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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 The Oxford team say that roughly one in a thousand scientific papers have to be withdrawn because of errors but generously suppose that in particle physics, the rate is one in 10,000."
Exactly. We rolled the dice once with the Manhattan Project. Before the first nuclear bomb was detonated, no one could prove with 100% certainty that the bomb would not ignite the entire planet's atmosphere. They could show that it was very unlikely to happen, but not impossible. So the dice were rolled and we got lucky. How many times can we roll the dice before our luck runs out?
How can a hypothetical miscalculation be "massive?"
Try this one: "Jesus Lives."
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
The colective "average man on the street" is a bunch of stupid animals.