I know a lot of my readership tend to be more scientifically inclined than me, so I’ll ask:
the Large Hadron Collider is set to power up next month. Now, I’m generally of the belief that scientists aren’t blitheringly stupid when it comes to danger, so I suspect the arguments made in this paper have been refuted somewhere, but where could I find that?
EDIT TO ADD: Okay, it took me a while (Google is occasionally unhelpful since most of the hits are going to the alarmist pages), but this page is a good counter.
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http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13555-particle-smasher-not-a-threat-to-the-earth.html
That’s all I can find on a quick search.
Here’s another anti-hysteria page, from CERN itself:
http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html
Quote: “scientists aren’t blitheringly stupid when it comes to danger”
I don’t accuse Evel Knievel of being stupid when it comes to danger, actually I think he was probably a genius when it comes to estimating and managing danger or he would probably not be alive today. But no one ever accused Evel Knievel of being cautious!
M.B. Dion of society du jour writes: “The ATLAS Experiment… Madness Or Invaluable Insight? by “So is ATLAS just an intellectual version of something Evel Knievel may have attempted in the lab?””
http://societydujour.net/2008/06/18/the-atlas-experiment-madness-or-invaluable-insight.aspx
I think this might be a fair characterization. Not that we should be overly cautious, the world is a dangerous place, but some of us are concerned about just how big a canyon the Large Hadron Collider is attempting to jump, and if pressures to start operations might be competing with safety calculations!
…. Evel Knievel isn’t alive today.
And yeah, it’s pretty well summed up in that edit-page. There’s a chance the world COULD go boom from the LHC. There’s also a chance cancer research could cause some accidental form of virus that turns everybody into vampires kind of like in I Am Legend. Are we gonna stop cancer research? No. Should we stop learning about the universe? No.
Those probably mention this, but the best soundbite is that cosmic rays strike stuff in the solar system(even earth) with more local energy that the LHC will ever be able to concentrate, and nothing weird has happened. The reason we don’t have much data on it is that it’s happening in random locations in unconstrained circumstances, but we can detect that it is occurring.
Based on my review of the literature, I’m actually not a big LHC booster. It’s interesting, and may be useful in other areas (like the generation of antimatter), but I think it’s probably too low energy to find the Higgs boson. Of course, it’s getting on the biggest thing we’ve ever built, so it’s useful just as engineering. But the next one will probably have to be in space anyway, so we’ve got a fifty year wait, or more by conventional progress metrics.
It wasn’t a stunt that killed Knievel.
For information on a similar project, I suggest you check out http://largehardoncollider.com/
We have only one more month to build our bomb shel—wait, won’t work….
Our spaceships, and gather supplies that could conceivably last us for the rest of our lives?! Man we’re screwed, what’s on TV?
i know this is going to sound like crazy talk, but i’m not a big fan of trusting the scientists here: when we first used the atom bomb, some of the scientists involved considered the possibility that it would set the atmosphere on fire and kill all surface-based life: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_test (text search for atmosphere). seems crazy to me to even risk it. same principle applies here- i don’t really care that in some theoretical frameworks they’ve shown it to be really really unlikely that a microscopic black hole won’t evaporate. they’re building this thing to find things they’ve never seen before, and there should be at least some expectation they’ll be surprised by some findings and have to revise said theoretical frameworks.
if i were a politician of any authority i’d do my darndest to revoke their funding until i was satisfied that there was no danger (not just a very small risk of danger, but no danger- we’re talking about extinction, after all). if there’s no way of eliminating that risk, we should wait until we can run it off-world.
I’m actually doing an internship in the ATLAS project this summer. I can’t really pretend that I have a good grasp of the stuff that’s worrying certain people (black holes, etc.), but if it makes you feel any better, the scientists on the project seem to view all the End Of The World scenarios as a big joke. Not that this is a foolproof argument, of course. But for what it’s worth, at least the people in the driving seat seem not to be worried.
So, does anyone know when the first firing of the LHC is supposed to occur? I’d like to mark my calender.
“But for what it’s worth, at least the people in the driving seat seem not to be worried.”
…Which is usually when I worry the most.
But CERN’s safety explanation is pretty persuasive.
some of the scientists involved considered the possibility that it would set the atmosphere on fire and kill all surface-based life
Yeah, and that turned out to be nonsense, and it didn’t happen. It seems the alarmists didn’t actually fully understand the process.
not just a very small risk of danger, but no danger
Wow, zero risk of even the craziest low-probability events as a threshold. Why are you even using a computer?
Anyway, a very recent summary is up at the arXiv e-print archive. Probably covers the same ground as the link in the post, but Motl causes some other physicists to experience severe gastric discomfort.
And if the entire practicing high-energy physics community is actually wrong about this, and the LHC does destroy the world / universe / multiverse… Um, sorry?
STEPHEN HAWKING: Great. The entire universe was destroyed.
FRY: Destroyed? Then where are we?
AL GORE: I don’t know. But I can darn well tell you where we’re not: the universe!
And if the entire practicing high-energy physics community is actually wrong about this, and the LHC does destroy the world / universe / multiverse…
Then we went out in the name of science!
“Motl causes some other physicists to experience severe gastric discomfort.”
Yeah, I’ve only read that one post of his and he already seems pretty unbearable.
“Wow, zero risk of even the craziest low-probability events as a threshold. Why are you even using a computer?”
The thing is, the LHC doesn’t currently deliver free music and pornography. While I can’t speak for Dan, I know that’s why I find it less essential than computers.
“Wow, zero risk of even the craziest low-probability events as a threshold. Why are you even using a computer?” (I don’t know how to do italics)
Hey, if we’re talking about endangering myself, I’ve got no problem with high-risk behaviors. I don’t think that it’s eminently unreasonable to apply a zero-risk standard when the risk is the destruction of the planet.
And try not to be such a jackass the next time around. From what I’ve read, people play nice here.
I don’t think MDS was being a jackass at all. Furthermore, he’s right.
There’s no such thing as “zero-risk”. Even the experiments you did in science class held a certain amount of risk. That’s why the classroom had that chemical shower and eye-wash station.
And if we had put off creating the atom bomb because of some people’s doomsday fears, we would have missed out on one of the greatest scientific achievements in history. Your example did defeat your own argument. MDS wasn’t a jackass for pointing that out, he was merely being observant.