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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 The Oxford team say that roughly one in a thousand scientific papers have to be withdrawn because of errors but generously suppose that in particle physics, the rate is one in 10,000."
If TV has taught us anything, we'll soon need Degeneracy Reactors to power our giant robots.
that does not make the odds of an asteroid destroying the earth 1:50...as wrong as the person calculating the odds are, the odds are still going to be incredibly small.
That's because you're assuming a prior probability of asteroid impact, which you're probably estimating from observation (i.e. if you've lived 50 years with no asteroid strikes, that gives you an estimate of the upper bound of the prior).
These guys aren't saying you should disregard priors when you have them -- like with asteroids. But for the LHC, arguably there is no accurate prior because nothing in that energy range has ever been done before.
You should have kept it informative. Think of it as "the Rickroll of science" :)