Kalam allays doomsday fear

New Delhi, Sept. 10: Former President and missile man A.P.J. Abdul Kalam on Wednesday led scientists in rubbishing fears by doomsayers that the controversial "Big Bang" experiment in Europe will eventually imperil earth saying it was safe and will not pose any "danger".

"It is just that the scientists in Geneva want to establish their own belief of the creation of universe as caused by the Big Bang," Dr Kalam said allaying fears by some sceptics that the collisions of protons would have an adverse impact and that world will come to an end after the ongoing experiment at the Cern laboratory near Geneva

The attempt to recreate the "Big Bang" to study the formation of universe will not create any threat to the people but would be beneficial to the scientific community and the world, he told reporters on the sidelines of a function at the Army Hospital here as the experiment passed its first major test with flying colours.

Narrating his personal experience when he visited the Cern site in Geneva recently, Dr Kalam said it will not create any threat to the lives of the people but would help in enhancing their living standards.

He said the experiment was good for physics as it would provide an idea to the scientific community on the amount of power and energy generated during the "Big Bang". Dr Kalam said the scientists were just firing the world’s biggest atom-smasher in a mission to answer some of the most perplexing questions in the cosmos.

Vinod Chauhan, accelerator physicist at Cern, said there was misconceptions about a dangerous fallout of the world’s mightiest experiment and asserted there was no threat to mankind. Any fears of an end to the world are overblown, he said. Cern scientists have dismissed fears that the process could create a "black hole" whose super-gravity would swallow the Earth.

The sceptics theorise that a byproduct of the collisions could be micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

—PTI