Slashdot Mirror
Miscalculation Invalidates LHC Safety Assurances
KentuckyFC writes "In a truly frightening study, physicists at the University of Oxford have identified a massive miscalculation that makes the LHC safety assurances more or less invalid (abstract). The focus of their work is not the safety of particle accelerators per se but the chances of any particular scientific argument being wrong. 'If the probability estimate given by an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then the estimate is suspect,' say the team. That has serious implications for the LHC, which some people worry could generate black holes that will swallow the planet. Nobody at CERN has put a figure on the chances of the LHC destroying the planet. One study simply said: 'there is no risk of any significance whatsoever from such black holes.' The danger is that this thinking could be entirely flawed, but what are the chances of this? The Oxford team say that roughly one in a thousand scientific papers have to be withdrawn because of errors but generously suppose that in particle physics, the rate is one in 10,000."
This is voodoo science. And I don't mean the LHC experiments.
I mean the TFA that in essence claims that because an expert may be wrong, any probability the expert assigns to a risk can be ignored and inflated by as much you feel like it. Talk about bias.
--
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Trust us, we know what we're doing.
Maybe I just like Romulans, but when I hear that the LHC will be making black holes I don't think about "woo, the earth is gunna get swallowed!" I wonder if there are any cool ways to use them for power generation.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Why was this tagged "redtitle"? I've seen people mention red titles several times but never have titles looked any different from normal ones.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
...that these researchers are wrong about the probability that the other researchers are wrong?
It's not like they actually showed an error in the calculations or showed any proof of danger.
This is a bunch of bored brains saying that on the basis of pure statistics: If one in 10,000 papers have an error in them then the probability of this paper having an error in it is 1 in 10,000 ergo any claim must be degraded by 10^-4?
They should be spending their valuable time actually checking the facts and figures and coming up with some real conclusions not some abstract theory on the reliability of scientific calculations..
My first thought from reading the summary is that essentially we're at a point in technology or whatever that we could, POSSIBLY, destroy the planet in a literal sense. That's a scary thought, especially if you think what we'll be capable in a hundred years from now.
I STILL don't think the LHC will kill us all but the fact we're debating it says something.
I don't wanna be right...
If I say "There's no danger here because higher energy interactions happen naturally all the time", there's maybe a 1 in 3 chance I'm wrong. (Hey, I'm no physicist, right?) So that means my argument is invalidated and can't be considered more than a 1 in 3 chance that the world won't end?
I'm also no statistician, but I don't think that's right.
(But I there's probably at least a 1 in 3 chance I'm wrong about that, too.)
The Singularity is coming!
From last Sunday
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Red title means it's hot off the press, so to speak. Why people want to tag it as such is beyond me.
It briefly had a red title. Not sure what that indicated though - perhaps that there were no comments?
Either they are right (the LHC is safe), and nothing happens. Or they are wrong, and no one is left to say anything about them being wrong.... ;-)
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
"It isn't even wrong..."
What if they are so far off, that not only do they not produce black holes, they do nothing, but dim the lights in Switzerland?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The purpose of the LHC is noble, and results could be what we need to get off this rock and really dominate the galaxy. If they destroy the Earth... meh, it was a good try. Maybe next time.
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Means that there is a much greater than zero probability? Sorry, either the paper is wrong or your interpretation of it is wrong. Publishing a probability is not a determination of that probability.
There is no published figure regarding the probability of your computer turning into chocolate pudding before it reaches warranty. The probability is still approximately zero despite that.
The probability of a black hole at the LHC swallowing the Earth is approximately zero, and it doesn't matter how many sensationalist journalists try to misconstrue real science in an effort to drum up sales.
and I don't think it's the assurance that the LHC won't produce black holes that swallow the earth. There reason the whole LHC black hole rubbish is dismissed out of hand is simply because we have already obvesrved particles colliding with much higher energies than the LHC can produce and they didn't form black holes. Where did we observe these collions - in earth atmosphere. We built the LHC so that we could study the collisions in a controlled manner not because they are of particularl high energy.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Because using chance as scientific basis for disaster has always been accepted in the scientific community for trying to prove something wrong. FUD tactics at it's best.
Opponent: Oh crap, you're whacking things together, it could destroy the earth, crazy scary technology we don't understand!
Proponent: That could never happen.
Opponent: OMG yes it could you don't know wtf you only have studied this shit your whole life you're not a sane normal rational person like the boys in Alabama!
Proponent: Look, we've done tons of calculations; we've compared this against real-world natural occurrences; we've considered the number of times the conditions we've come up with have occurred in our lifetimes, and it's huge. We're just scaling it down to a laboratory level so we can observe it in a controlled environment. It can't break anything.
Opponent: BUT YOU COULD BE WRONG!!!!
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but what are the chances of the LHC creating a strangelet?
-who is paying for these "results"?
I find the whole black hole idea ridiculous, it seems like something someone would come up with as a front to push another agenda.
My retirement fund is pretty much crushed at this point.
Being consumed by black holes created by a multibillion dollar scientific whiz-ma-gig is sounding like a pretty good exit plan.
Editors: Would somebody PLEASE create a FAQ on this? A red title thread has been in several articles every day.
Answer: A red title is what appears on articles subscribers see in "The Mysterious Future!" previews. For some reason, as an article is taken out of "The Mysterious Future!", the flag that makes the article a subscriber-only preview seems to come off some period of time ahead of the flag that makes the title red, so what you are seeing is what subscribers see when the article is in subscriber preview mode.
Either they did this on purpose to indicate that the article is 'hot off the presses' or there's some sort of race condition in their new styling code.
My blog
...they can't destroy the earth. That's where I keep all my stuff.
I see no problem with the LHC accidentally creating a blackhole.
Why?
If it does, we're all dead anyways, so it's not like it's really going to matter since there will be no one alive to place or take blame.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
should not be taken seriously. even if they're by Florentin Smarandache.
LHC is used as an example, misleading headline written by Fox News. -1
~kulakovich
That this would be the end of the world that neo-cons hope and pray for. Now, they will not have to see a black president in for long, nor take responsibility for their actions.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We might as well blow the whole shooting match up trying to figure out how the world works, rather than some pointless nuclear war that is looming in the not to distant future. Do it CERN fire up that LHC and take it to maximum power captain.
"Anyone Who Thinks the LHC Will Destroy the World is a Twat"
He's a particle physicist from my physics department (Manchester), and hence let it be known Oxford physicists are twats!
'If the probability estimate given by an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then the estimate is suspect,'
But if the improbability is large enough, and you hook it up to a nice, hot cup of tea; then we'll travel instantaneously through every point of the Universe, and possibly create a worried-looking whale and a bowl of petunias.
... and then they built the supercollider.
What were the experts' odds on Chernobyl?
How did this crap manage to find Slashdot?
I saw this either this week or last with some idiots moaning about it.
There are equations for working this crap out, and unless they REALLY screwed up with everything we currently know about physics, i have a very good feeling that we won't be ripped atom-from-atom.
The blackhole won't be able to gather anywhere near enough mass within our stars lifetime, IF one is even created in the first place.
By the time this is even a threat, humans have either:
1) died
2) died
3) ????
4) died.
Actually, wait a minute, wasn't something similar on HERE a few days back about it?
It was either here, CNET or Current, and i highly doubt it was Current... (no offence)
Its not how the scrolls say it ends.
( Thats a "Pretender" reference for you kids )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm not worried because I would expect that people associated with the LHC have thought about the personal consequences to them if they are wrong, and the LHC does in fact generate black holes that are long-lasting enough to reach critical mass.
This isn't like the threat of global warming. Being personally identifiable as the cause of the destruction of our birth planet is the sort of thing that leads to show trials and executions. These people are laying their lives and the well-being of their families on the line. I think that's a big enough penalty that we can trust assurances without worrying about the details.
The people who wrote this paper don't give a shit whether this might induce false furore. All they care about is using pop culture science issue to get you to read their rhetoric.
I record my sleeptalking
The article is a pile of BS topped by a sensationalist (and completely wrong) headline. The paper abstract is interesting, but that's it.
Essentially the blog article makes the jump from 1 in 1000 papers being withdrawn because of "an error", any error, to the idea that the safety of the LHC is "invalid" due to a "massive miscalculation."
How can a hypothetical miscalculation be "massive?" Anyway, you can't just take an average retraction rate for papers and assume it applies to anything you like. The arguments for the LHC being safe are based on well established science. That is, for the LHC to destroy the world not only would ONE paper have to be wrong, but a LOT of papers would have to be wrong, and all in the same direction.
I'm bored of reading about the doomsday preachers. If the LHC blows the planet into smithereens, we won't have to listen to these pedantic pessimists anymore. If the LHC doesnâ(TM)t blow up the world, the pedantic pessimists will retreat into their shells and we still wonâ(TM)t have to listen to them anymore. Win win! Flick the switch homies.
Summary is certainly not accurate: the paper doesn't claim any kind of miscalculations; the published papers giving confidence limits do explicitly assume truth of models.
That said...
The paper essentially says: if the models are accurate then there is a tiny probability of catastrophe - but if the models are inaccurate then that probability might be much larger. Which is fine as far as it goes, it's certainly in accordance with standard probability theory.
However it does miss one quite important point: which is that whether or not the 'true' model of physics is what we think it is (in fact, we know we don't have it) it has to obey certain conditions. It has to be true that the intermediate-scale low energy limit is Newtonian, that if you introduce high energies, large masses or simply large scale then the limit must be Einsteinian, and that the low-energy small-scale limit must match known quantum theory. All these things are tested literally billions of times a day. The only questions are with what exactly happens in the areas we haven't tested much (which admittedly are large areas).
This means that even if there are errors in the 'accepted models' used to calculate the chance of catastrophe, those errors are very likely not to be enormous - if you prefer, the paper should perhaps split its analysis into 'accepted model holds', 'accepted model is only wrong by a factor of 10^3' and 'accepted model is badly wrong' - and the point is that the probability of catastrophe given either of the first two cases remains tiny under the existing analysis, while we may reasonably assume that the probability of the third case is miniscule.
As to the withdrawing of papers - yes, many papers have flaws, and even many flaws remain undetected. On the other hand, many papers are not really read in detail - and those papers tend to coincide. If some graduate student writes a paper on something not especially interesting, then they will read it (but it's hard to catch your own errors), their supervisor should read it (but may not do so properly) and the referee should read it (but is likely to simply check for plausibility not go into detail). Quite possibly no-one else looks beyond the abstract and first few pages - so errors aren't caught. On the other hand, if a paper is important and many people look at it, then errors usually are caught because several people independently check the details in the process of trying to understand it.
One should not push too far the 'if all our theories are wrong there will be a catastrophe' idea - it's not a false idea, but equally it's perfectly possible that when the 9 billion names of God are written down the universe will end; it's just not very likely.
All the black holes in the sky are a sign of civilizations that have advanced enough to try this experiment. We should be proud to be another.
That'd be a cool way to go. Fire 'er up!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I prefer to rely on http://www.hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
We really don't have anything to worry about unless they decide to fire the LHC up on 12/21/12 at 11:11.
Don't rush me, Sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.
Skynet> Segmentation fault, Core dumped++CARRIER LOST++
You speak London? I speak London very best.
If the probability estimate given by an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then the estimate is suspect.
The headline says "Miscalculation Invalidates LHC Safety Assurances", yet the quote from the abstract seems to say that because arguments are sometimes "flawed" (terribly squishy word, that), it follows that for crucially important calculations we have to...well, the abstract doesn't say what we should do, and there's no link to the actual article. (Maybe there's a good reason for the latter.)
This amounts to the assertion that if an estimate is about something very important, then we can't trust the estimate, because some estimates are mistaken. In other words, we can't make estimates about important things—just trivial ones.
Unless someone produces the article in question, and unless it actually makes a more substantial argument than I quoted, I vote this a waste of my time on the part of whoever submitted it. May the rats eat your mail.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
How could you know that?
If you are a subscriber, then the only way that you know it is available to non subscribers is the change in title colour. If you are not a subscriber, then you don't know what the subscribers-only titles look like.
Unless, of course, only _one_ of your sock puppets is a subscriber!
Lock the wife and the dog in the boot of the car.
Return one hour later.
Who's happy to see you?
The advancement of science is more important, at least for me.
If a black hole were created.
Uh, let me rephrase that.
The the safety of the LHC does not depend on a single calculation.
For a black hole created by the LHC to destroy the earth essentially requires everything we know about physics to be wrong.
First, can it even create them? The Standard Model says no - not even close. A certain category of String Theory models say maybe. This same models predict that these black holes are everywhere, being created all the time, even here on Earth.
Will black holes evaporate? They certainly should. If we are wrong about this than in all probability we are wrong about being able to create them at all as well - and we should hope we are, since they'd have swallowed up the universe by now if they were dangerous.
Is a stable micro black hole even dangerous? The numbers I've seen show a black hole like this would behave more or less like a neutrino. Maybe hitting an atom every few thousand or million years. The sun will enter its red giant stage, destroy Earth, and shrink down to a white dwarf before the black hole gains any significant mass. I don't think we will care much at that point.
ok... I would have told you that without a research paper
paranoid person: The LHC is going to cause a black hole!
scientist: No, the LHC is not going to cause a black hole.
paranoid person: The chances of a scientist being wrong is 10%, therefore there is a 10% chance that the LHC will cause a black hole!
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
Please, whoever is in charge, leave this nonsense off the front page. Misleading titles and articles written by people who just want attention do not help anyone out.
If it swallows the earth, well, it will probably happen so fast it will make no difference to me anyway. But if it takes after nuclear bombs, well, let's just say I'm glad this thing is on the other side of the world from where I am.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I think this article's argument is being extended beyond its bounds. While 1 in 10,000 physics papers may be wrong, this does not suggest that there's a 1 in 10,000 chance that gravity is a repulsive force, or that carbon has eighty seven electrons. If one in 10,000 papers in pure mathematics was wrong, would be able to fairly argue that there's a 1 in 10,000 chance that non-commutative operators do not exist?
I mean to say, the LHC safety argument is based on the conclusions of a lot of research. If we reasonably suppose that it is only one thousand papers, and that at least half of those have to be wrong, then that's 1 in 10,000 to the power 500, or 1 in 10 to the power 2000. For comparison the number of protons in the observable universe is on the order of, what, ten to the one hundred?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Yeah, but the misleading example wasn't chosen by the headline writer, it was chosen by the ones who wrote the paper, who no doubt are looking for a bit of notoriety, and to abuse the publishing system.
Qxe4
If we assume the black hole swallows the world, there's no problem, is there?
After all, there won't be anybody around to complain about it.
Well, maybe the astronauts on the ISS.
If Jimbo tells you that there's a 1% chance that your tire will go flat if you don't fix it, that's not 1% if Jimbo is wrong 50% of the time. At best, it's 50.5%.
But you assume that Jimbo's being wrong means that the probability of failure is 100%! It's not necessarily. In fact, Jimbo might be wrong in that the probability of a flat tire is actually 0% -- in which case, his being wrong has helped you. If this is the case, then the total probability is 0.5%, much better than 1%. This is the best case; 50.5% is the worst case, and neither is "more likely", because we don't know what the conditional probabilities are. It's this fallacious reasoning -- that if the theory is wrong, the probability of the event must be greater -- that make this article technically true, but useless. We cannot handpick these probabilities. From the TFA (not the abstract):
The other unknown term in equation (1), P(X|not A) [read: the probability of the catastrophe given we're wrong], is generally even more difficult to evaluate, but lets suppose that in the current example, we think it highly unlikely that the event will occur even if the argument is not sound, and that we also treat this probability as one in a thousand.
(emphasis and comment mine). I disagree. This probability is impossible to evaluate, and so this paper means nothing.
The LHC paper has been 'published'. It has been peer reviewed up the butt. It has not been withdrawn. It obviously then falls into the 'other' 999/1000. Like slashdot is fond of saying: there is nothing to see here, move along.
Prior to the Three Mile Island accident, the Rasmussen report (WASH-1400) calculated that chances of an accident severe enough to cause core damage had been calculated as one in 20,000 per reactor per year.
The accident happened three months after the reactor was first put into commercial operation.
I don't suppose there's any way of knowing for sure that the Three Mile Island really wasn't a one-chance-in-20,000 (or one in 80,000, given that it only operated for 1/4 of a year), but it does not give me confidence in the ability of experts to calculate the probability of very-low-probability, very-high-consequence events.
More to the point... it's quite disconcerting to read that it's now believed that the black holes can last far longer than was previously thought. It suggests that they don't have a very good handle on the physics yet.
It's sort of like saying "The Titanic is safe, because it will be traveling in waters without icebergs. Oops, we've just discovered it will be traveling in waters with icebergs, but it doesn't matter, because it won't sink even if it hits one."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Seriously, nothing to see here. This is truly an embarrassment to Slashdot (if that's even possible). Just move along.
I vote this a waste of my time on the part of whoever submitted it.
But this is /., where neither the editors nor most of the readers know any science.
Obviously the article is stupid. By their reckoning because people are often wrong about what will happen when they cross the street no one can argue that the world won't be destroyed the next time I cross the street despite the fact that I cross the street every day without the world ending.
No one who isn't completely brain dead would describe this as "truly frightening," but I guess there are a lot of brain dead people around, including all the /. editors.
The point of the article, rather, is to do exactly what it has done, which is generate page-views for the site. I'm told there's advertising here now, although as I use Firefox with NoScript I don't see any of it.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
well, the abstract doesn't say what we should do, and there's no link to the actual article
Try clicking on "PDF only" directly under the big word "Download" in the top right corner of the abstract page.
(Maybe there's a good reason for the latter.)
Yes, they really tried hard to hide the link... :)
I know that this is completely offtopic and all, but it is driving me nuts. Since 3 days ago, the new slashdot dynamic discussion is not working in firefox any more. I tried several versions, and short of completely uninstalling it and removing all preferences, something which I do not wish to do, nothing works. The floating widget is gone, and I cannot dynamically load comments. What can I do?
Okay seriously?
The probability that Jimbo is wrong is unrelated to the probability of your tire failing. If jimbo says that you have a 1% chance of your tire failing, but there's a 50% chance that jimbo is wrong we can reach the following conclusion: There is a 50% chance that your tire has a 1% chance of failing. There is a 50% chance that your tire has some other probability of failing. Some other probability of failing includes values such as 0%, .5%, and 2%. It also includes a 100% probability of your tire failing.
However, we have to assume that Jim isn't pulling the 1% figure out of his ass. If your tire was 100% likely to fail, we can still assume that Jim based his statement on a reasonable analysis. Perhaps Jim didn't notice a nail in your tire, but without knowing the quality of Jim's inspection of your tire, or without having access information Jim doesn't have, it's hard to say that he has a 50% chance of being wrong.
Finally, in some cases a professional will include a certain amount of leeway in his figure. Chances are, Jim fully inspected the tire and doesn't see any reason why it would fail prematurely. Chances are, that 1% is left as wiggle room in case of invisible manufacturing defect or a mistake in his evaluation. In this case, Jim has already factored into his evaluation the chances that he's incorrect.
The LHC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lhc) has a collison energy of in the TeV scale (tera = 10^12)
The Pierre Auger Observatory (http://www.auger.org/observatory/) records one 10^19 eV hit per km^2 a year, just on earth. If that hasn't turned up any major anomalies in our solar system or even in the major mass centers in our close vicinity over the billions of years it's been happening then I would like an explantion why.
Every single day the earth is bombarded with particles of far higher energy than those the LHC could ever come close to producing. We've observed cosmic rays with energies that are several orders of magnitude higher than the LHC can ever come close to producing. The Pierre-Auger project will probably reveal that we're hit by far more of them, and might even tell us where they're coming from. So if the LHC were capable of producing a world ending event, we already wouldn't be here. Sure, "scientists meddle with forces they don't understand" sells papers, (and let's face it, if we DID understand them, we wouldn't need to meddle) but we all do that. How many of you know exactly how the computer sitting on your desk works, down to the excitation states of silicon? Yet you still use them and don't worry about them causing the world to end, because you know that it just isn't possible. The same analysis works for the LHC.
So what if its wrong... we're still going to end up dead one way or another... personally in around, say 50 or 60 years or so for a reasonable stab in the dark or as an entire species I'd give us another couple of centuries if that before someone goes 'wouldn't it be cool if we tried this'.
Even if we survive at some point either the sun is going to go pop or the galaxy is going to crash into another one (and boy, I'd hate to see the insurance paperwork for that claim let alone tried to decide blame and whether the milky way is a right off or could be repaired).
My vote is even if there is a chance which isn't as slim as first thought we should still go for it.
(And totally off-topic aren't the odds of winning the UK ((49^48^47^46^45^44^43) to 1) lottery somewhere in the same order of magnitude as the original odds?)
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
isn't that racist?
why is this modded insightful?
If CERN leaves the window open long enough by failing to produce real collisions in the LHC that don't destroy the planet the alarmists WILL achieve their goals and get it shut down. Have no doubt. Politicians of all stripes thrive on alarmist nonsense. This 'story' is exactly the sort of double-speak that can lend just enough credibility to the alarmist argument to get the ball rolling.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
It's called the financial market.
They do make a point, but there are errors and oversights in the article. The overall effect is that the article is really meant to bash their "example" case of the LHC.
Let's see... here is one of the first errors. (a scientific paper can't) "take into account the possibility that it is in error."
Maybe, someone should start selling black hole insurance policies. The payout is $1,000,000 if your house gets swallowed by a black hole.
Quick! Protect yourself, your family, your house, in the event an evil LHC black hole swallows them. The premium is $100/month ...
You can't really know until you've tried it. Statistical information requires data from previous experimentation. Are these people really scientists?
All of these articles about doomsday scenarios involving the LHC seems to point to the discover of the missing step:
1) Write obscure/specialised audience article
2) ?
3) Main stream readership
? = Add LHC blackhole to the title - sweet!!
With all this uncertainty, it does however highlight two certainties.
First, they have proved they can make mistakes. (While this should be obvious, it is however so often assumed that as they are the best of us, then they must know what they are doing).
Second, it proves they do not know precisely what they are doing. (Again this should be obvious, (as there would be no point in building the LHC, if they knew precisely what was going to happen). But it again highlights how its assumed they do know what they are doing, when in fact they cannot know).
This doesn't prove the LHC is dangerous, but it does prove they cannot prove the LHC isn't dangerous.
At the same time, we have theories which can show possible dangers. Now possible doesn't mean probable, but it also doesn't mean impossible.
Even the argument about atmospheric collisions is flawed, as the set of conditions inside the LHC is different to in the atmosphere. For example atmospheric collisions are very unlikely to have any chance of many Higgs Bosons in collision with each other whereas in the LHC it is possible, and thats just one example difference. Also we have no idea how multiple Higgs Bosons will behave or decay in groups or if it will allow them to interact or merge with other particles and how continuing collisions would affect them).
I don't believe they would ever stop these experiments, as too many people involved with the science (and the money behind the LHC) have such intense desire to learn from the experiments. But I do at least hope, they use extreme caution and so only slowly, (over a period of a many months) move to (even currently possible) higher energy collision experiments, in very small increments. While its easy to assume they will, they have shown too many times how worried they are other experiment teams are going to get to the noble prize winning results first, so they do have extreme pressure on them, to rush into the higher energy experiments to show results fast).
This is the only experiment in human history where we cannot learn from our mistakes. We have to be 100% certain it is safe, before each new step up is even attempted. (Too many mistakes have already been made and we have yet to even get into the more possible dangerous aspects of the experiments).
I'm not terribly worried about a one in ten thousand chance of the world being destroyed by the LHC. The ones that you really have to worry about are the one in a million chances.
Yeah, maybe if we miniaturize this enough, it would be a light saber. Hmmm... if we enlarge it enough, maybe it could be a Death Star cannon.
Come here, asteroid. Just a little closer...
There *is* a link to the article. Click on "PDF only" to the right of the abstract.
No, it's not a mistake. It all comes down to the fact that there are two general types of interpretations of probability:
Basically, you're treating this as an argument about probability in the first sense, when it is really about probability in the second sense. The argument is that even if your formulas lead you to asssign a degree of confidence of .00000000000001 to the proposition that the LHC will not destroy the Earth, that means very little if we assign a degree of confidence of .000001 to the proposition that you are wrong.
The point now, which other posters in this thread have made in other ways, is that the frequency model for probability theory is not relevant here, because this situation is not like a coin toss. For the situation to be like a coin toss, we would have had to do something like run the LHC a gazillion times, and observe how many of those times it ended up destroying the Earth. Therefore, the probabilities must be interpreted as degree of belief, and the number produced by any formula must be tossed out if the probability of getting the formula wrong is bigger than that number.
The assumption you're making here is that the number is the "probability of the event." Again, it is not; it is the degree of belief warranted to a specific proposition, given some other information.
Are you adequate?
The linked article summary makes the quite logical proposition that if your estimated safety margin is much smaller than the chance that your estimate is wrong, then your real safety margin is equal to the chance that your estimate is wrong. The summary of the paper seems to imply that they take a mathematical approach to estimating the chance that something is wrong.
The headline, while technically correct, is intentionally inflamatory. And I would estimate there is a 90% chance of this being used incorrectly. But the underlying theory seems valid, assuming that you can create a solid statistical system to estimate a logistical margin of error.
The ______ Agenda
Their whole study is voodoo. This isn't physics, it's just math. Simple math doesn't have grey areas.
The maximum output for the LHC is in the 10^15eV range. That's the same as many cosmic rays. In fact, the rate of cosmic ray impact at about 10^15eV is about one impact, per square meter of the Earth's surface, per year.
The Earth's surface area is 5.10227658 × 10^14 meters. We can assume cosmic rays have been pouring in at roughly the same rate for about 4.6 billion years, or the age of the Earth.
That means, we have not seen a "Earth Ending Event" in 2.34704723 × 10^24 chances. And that ignores that there's a large portion of cosmic rays that come in with an energy GREATER THAN 10^15eV.
There's no gray area here. Even assuming that we've gotten incredibly lucky and the very next cosmic ray impact on the Earth will cause a black hole, ... oops, not that one, no the next one, oh wait (never mind)... The odds of any single collision causing a black hole event would be at best in the range of 1:1x10^24. That's not one in a hundred billion, that's:
1 : 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
That's one in a septillion. That's close to the number of stars in the visible universe. This whole thing is nothing but a ridiculous anti-science rant.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
A black hole CAN NOT BE CREATED By US!!! Even if several thousand atome worth of matter were smashed together into an area one millionth of an atomic nucleus, one thousand atoms worth of gravity doesn't amount to anything in the scale of the real world. even if these atoms stayed in that configuration for many seconds or minutes, they still don't have enough mass to create gravity that could start pulling in other matter, especially since the collisions are set-up in a very high vacume and all the surrounding matter (sensors etc.) are bolted very tightly to a very sturdy base. The fact that people continue to debate this issue just astounds me. A tiny bit of concentrated matter is still only a tiny bit of matter, no matter how much you consentrate it! Remember, a true black hole has the mass of a star in an area the size of a single atomic nucleus, so that's some pretty consentrated mass. You can hang a lead ball on a 2000 foot string next to a granite mountain face and only barely detect the deflection of the ball on the string. Gravity is a very weak force people.
Keep passing the open windows...
People noticed some decades ago that failure analyses seemed to predict failures with much less frequency than failures actually occurred. Why? Because the failure analyses themselves have some frequency with which they're wrong (rest on incorrect assumptions, themselves contain errors, etc.). Furthermore, failures can come not only from poor design, but poor implementation, poor initial data (e.g. the site wasn't what you thought it was like), etc. If you want accurate estimates of the overall likelihood of failure, as you generally do, modern failure analysis tends to take an empirical, whole-system view, in which no component of the process is assumed a priori to have a zero error rate.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Can /. stop linking to papers on the Arxiv. Any one can publish ANYTHING on the Arxiv. It is not a reputable scientific source and /. should stop treating like one.
It's both right and wrong. The conclusion that we can't trust the probability of disaster if we got it wrong is correct...bloody obvious, but correct. The part where they use the population of the Earth to determine whether the LHC "risk" is acceptable is frankly insane. This seems to suggest that if Bird flu wipes out half the population then the "risk" of running the LHC is suddenly now more acceptable?
...if someone publishes a paper saying that water isn't wet then there's a high probability of not being wet. It's completely obvious to anyone without a vested interest in some crackpot physical theory that the LHC is nowhere near powerful enough to produce black holes and that the whole black hole scare is nothing but a bit of creative writing. If someone publishes this fact, it doesn't suddenly become unreliable.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
As one of the authors of the paper in question, I'd like to point out that the headline and summary are very misleading. We have *not* identified any particular miscalculation and nor have we claimed to. Indeed, we are impressed by the recent safety report and agree that it is very unlikely that there will be a disaster.
The basic point of our paper is that what we really want to know is the chance of the disaster happening, but the reports give us the chance of it happening given a large number of physical assumptions. These probabilities are not the same, because there is a small but real chance that there is a flaw in these assumptions. This need not be due to any mistake on behalf of the physicists but may be like Lord Kelvin miscalculating the age of the Earth because nuclear fission and fusion were not yet known. Think of it this way: in a random sample of 1,000,000 cutting edge scientific articles that look as reliable as the LHC safety report, how many of them are likely to have flaws that invalidate their reasoning? This is especially pertinent as the safety report for the LHC's predecessor (the RHIC) failed to take into account anthropic considerations.
Of course even if the argument is flawed, we are still probably safe. We have indeed dealt with this point in the paper. The overall risk is very small, but larger than the raw calculations suggest, and non-negligible when there are 6.5 billion lives at stake. We thus urge caution and a reassessment of the safety of the LHC taking these considerations into account.
I encourage you all to read the actual article, which goes into many of these points in detail:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0810.5515v1
Given enough time, 100% of all scientific theories have turned out to be false.
The authors of this paper neglected to include errors working against their desired outcome (oddly, one of the main points of their paper). This really comes up in their argument that inconsequential actions with no "plausible" mechanism of catastrophe should not be treated by their theory. The example they give is dropping a pencil: there's no way to know whether dropping or not dropping a pencil could destroy the planet. Plausibility is a tricky thing, and there are certainly situations where knowledge of advanced physics could help save life as we know it. What if we *need* to do this experiment to prevent the destruction of the planet? I have no idea what the probability on that is, but by their arguments, it is nearly the same as the probability that running the experiment will destroy the earth (their argument is essentially that extremely small probabilities should be replaced in favor of the measured probability that the relevant group, in this case LHC physicists, is wrong).
Thus the argument comes to: is it plausible that we may need to know advanced particle physics in the future to prevent catastrophe. I think it's certainly plausible. They strangely propose a 90% error on themselves, which would actually make the risk of not doing the experiment much higher than the risk of doing it (LHC physicist error is around 0.3% in their higher estimations).
Fun bar conversation. Bad science.
Parent is quite correct. I read the paper expecting to find sophisticated calculations about the properties of micro black holes, and instead I found a rather pedestrian discussion of probability theory.
The basic argument for the safety of the LHC still stands: nature has frequently produced collisions at much higher energies than we can ever hope to achieve in the LHC, many such occurring in the Earth's atmosphere, and yet the Earth has stayed around long enough for intelligent (or maybe not so much) life to evolve here.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Along with the other comments here, I would also like to point out that arXiv is _not_ peer reviewed. It's really frustrating the amount of citations from arXiv I've seen lately. People need to take everything from arXiv with a grain of salt. Sure, arXiv is there to spark discussion, but until it ends up in a peer reviewed journal, treat it as hearsay.
So your arguments are based on probability i see. sadly the entire article also works in the way that you can replace black holes with giant strippers and it still works, there is no evidence that black holes will be created, you cannot prove a negative, therefore there are no studies looking into how probable it is, for that would be a waste of time. and i am not a blogger, so of course my intelligence is lower than the "journalist" and even i can see his flaws!!
Don't we also have to consider that this study might be wrong?
You know how we haven't found any life "out there" ?
What if there is/was life out there.. but they all progress to the point where they all build a LHC.. and it creates a black hole that swallows their planet.. leaving no trace? :D
At Uncyclopedia we made fun of it.
Including Sci Fi references:
"No! Davros, you can't!"
~ Doctor Who on switching on the LHC
"The Large Hadron Collider is a particle accelerator that has not yet destroyed the world.[1]"
I think the first sentence pretty much sums up what it is and what it possibly can do.
Some people have a theory that at least some of the black holes in the universes used to be Earth like planets until they invented a LHC device which made small black holes that quickly became giant black holes and swallowed their planet and then later their star. That is why there is no intelligent life, each planet that reached our current stage of technology developed a LHC that either destroyed the planet or made a big a** large black hole that swallowed the planet and its star.
Of course miniaturizing it into a planet sized black hole gun, we can use it as a weapon and aim and fire black holes at enemy planets, swallowing them into the man made black holes or even create a black hole bomb.
It is tempting to just withdraw all US and EU troops from the middle-east and then drop a LHC black hole bomb on them and see it wipe out part of the planet and sacrifice innocent lives to finally get rid of terrorists living their and their support from dictatorships that use oil money to fund terrorist networks. But doing so would be highly immoral and unethical, killing billions of lives and destroying what natural resources are available there.
Which is why we should propose a ban on black hole weapons just like we want a ban on nuclear bombs.
What if Iran invents their own LHC? The horror, the horror!
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Who would remember if we all died?
At the end of days, at the end of time.
When the Sun burns out will any of this matter.
Who will be there to remember who we were?
Who will be there to know that any of this had meaning for us?
And in retrospect I'll say we've done no wrong.
Who are we to judge what is right and what has purpose for us?
With designs upon ourselves to do no wrong,
running wild unaware of what might come of us.
The Sun was born, so it shall die, so only shadows comfort me.
I know in darkness I will find you giving up inside like me.
Each day shall end as it begins and though you're far away from me
I know in darkness I will find you giving up inside like me
Without a thought I will see everything eternal,
forget that once we were just dust from heavens fire.
As we were forged we shall return, perhaps some day.
I will remember you and wonder who we were.
I wrote about this in the last post, it seems as though someone was listening, even if i didn't get a score.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1102267&cid=26587923
The earth is bombarded daily with cosmic rays literally billions of times more energetic than anything LHC will produce. There is nothing going on at LHC that hasn't been happening continuously in our upper atmosphere since the very formation of the earth.
In my book, that qualifies as "there is no risk of any significance whatsoever from such black holes"!
-JS
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity...
1. We have discovered and confirmed neutron stars. 2. Neutron stars have a density on the order of atomic nuclei, the strong force and electroweak forces keep gravity from completely collapsing the matter into a singularity. 3. Supermassive black holes found in things like AGN (Active Galactic Nuclei) can produce particles with energy on the order of 10^19 eV, as compared to the LHC which can produce particles with energy on the order of 10^12 eV. Some of these energetic particles inevitably strike neutron stars as they do our atmosphere. 4. Neutron stars exist. This means that with 7 orders of higher energy and a much larger particle target, black holes still have not formed and sucked up all neutron stars. Given the frequency with which ultra high energy particles are observed in our own atmosphere, this should occur a relatively short time after a neutron star was first formed. So the point: LHC cannot make black holes which suck up the Earth thereby ending human life because neutron stars exist and are not short lived.
What other information does she have about you, and what is the conditional probability of you beating her given that information?
As one adds more information about you to your wife's model, her probability assignments must be revised to account for that information. For example, if there are specific personality features in men such that men who lack them strongly tend not to beat their wives, and you clearly do not have those personality features, your wife would need to revise her estimate downwards that you might beat her.
Your rhetorical question only truly has effect if the only facts that your wife brought into the decision were that (a) you are a man, and (b) one in fifty men beat their wives. A woman that decided to marry a man knowing nothing else about him would not universally be judged to be acting very rationally.
Are you adequate?
I used to be subscriber. I haven't renewed for a couple of months due to a tightening of my budget as a result of the economic crash. Surely you can understand that. ;)
My blog
Dammit... better cancel the hookers and blow.
greed@All_Evils:~#
In the LHC case we have pretty much the same set of information being analysed by different people but using the same science, we then don't gain anything except verification of calculations. Even then, scientists very seldom run all their calculations from scratch but use common packages (MathCAD etc) and models. If they all run the same calcs then that's hardly verification.
What is far more important in the LHC case is this: Do scientists have sufficient understanding of the laws of physics? Asking them is pointless because they don't know how much they don't know and are thus incapable of making a reasonable guess as to whether something will happen that exceeds the bounds of their knowledge.
What we're talking about is more possibility than probability.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Whoever wrote this headline has an agenda. This is simply the abstract of a paper that analyzes the validity of uncertainty calculations and uses the LHC as an example of how to perform a better uncertainty calculation.
Real applications have nothing to do with the LHC but instead are likely to involve failure probabilities in safety systems and other situations where models are used and occasionally given unreasonably low uncertainties.
In short, this paper probably has grand applicability to software in products adherent to IEC 61508 and no applicability to the LHC. Try this example: you estimate the mean time between failures of your code to be 20,000 hours plus or minus 1000 hours. Your colleagues know you make completely boneheaded mistakes in 50% of your calculations. This means that given your work, the conditional probability of the actual answer being 20,000 hours plus or minus 1000 is a lot lower than it otherwise would have been and this conditional probability is not the same thing as the probability of the actual event.
Follow the link in the post which says (abstract). Go to the top right hand corner of the page which subsequently appears, by the magic of the internet. There is a link which says 'PDF Only'. This will not lead you to reports on a pro-adobe march.
People are really worried about these black holes, but they could be our solution to conquering the vastness of space. Regarding your skepticism of FTL travel, you might want to consider the possibility of USING the black holes for the purpose of traveling great distances. Forget worm holes for now, but consider the Event Horizon surrounding these miniature black holes. If we can create the black holes surrounding ourselves (or a small craft), then we can accelerate approaching c to create relativistic effects for the occupants of the craft. If we can create the artificial black hole surrounding a craft that is already in motion in space, then it will continue to travel for millions of years while the occupants only experience a short span of time.
Well, that kind of screws up their relationship with life on Earth, which will be millions of years advanced by the time the explorers find another civilization in the Andromeda Galaxy or elsewhere. I've got a solution for keeping them in the same timeline. (I'm working on a patent for this whole system, so please don't try to steal this before I can bring it to market.) We'll need to surround the entire solar system with a black hole to match the relatavistic effects travelers are experiencing in their interstellar craft. We can't just enclose the Earth, because the Sun will go nova within minutes of us sitting inside our cozy Event Horizon. We have to preserve the Sun as well as all the other planets.
This capability will be the greatest technological advancement of humankind. When we can control time via relativistic effect, we can solve a LOT of problems. For instance, if you want a googleplex of CPU hours to be produced by a machine, you can send it outside the black hole enclosing the solar system and have it return in just a few minutes. Meanwhile, while it was outside, it ran your computations for hundreds of thousands of years.
CERN is just the first step.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
We all decided to buy war machines instead of going into space with that momentum we had in the 60s. Maybe we could have the technology to push this bad boy out in space so if it DOES create a black hole, it can't eat the earth and gain mass, only the collider itself, which presumably isn't massive enough to start sucking in distant objects. Any physicists want to clarify? Do we need to be inside the ionosphere/have gravity for this equipment to function properly?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
FOR SCIENCE!
An author of the paper in question speaks up to clarify his work from the grossly miss-representative headline and summary, and in 3.5 hours it gets modded +2 Insightful? I think this needs an Informative and an Underrated, pronto.
(Slashdot: Even the submitters don't RTFA anymore.)
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Of all the ways we could destroy the world research into basic science is the most noble way. I'm not worried about the LHC when there are many more ignorant and brutish ways that are more likely.
has anyone ever thought about why we do not observe any signs of intelligent life in the galaxy?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Proponent : Oh, you fool! Smokestacks are the sign of prosperity! Modern science is bringing you low cost energy and consumer goods! What could go wrong!
Proponent : Hey, instead of using whales for oil, why not get with the program, you luddite, and get it from the ground? Nothing could go wrong!
Proponent: Oh, what are you, a fireman or something? Trains are obsolete! Get onboard with the modern car! What could possibly go wrong!
This is my sig.
There are several flaws in the articles reasoning:
1. Retracted papers are retracted for many reasons...a small fraction of which is because the fundamental principal of the paper is wrong. Most often it has to do with smaller things.
2. Prediction is not a zero sum game. Just because someones theory about the risk is incorrect does not mean the worst case scenario will happen.
3. The risk assessment of the LHC is not based on one persons theory, but a collection of scientists theories. As with most scientists, they disagree on a multitude of minor points and some major ones. Despite this the consensus from the vast majority of physicists is that there is little or no danger in smashing particles at the energys used in the LHC. For this to be incorrect the hypotheses of not one but all of the scientists would have to be in error, bringing us back to a very small probability of death by black hole.
The thinking of those who say "no chance of black holes" is totally flawed. If they continue with this LHC bullshit, then all the money and effort of those who worked on this project will have been spent on building the doomsday mechanism that will be responsible for the destruction of the planet and the deaths of all mankind. A tiny black hole will form. Before it can evaporate, it will swallow just enough particles from the surrounding space that it will reach a certain critical mass whereby it will swallow material faster than it can evaporate. Even just slightly faster will be enough, because it will be impossible to handle this tiny object in any way; it will be impossible to destroy it; it will be impossible to discard it. I think it will actually take time for this thing to swallow the whole planet. Maybe days, maybe weeks. Imagine what kind of horror will sweep the planet when everyone worldwide realizes that within hours or days, they will be sucked with immense gravity into this black hole, to their deaths. First there will be a coverup. Within hours the coverup will fail. Chaos will sweep the planet in the short time between the formation of this thing and the total destruction. The entire planet will become a lump of black hole material about the size of a tennis ball.
Everybody seems to be afraid of black holes (small things with great density), but has anyone tried to calculate the density of a black hole? And for a frame of reference, computed the density of an electron?
A rough calculation will show that an electron actually have a density GREATER than a black hole. (Left as an execise for the reader)
So I propose a ban of electrons before we all die!
Basically all the arguments for black hole creation fail when you ask the question, "Where are you going to get all the mass to create the black hole?"
A black hole has much more mass than our planet. Energy released from the destruction of mass is supposed to be very large; even if it were possible to convert energy into mass at the LHC, the mass gain should be negligible.
Everyone is talking about giant black holes that will swallow the earth as if that's a bad thing.
I don't actually understand the panic with these black holes. If everybody dies in a flash, who cares?
The idea of 1 in 10000 papers having errors is silly. Two in three published and peer-reviewed papers have serious errors, as a rule of thumb. It is the way science works, on the cutting edge there are a lot of mistakes.
The original article is about "what if" the calculations are wrong. Slashdot seems to suggest that they're proven wrong. Quite a difference.
makes the LHC safety assurances more or less invalid
Lets hope it makes it less invalid!
We have an example in nature of something far more powerful (more than 10000x more powerful in some cases), that is being bombarding Earth since it appeared, The Cosmic Rays. And we are still here right? There are no black holes or any other space singularities forming around us.
So, please dedicate your minds to something useful instead of putting fear in to people heads.
Every time I see an article like this one, I wish they are right and black hole is going to swallow this stupid world.
I'm at Oxford University and these guys are NOT physicists. I actually know one of them (Toby) in passing, and he is a philosopher (though he was a mathematician), and the other two are also philosophers. You can actually check this publicly at www.ox.ac.uk under "contact people".
They clearly haven't the faintest idea what the probabilities they are giving values to in the paper actually of total destruction are, and seem to have only a very basic knowledge of physics. Frankly, their actual estimates of the probabilities in question are insultingly arrogant.
But how likely is it that Jim is 49x out on his estimate?
THAT is the voodoo shit going on in the paper.
Or if it produces a goose that lays golden eggs?
I mean, if you're going to say "What if X happens" and X isn't going to happen, why stop at boring old X="long lived microscopic black holes"?
If you're making shit up, make it GOOD.
PS the answer is that the chances of any matter falling in to this black hole would constitute about 1 atom every 100,000 passes through the earth, each pass taking a couple of days. To reach the 10^24kg of the earth would take thousands of times longer than the age of the universe.
The other anwser is: what if 0.001% of the energy of the collision wasn't converted? After all, if they aren't going EXACTLY STRAIGHT ON toward each other, there's some momentum left over. And that momentum would have such a small mass move at several hundred times the escape velocity of the earth, hence the mincro black hole would pass once tops through the earth then continue on into outer space.
It's good to ask questions, but these questions have already been answered... endlessly
Worse yet, the study in question has NOTHING to do with the LHC. A bunch of journalists decided that it'd be more interesting to continue the doomsday meme. Pathetic
Correct.
Not just one scientist would have to be wrong but all 10,000 working on the LHC.
Even worse; Over 100,000 papers and supporting experiments would have to be wrong.
I guess they are trying to say;
We got more bogus papers that state that the LHC is unsafe than you got papers that prove the LHC is safe. So we got a better chance of being correct!
Just like the tabacco industry, for every person in a white cote proving us wrong we get 4 that say the opposite.
The headline and summary are misleading but the main point of the paper stands. Once we are talking about probabilities of one-in-a-million or less, other second order terms come into effect.
Example: the probability of the blood "not being from OJ Simpson" was declared to be "one-in-six-billion". Well at those orders of magnitude the probability of an unknown-to-him twin brother are higher than that. Of course I'm not claiming he has one. In all likelihood he doesn't, it's just that the probability of that event is around 1-in-100 million, which far outweighs the 1-in-6,000,000,000 given by the genetics "expert".
So the correct thing to say is that the chances of the blood not being OJs is one-in-100,000,000. Good enough for me to convict and scientifically accurate. The other figure is nonsense.
How do they calculate probability of something that never happenned?
LHC is an experimental device, the scientists built it in order to learn new things about universe. Honestly, they don't know exactly what will happen when they start it, and they want to know what happens. This process is called 'an experiment'.
If the scientists knew what will happen inside, they wouldn't have to built LHC in the first place.
Again, how precisely can they calculate probability of something they're not sure what it does?
I'm not insane. My mother had me tested.
You cannot add together or combine the probabilities resulting from mutually exclusive conditions, ie. P(X|A) and P(X|~A). It's equivalent to arguing from a false premise in order to "prove" a falsehood.
And quite apart from misuse of the equation, P(X|~A) doesn't even have a value, since a probability cannot be assigned in the absence of a valid argument.
Hey, they only need to be right once.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The article is simply noting that there is a difference between known risks and unknown risks, and not all risks that we classify as "known" are actually known.
Let me give you a prime example that my brother ran into as he was working towards a PhD in Atomic Physics, which is quite ironic.
When you combine data sets in order to get averages, standard deviations, and the like, there is one set of equations that you should use if you know the size of each data set.
There is entirely a different set of equations that you should use, if you *don't* know the size of each data set.
Typically, only the second of these is published as "the rule for combining data sets", probably because the first case is trivial. But because only the second of these is published, often researchers combine data sets of known size using the wrong set of equations. There errors typically aren't all that large (though they can be). That was where my brother ran into the problem, chasing down errors that shouldn't have shown up.
Right there is a risk that is classified as known, which is actually unknown.
Now, the original article is claiming that we are ignoring secondary probabilities of error. For numerical calculations, that is quite normal, since the magnitude of r^2 is much less than the magnitude of r, for small r. But for theoretical conclusions, it is not always valid. Sometimes very distinct features are brought out by the 2nd-order calculations (such as the charge/mass ratio of a unitary spin black hole).
Indeed, the fact that we are ignoring this, is itself an error in theory.
It was similar flaws in theory that led to launching the Challenger (first order approximation: we haven't lost a shuttle yet, therefore it is safe.) Not only that, but the problem is endemic with government-sponsored research. LHC is government-sponsored. Therefore, my own first-order approximation is that the LHC is subject to the same flaws in groupthink as NASA.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Created by extint civilizations who had experiments with devices ? such as LHC ? :)
We will know soon ! (or not)
I dont know if its a coincidence, but didnt the economy tank the second they switched it on...
Maybe future sharemarket knowledge traveled through time into peoples heads and they got a clue, SELL NOW, its all a con and ponzi scheme, all shares are worthless.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Most scientific papers are probably wrong. That being so, then the cited paper is also probably wrong. Aside: are black holes a planetary civilization IQ test?
Probably not from the LHC, but you have to go sometime.
Free Martian Whores!
This is a scientific restatement of Pascal's Wager, and the same logic can be applied to any action: if the chances of me blowing up the universe by turning on my blender are not provably zero, I shouldn't use the blender, because the risks [destruction of everything] are so high. It's mathematically and logically sound, but ultimately immaterial: at some point, one has to weigh the evidence with which one is presented against the degree of certainty with which we can determine the risk. Or stop using the blender altogether, and then it's no more frozen daiquiris for any of us.
If the alarmists are correct (and I doubt they are, but I don't know enough about the physics here to form a confident opinion), then what happens? This is more of a thought-experiment than anything else.
Will a black hole suddenly swallow the world so quickly that we'd have no warning? (Would that be the best of all possible bad outcomes?) This would imply that they generated such a large black hole that it grew within a matter of seconds (or perhaps minutes) into some world-swallowing gobbler - or that it generated a black hole that went undetected and fell into the earth until it grew into a world swallowing gobbler.
Would it be possible to generate a black hole that (somehow) gained enough velocity or momentum (from asymmetric gobbling of the earth) to escape from the earth? I.e.: if a black hole swallows stuff on only one "side" (whatever that means for a singularity), would there be sufficient asymmetrical release to eject it from the earth? What happens if it ends up in low-earth orbit? Does that wreck GPS and earth monitoring satellites?
What if a black hole simply orbits inside the earth for a while - would it heat the core as it destroys the matter of the core? How much destruction of matter (E=MC^2) would be necessary to cause significant enough heating to cause an increase in volcanism? How does conservation of momentum apply here? Does the thing orbit closer and closer to the center of the earth as it gobbles more and more of the earth?
Mostly, I wonder if there'll be enough time to panic and really make people's lives terribly awful, or if we'll all just disappear without much warning at all.
In the Biblical book of Revelation, a prophetic account of 1/3 of the stars falling, etc., is mentioned... Suppose the LHC creates enough of a gravitational shift that satellites come down and other undesirable effects? How would someone writing 2000 years ago describe LHC failure?
Yes, there are small places with LOTS of mass, but no, we don't describe the math correctly at this time.
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
If you're going to assign probabilities to arguments as the starting point of the discussion, well, fine.
Cosmic rays shower the Earth with energies that are higher than LHC. These have failed to create black holes that have eaten the Earth. Thus, it is impossible for LHC to create black holes that will eat the Earth.
Probability of this argument being correct? 100%, give or take zero.
Maury
My guess is that this teeny black hole would immediately start falling toward the center of the earth - gobbling up bits of matter that encounter its event horizon as it goes. When it got to the center, its momentum would be fairly high (32 ft/sec/sec accelleration for the entire radius, assuming that the event horizon gobbling up matter effectively reduced any drag/resistance to zero).
Anyway, I'm too lazy to calculate the velocity, but I'd wager that it couldn't overcome the escape velocity of the Earth, so it would "fall" right through the gravitational center of the Earth and then start to be slowed by the gravitational attraction. This process would continue with the black hole gathering more mass as it cuts its way through on repeated oscillations. In fact, it might even end up in some kind of elliptical orbit. This would continue for a long time, until the core of the Earth was eventually replaced by this ever-growing black hole. All this mass moving about would probably cause eccentricities in our orbit and if it gobbled up enough, I wonder if it wouldn't mess up our magnetic fields after a time.
I'm just guessing here, and IANAPP (I am not a particle physicist).
I like these thought experiments... of course, someone with a calculator and more free time than I would probably point out how every word I stated aside from INAPP is utterly wrong. :P
The Digital Sorceress
If Earth-eating black-holes are formed by the LHC and the Earth disappears into the abyss, what will happen to the Space Station? Will it remain in orbit around the hole, or will tidal forces and/or radiation doom it also?
Table-ized A.I.
Here's the original text.
But there's another post here which mentions its origins in the Fermi Paradox, so maybe it's from Enrico Fermi, originally.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Maybe the answer is that each had evolved to doing such physics experiments that their home planets all got chomped by black holes.
.
Now I don't really think this is the case, but to say it happens in nature so therefore we're safe is NOT true. High energy cosmic rays seldom run into thousand ton slabs of steel.
The argument that airless planets also get bombarded is better, but the density of the first few centimeters of surface is, in almost all cases, much less than iron. Then wouldn't neutron stars get blasted to black holes all the time? Well, who's to say they don't? Also, even neutron stars generally have an "atmosphere" made of an accretion disk. So a cosmic ray strike on the surface may still be rare.
Causing a black hole strike on the dense inside walls of the LHC may be one of the few places in the universe where these conditions exist.
Who are the major funders for this project? I think they should at least be in the building when they throw the switch, no?
Has anyone ever thought that we already are in a Black Hole and that it has swallowed the entirety of the galaxies we see?
I did RTFA and the SPECIFICALLY mention LHC.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I am very glad you posted, because I was about to send you my comments by email.
First, I was fascinated by your paper! As a physicist, my limited understanding of probability cames from two decades' struggle and research to decide on what to teach in the first-year Physics Intoductory Laboratory regarding measurement and experimental data treatment.
I believe that your article is a must-read for _any_ first-year university student, be it in natural sciences, medicine, law, engineering or even economics (regarding economics, I am certain you have already read Nassim Nicholas Taleb 's "Black Swan", which deals with the same issues in a different language). Your paper might trigger some ideas on simpler examples teach in order to illustrate the fallacies due to misapplication of formalism and dogmatism.
Please allow me to ask the following clarifications:
1. In your paper you seem to avoid clarifying the concept of "probability". Is this done on purpose? As I see it, most calculations of probability, uncertainty and risk are plagued from both ambiguous use of the concepts themselves and an even more ambiguous and arbitrary use of previous literature's "probability" results. In other words, making a meta-use of your terminology, I think that both a given author's and the literature's i) theory of probability used; ii) specific models applied to the problem; and c) calculations of probability made should be a) explicit and b) compatible.
2. Especially in the case of rare and even unique events, I think one cannot avoid discussing and clarifying the real meaning of probability in those contexts. For example, what is the meaning of the probability of collapse of the Golden Gate Bridge, or the probability of a 10 km asteroid hitting the Earth? I think that in order to calculate such probabilities within the frequentist paradigm, one has to have a sample space of at least 30 such events to produce a somewhat (~10% ???) reliable estimate. So what is the meaning of P(X) according to your standpoint?
3. To be more specific, if X = the catastrophe occurs, can P(X) have any meaning within the frequentist paradigm, when such a catastrophe has never ever happened? (Especially when you do not clarify whether P(X) denotes the "objective" probability of the event or the "subjective" probability of the statement "the catastrophe occurs").
4. Since it appeared to me that you have taken special care to avoid triggering any paradigm wars in your article, should we conclude you have devised or are following some particular unifying approach?
Finally, I think that it would be most instructive if you could provide a historical (or LHC-related) example of risk assessments for the same event according to different paradigms (frequentist, bayesian, mixed, other) and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. This discussion could serve as an enlightning example of the epistemological implications of Figure 2.
Thanks in advance!
If what you were saying was true we could destroy the earth by having a 10 year old do the calculations since they would almost certainly be wrong.
I'm 10 years old, you insensitive clod!
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Unfortunately, I think that the authors' language is a mixture of frequentist and bayesian terminology, because they either don't want to take sides, or they attempt to convince readers that their line of thought applies to all paradigms (or both).
"assuming 50/50" would denote total ignorance, which would be a lie.
The "expert's opinion" you mention would most likely be a frequentist's published estimate. The estimate of a "lay person" is much more close to the bayesian point of view, and therefore in the context of unique events (like LHC) much more sensible.
All "numbers we end up with" are junk, unless the specific model, theory and calculations are made explicit.
And yes, there are very dangerous uses of probability theory. Think of war games, economic crashes, fatal mistakes at hospitals. Unless we all get a real grip of the concepts, we are at the mercy of "experts" and "academics".
Have a look at "What is probability?" in d'Agostini's "Bayesian Primer" (http://www.roma1.infn.it/~dagos/cern/node35.html). I am sure you will like his scepticism, and if you are physics or mathematics inclined, you'll read the rest and see the light like I did 10 years ago.
Yes, yes, but what is it if I look inside the box?
You'll find ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. STUPID!
This was posted on the arXiv blog, and destroys the argument pretty convincingly:
"By vepxistqaosani on Jan 29, 2009
My calculations show that the probability the sun will rise tomorrow is 1; however, since Ord et al. have demonstrated that there is a probability of 1 in 10,000 that physical calculations are wrong, it follows that there is a 1 in 10,000 chance that the sun will not rise tomorrow.
I expect to live another 50 years. Simple probability demonstrates that there is an 84% change that the sun will fail to rise during that time.
But wait! In the 5000 years of recorded human history, the probability that the sun failed to rise at least once is asymptotically equal to 1.
Everything we think we know is wrong!"
I'm pretty sure you can be a subscriber and still hide the (*).
No, that's not a body part.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse-Five
with this theory. Is stupid. Is most stupid theory I ever heard.
So, who's going to write the screen play for a new movie about the end of the earth by black hole with bruce willis as the chief scientist who tries to stop it and, for a change, loses? Naaa. He'd be the only one to stop it somehow, even though all of our deities combined couldn't do such a thing. :)
Having spoken with a noted cosmologist about "Expansion", I have a great deal of respect for the forces involved around the time of the big bang, when in a very small amount of time, a great deal of mass arrived in a big darn hurry. I am not as worried about the creation of a small black hole that lasts a few milliseconds as an event where a huge amount of mass arrives unexpectedly in a very short period of time. This would also be bad, unless of course it happened to be something cool like millions of tons of some precious metal that would benefit personkind. Even then, it would be inconvenient for billions of tons of material to arrive unexpectedly in a small space. A billion tons of diamonds arriving would bum out the diamond merchants. A billion tons of arsenic would create a new supersite. A billion tons of gold would be good for the Swiss national treasury. A billion tons of Viagra would be a WTO problem considering patents and trademarks...
Matter being drawn into the black holes should be accelerated to damn close to the speed of light, and will emit massive amounts of gamma radiation, with a conversion rate that's higher than even fusion.
If we could harness the energy of the gamma emissions around artificial black holes, we'd be have vast energy generating capability, without the pesky fast neutrons that most fusion reactions generate.
...and the only waste by-product is a blackhole at the reactor site? Gee, sign me up...
My favorite quote doesn't fit into 120 characters. Now no one will like me.
They have that now? The power to make black holes in a lab, AND turn them into zombie black holes? Wow.
I'm fascinated by your new zombie scientist cult, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
If studies might be 1,000 times off, this study might be 1,000 times off and the hadron collider odds might be a million times off instead of 1,000 times off. Just my take on this :-)
created last time we built the LHC?
Space Invaders is an addictive game. People used to get obsessed with it.
In Space Invaders, you never win. The aliens never give in and declare you their leader and give you a ticker-tape parade. A game of Space Invaders ends, when, inevitably, you die.
So why was it so popular? Because it was a challenge to take the odds that the game threw at you, and make the very best of them that you possibly could. Some people played competitively to get the best hi-score they could, others just played because the beeps and the aliens and the moving things and new things that appeared at higher levels were fun. For some it was about testing themselves, or about the adrenalin fix, for others it was about discovery, and for another set, it was simply about the joy of experiencing something new.
Same thing with life.
Eric Baird
Same thing with the human race. A massively entwined mesh of billions of silvery slug trails weaving between each other in 4D, charting every peak of civilisation, and every low point.
Sure, at some point, the faded echoes of the ended mesh tail will become too indistinct for others to read or decipher, but that doesn't matter. The record is still there even if there's nobody else who can read it. Individually and collectively, we're all carving our own individual trails directly into the fabric of spacetime.
What you'd like your trail to say is up to you.
Eric Baird
1/10000 is about the same odds as finding a four leaf clover. I have found about 6 of them in 10 years.
Error in principle vs. calculation have been central to the philosophy of science and the origin of statistics for centuries. The only things new here is applying it to LHC data and having the balls to think that they hype so generated for mask the fact that there's nothing new here.
Those unable to produce useful material w.r.t LHC have taken to producing such as this diatribe. Corrtadicting their own assertions they fail to note major failings in the papers containing warnings, such as the recent one that such "mini-black-holes" could persist for seconds of minutes. Calculations repeated by dozens independently have shown that (1) "mini" is misleading -- the size is far less than that of an electron, and (2) at that size it can circle a nucleus for years before having a 50% chance of running into a particle which it can absorb and so grow. Of course (3) (per Hawking) says it can't last near long enough for that to happen.
These flag wavers fall prey to what they accuse of in others and fail to note the long history they subsume unacknowledged or that calculations done without that errors they claim might possibly occur in some instances but don't claim actually did in any particular instance.
I'm saddened this made it this high in the pubs. My undergrads -- psychology, not physics -- have to absorb and report on alpha and beta type errors based on both theory and data analysis. I can only hope this pub made it this far based on the FUD factor and not because such calculations usually are ignored by those in this field, making this actually noteworthy.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Thanks for the link, it's an interesting read.
In this light, I would like to remark the following regarding the article by Ord et al.:
Indeed, it seems they follow a Bayesian or subjective approach - they postulate that we must account for the assumptions used in a probability estimate, by using Bayes formula for conditional probabilities. This seems like a sensible thing to do.
But they are not consistent: in a truly subjective approach, there are no absolute probabilities - only probabilities under some assumptions. Ideally, we should try to make all such assumptions explicit. Yet they use Bayes formula to compute some absolute probability, by including even more hidden assumptions, namely, some default probability in case the original assumption were wrong. What assumptions is that default based on? They don't seem to care suddenly, they just want to water down any expert opinion - if its a low number, make it higher, if its a high number, make it lower.
Terrible!
assignment != equality != identity
Then the situation would be:
Sounds good to me.
... they postulate that we must account for the assumptions used in a probability estimate
If you read more Bayesian stuff, you will see that this is not some author's arbitrary postulate, it's the standard, simple, sensible and straightforward Bayesian way to include previous knowledge in a probability model. In fact it's the only way.
...there are no absolute probabilities - only probabilities under some assumptions
De Finetti's seminal book starts with "Probability does not exist" - meaning that probability is not an intrinsic feature of reality, but a human concept that cannot "exist" i.e. live outside the human mind.
I am sure that the referees to the journal they'll attempt to publish this in are more experts than we are and they'll notice the inconsistencies in language (they truly try to balance on two boats). So the authors sooner or later will have to clarify their approach. This paper is prime stuff for e.g. Foundations of Science. I really hope that the popularity the article gets through /. will force the authors to read our comments and edit their manuscript. The people want to know more!
In the wise words of Donald Rumsfield: There are the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns.
How many times can we roll the dice before our luck runs out?
Every single time. After that, there won't be any more dice to roll, or anyone to roll them if they did exist.
If we had some dice, we could roll them, if we existed.
What a relief!