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 The Oxford team say that roughly one in a thousand scientific papers have to be withdrawn because of errors but generously suppose that in particle physics, the rate is one in 10,000."

Comments

Re:Meh.... not really a problem

[twostix]

I'll bet my life savings that you wouldn't be so gung-ho if it actually really happened.

But keep up the facade, obviously you've fooled a few people to get to +5.

It's that sort of bullshit arrogant 'superior to the dirty masses I don't care about life, science at any cost' juvenile attitude that feeds the anti-science movement in the wider population. Especially concerning the LHC.

Of course it's completely fake and you just like the dirty uneducated masses hold onto your own insignificant life as vigorously as you can.

There's people here arguing and showing the science and using rational discourse to display why the LHC is not and will not be a problem. That is the correct way. It maybe slow, it maybe tedious and difficult but it's the high ground and will work to keep the wider population at ease.

Telling everyone you're happy for them to all die because you want to advance *your* cause and don't care about your own life is the incorrect way. It's the religious zealots way, and the average person doesn't appreciate being told that they and their families may die for something that's really not that important to them they but should be happy about it because it's for someone elses 'greater cause'.

That's called religion.