Customer Reviews

The Dominium Sequencing antimatter and gravity effect: Big Bang to black hole; and implications for a manmade near-future doomsday: End-of-all-life on Earth

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This is simply just another ridiculous attempt at being noticed. This guy has spammed every science blog he can find to advertise his book. His pet theory has been destroyed by anyone with any kind of scientific training but he has steadfastly refused to accept any evidence that he is wrong. All he does is claim victory after each argument and then publish that everyone thinks he is correct. Instead of publishing his theory where it could be peer reviewed by scientists, he went straight to the internet and hopes to sell his self published book by appealing to conspiracy theorists.

If you are someone who enjoys grand conspiracy theories about the end of the world, and is willing to fund the spread of falsehoods aimed at canceling the largest science experiment in history then you should consider purchasing this book. I have only read the briefer free version that was available online, but I have also debated the author on the now defunct Scientific American forums, so I feel qualified to write this review.

In a nutshell, the author has some technical background, but no formal training in advanced physics. He claims that based on a religious inspiration he was led to a grand theory that supposedly explains all kinds of mysteries that physicists have been struggling to understand for decades, including dark matter and dark energy. As a consequence of this theory he arrives at the conclusion that if mini black holes are produced at the new particle collider in Switzerland, they will not disintegrate in a benign spray of safe particles (as predicted by all peer reviewed physics models) but will instead be stable and gobble up the earth.

It is relatively common to have people with no formal training come along claiming to have solved all the mysteries physics in one simple theory. It is so common, in fact, that a system of scoring such theories has developed in a "crackpot index": http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html. This theory scores quite high on the scale itself. The author refuses or lacks the training to back up any of his assertions with calculations. He claims the scientific community is suppressing his theory. And he has made no effort to check whether experiments or astronomical observations contradict his model. A number of scientists, myself included, took the time to learn about this author's model, find some of the numerous problems with it, and explain them to him, but he did not deal with these problems honestly. Perhaps the most dramatic problem with his model is that it blatantly contradicts the famous uniformity of the cosmic microwave background radiation. If matter and antimatter repelled each other as he claims and clumped into his "dominia", there would be large clusters and gaps of this radiation rather than the almost completely uniform distribution that is observed. Further, even if his theory were somehow correct, the collider would still be safe to use because cosmic radiation is constantly bombarding our atmosphere at vastly higher energies than the collider is capable of producing. If the collider is capable of producing stable, planet-gobbling black holes, then nature would have killed us with them already through these collisions (a complication relating to the boost of black holes from cosmic rays also needs to be considered, but a discussion of this was well over the author's head). The author's attempts to dismiss this argument because of "dogpiling" effects at the colliders were totally dishonest.

In conclusion, this author has come up with this "theory" in a field in which he is not trained which is fundamentally wrong in many ways. He has had many of these problems explained to him many times, yet he continues to ignore them, and he groundlessly continues to claim that the collider is likely to destroy the world because of his theory. I do not write this review because I am worried about this theory (I would be surprised if anyone with decision making authority finds out about this and takes it seriously). But I find the idea of the author making money off of the spread of falsehoods quite offensive. Please do not spend money to support this kind of behavior!

The LHC project, despite all the money that has been poured into it, could end up destroying everything - and that means everything. "The Dominium" speaks of a near-future man-made doomsday scenario where an object made as a symbol of peace, cooperation, and scientific advancement could collapse the universe into yet another big bang, speaking as if this a very real reality, and not just fiction. In publishing his book, Hasanuddin passes the burden of responsibility to the reader - what could you do to stop the LHC project. Highly recommended to readers with an interest in hard science and who would ask of a more through understanding of the LHC project.