awe at the natural world, the sense of humility and wonder aroused by a brilliant star-filled cosmos (pictured on the covers of both The Dominium and Icarus at the Edge of Time), that inspires science. If the accounts of scientists’ journeys into those realms, through fine-tuned telescopes and colossal particle accelerators, are not as easy to tell, they are all the more amazing for being real. And they will not make you disappear if you dive in.

Antonio Baclig ‘09 can’t get enough of the “Large Hadron Rap,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM.