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The LHC, Black Holes, and the Law
KentuckyFC writes "Now that the physicists have had their say over the safety of the Large Hadron Collider, a law professor has produced a comprehensive legal study addressing the legal issue that might arise were a court to deal with a request to halt a multi-billion-dollar particle-physics experiment (abstract). The legal issues make for startling reading. The analysis discusses the problem with expert witnesses, which is that any particle physicists would be afraid for their livelihoods and anybody else afraid for their lives. How can such evidence be relied upon? It examines the well established legal argument that death is not a redressable injury under American tort law, which could imply that the value in any cost-benefit analysis of the future of the Earth after it had been destroyed is zero (there would be nobody to compensate). It asks whether state-of-the-art theoretical physics is really able to say that the LHC is safe given that a scientific theory that seems unassailable in one era may seem naive in the next. But most worrying of all, it points out that the safety analyses so far have all been done by CERN itself. The question left open by the author is what verdict a court might reach."
Of course, this is relevant because in the event of an LHC-created black hole destroying the planet, we will of course launch into space a "lifeboat" containing a judge, defense and plaintiff lawyers, Rusty the Bailiff to keep everyone in line, and one token normal person to be the plaintiff. Justice will be served no matter what the damage to the planet is.
Assuming the LHC destroys the world with the LHC itself getting swallowed first and all of Earth going next and eventuallyd swallowing the Solar System, what assets would they have left? You should know better than to sue somebody without assets, particularly when you can't hire a lawyer because all your money is gone, all the lawyers are gone, and for that matter, you're gone too.
What's the point of living but to try to understand our universe and find the true answer to life,universe, and everything. Everything else is just fluff.
Everyone knows that after the Earth is destroyed and humanity is wiped off the face of the planet, there will still be cockroaches and lawyers around.
Bailiff: All rise! Judge Periplaneta americana Linnaeus now presiding!
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
You need a considerable amount of mass to create a black hole. Instead what CERN are trying to do is find the graviton, which is simply a super small particle. It will last for a fraction of a nano second, since it won't be stable enough to consume the earth.
All of these lawyer types first have to understand quantum mechanics, general relativity and on top of that M-theory before they can truly wage in on the debate.
What are the chances these guys just want to get their names in the paper?
The LHC will not destroy the world.
What if it just blow up / messed up part of the earth and not all of it how will the court look at that?
Who cares what the American law says ? Its built by CERN, its in the France-Switzerland border ...
It asks whether state-of-the-art theoretical physics is really able to say that the LHC is safe given that a scientific theory that seems unassailable in one era may seem naive in the next.
And yet again, a basic understanding of the fundamental scientific process causes people to say foolish things. "Previous scientific theories were proven wrong, so we shouldn't trust current theories" blah blah blah. Previous scientific theories weren't proven wrong, just incomplete, as has been said thousands upon thousands of time. Under restricted conditions, they are still "right"- in the scientific sense of the word, which is "matches observation to our more precise measurements". OK, so people want to make the, "LHC is an extreme condition and so outside the tested realm of theory." Yeah. No. Not at all. The exact same theory which predicts that black holes could be created predicts that they are also being constantly created in the earth's atmosphere. And the exact same theory predicts that they evaporate via Hawking radiation, etc. You don't get to have it both ways. And this is where people's arguments get really silly: "But, you could be completely wrong!" Yes. I suppose we could. But in that case, we could be wrong in an infinite number of ways. And an earth destroying black hole would require us to be wrong in a very specific way on par with, "Our knowledge of electricity could be wrong and some magical circuit with just the right components will end all of reality as we know it."
Arguing that theoretical physicists would be likely to be biased is, if possible, even dumber than the LHC panic arguments. You don't need a PhD to understand that the whole hysteria is retarded. In fact, suggesting that you do is creating a false dichotomy: either you need to be a particle physicist, or you're just taking their word for it. Seriously, this "analysis" will probably do more harm than good.
Now can we as a society please move on?
The scientific theories that are relied upon to show the LHC is safe may eventually prove to be false, or at least short-sighted. However, these same theories are what led people to consider the possibility of black hole production in the first place. If those theories are taken away, then the reason for concern also disappears.
If we are going to take the prevailing theories to be unreliable, then all that remains is common sense. Someone might raise the concern that a car collision would lead to a devastating black hole, if it happened in exactly the wrong way. There is no reason to take this concern seriously given the number of accidents which the earth has already survived. Similarly, there is no reason to think that the LHC will produce anything more dramatic than the high-energy particle collisions occurring in our atmosphere every day.
Seems to me the same arguments could be made for the "expert witnesses" (and if you take the Climate-Change-will-destroy-humanity crowd at their word, the cost-benefit analysis as well) in the AGW debate.
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
I'm in the process of reading TFA, but if the summary given is correct there's a serious problem. Suppose I'm a nutjob who claims that some new technologies will destroy the world. Say releasing the new Apple tablet. Or maybe the latest Linux security patch. There's some tiny but non-zero probability that I'm correct. If one takesserious the argument as given " that death is not a redressable injury under American tort law, which could imply that the value in any cost-benefit analysis of the future of the Earth after it had been destroyed is zero" then it should hold regardless of the probability of the risk. Essentially this is an unhealthy variant of Pascal's wager which already has lots of problems. What if, for example, I claim that the world would be destroyed if we don't run the LHC? Again, some tiny but non-zero probability. This sort of argument simply cannot be used without clearly ridiculous results.
We're neither dead nor alive so long as nobody looks into this issue. :-)
It had to be an American lawyer. Its a good thing the idiots in this country can't do much about it. There are idiots everywhere but why do OURS have to be so meddlesome? Before the first atomic weapons were used some scientists thought that the explosion would consume the entire atmosphere all around the world. One of the things that guy sites as an example of scientists failing to assess the outcome of an experiment is the bomb that was 15 megatons instead of 5. He claims miscalculations caused it? Yes miscalculations in the sense that they were pretty much guessing like our scientists are doing to some extent. This is why they weren't just like, "aight guys, lets put ALL the plutonium in there...the bigger the better right...?"
IN NO EVENT WILL THE LHC BE LIABLE TO ANY THIRD PARTY FOR ANY SPECIAL, COLLATERAL, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, PUNITIVE, OR ENHANCED DAMAGES ("EXCLUDED DAMAGES"). EXCLUDED DAMAGES INCLUDE COSTS OF INSPECTION, REMOVAL, AND REPLACEMENT COSTS, REPROCUREMENT COSTS (INCLUDING MAGRATHEA'S ADMINISTRATIVE AND PERSONNEL COSTS) OF REPLACEMENT OR SUBSTITUTE PLANETS, LOSS OF GOODWILL, LOSS OF REVENUE OR PROFITS, AND LOSS OF USE, WITHOUT REGARD TO WHETHER LHC HAS BEEN NOTIFIED IN ADVANCE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF ANY SUCH CLAIM OR DAMAGE.
Blah blah blah, there's too much YELLING in this post. Here's some junk for the filter: This Agreement will be binding upon and inure to the benefit of the parties and their respective permitted successors and assigns. Buyer may not assign this Agreement in any respect without the prior written consent of Seller. Seller may assign this Agreement, in whole or in part, or any of its rights or obligations hereunder without notice to or consent by Buyer. Seller may subcontract manufacturing or other work as to any or all Products without notice to or consent of Buyer. The failure of a party to enforce any right hereunder shall not waive that or any other right. If any provision of any Order Document is held to be illegal, invalid or unenforceable, then (i) such provision will be reformed to cure or remove such defect and if not reformed will be severed, (ii) the legality, validity and enforceability of the remaining provisions will not be affected or impaired, and (iii) the parties will endeavor in good faith to replace the severed provisions with valid provisions of the same or similar economic effect. The invalidity of a provision in a particular jurisdiction will not render unenforceable such provision in any other jurisdiction. No amendment or modification to the Order Documents will be effective unless specifically agreed in a writing signed by Seller
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
lawyer dribble with an American generals famous quote, "I am not an atomic playboy." End of story.
I mean they make it sound like when something turns into a black hole it gains "More gravity" and sucks everything around into it which is utterly not true. (If a stellar mass BH went through our solar system the most likely thing it would do to the Earth is distort it's orbit and or move the Sun.) I mean we're talking about creating black holes so small they could literally go straight through a proton and miss all the quarks inside, sucking up nothing. Hey that reminds me, electrons and quarks don't have a size, they're singularities.(Kind of like the things they want to make in the LHC.) However they've never been observed to act like a BH even though you'd think they would. So that makes me think even if they made a singularity that small it wouldn't act like a BH either.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I think the take home lesson is thus: Scientists need to rise above the rabble and babble of human peccadilloes and attempt to be more humble, less confrontational ("Anyone who thinks the LHC is dangerous is a twat") and more rational. The LHC is a good object lesson in this regard. Climate change is another. As a species we are to the point where we can significantly damage the earth and there is no class of human being that is even remotely capable of dealing with these issues. Science, as a body, needs to have it's practitioners step back and avoid the logical fallacies allowed politicians, lawyers, TV pundits and other wingnuts.
Of course, 'Science' isn't going to be able to do this very well because it's composed of irrational, emotional, childish, stressed and fallible humans. But we need to try as best we can. Either that or beam down Mr. Spock.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
AAAHHHH!
How would anyone else ever had the AAAHHHH moment, if you hadn't explained it to us. We are ever so grateful. Allow me, on behalf of all of Slashdot, to thank you.
I know there's a joke in there somewhere, I just can't quite figure it out.
This ain't rocket surgery.
The argument for safety is very simple, and it doesn't require a physicist to make it. Sadly, it does require common sense, which is likely to be absent in this case.
Anyway, here it is: the Earth has been--and continues to be--bombarded by cosmic rays of immensely greater energies than found in the LHC. After billions of years without incident, one can only conclude that any problems must not be very significant, as we are here after all.
We aren't off the hook though; even if the LHC may not be capable of destroying the Earth, the lawyers are certainly doing a fine job.
Is the LHC dangerous. Quite possibly. Will it destroy the world? Ask British physicist Brian Cox: "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat."
I think that sums it up.
The lawyer is basing his findings on a false premise: "any particle physicists would be afraid for their livelihoods". This is not the case. There are a lot of particle physicists that are not working for CERN and whose research does no depend on CERN nor the LHC.
Also the bit about "anybody else afraid for their lives". I am not afraid for my life.
I am neither a particle physicist nor afraid for my life, there is no problem.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
this is a wonderful approach!
it shows the difference between law and progress: law is meant to make society work. it does not have a need to be "right". there is no right. human progress is made by making mistakes and taking risks. law is there to make order and society. we are at a point now where progress means making mistakes that have the potential to take out all of the society that law is meant to enable. the questions are very profound and i will not attempt to answer them, but this is a great way to access them. the same applies to many other topics like nuclear weapons, nano tech, genetics etc, but i have never before seen them put forward so accessible. thank you!
Cost-benefit analysis is inappropriate for an experiment like that in that the worst-case undesirable outcome would result in everyone being dead. A Risk-benefit analysis is the preferred method of determining if an experiment is ethical.
Let us imagine we were doing an analysis of the following game - Someone will pay you one million dollars to take a single bullet, load it into a six shot revolver, spin the cylinder and then point the gun to your head and pull the trigger. A cost-benefit analysis says you shouldn't do this - the risk is your life, or 100% vs one million dollars. On the other hand, a risk-benefit analysis says you have a 83.33% chance of walking away with one million dollars, which is a pretty good bet (admit it, you'd probably do it.)
The LHC is similar. Even the nay-sayers agree the chances of something cataclysmic happening is very low. On the other end, the things we learn about the inner workings of the universe and strange particles could improve life for everyone on earth.
I say to test the LHC on 2012/12/21, so if there is a end of world, we will know (or not)
I like the academic arguments. In this case, its purely academic.
But the problem I have with this guy's approach is that while the likelihood of LHC-created Earth-destroying black holes is infitesimally small, the likelihood of crazy nutjobs picking up his argument as "proof" of LHC dangers approaches 1. Society will always have people with mental disabilities; taking advantage of them doesn't make you look smart - it just makes you look cruel and stupid. In this case, it's fairly obvious he's either oblivious to the problems his statements will create for other people, or he cares more for gaining publicity than the possible problems his statements will create.
There are valid concerns with the global warming debate. I have seen the data, and yes, a cursory analysis of temperature puts us on the downward decline of a 100 year cycle*. However, even a rudimentary understanding of physics dispels any concerns over LHC created black holes. The controversy is manufactured entirely by the press and a few, possibly very stupid, lackeys who go along with them for reasons unknown. I can only speculate the reasons why he can't be bothered to obtain even a first-semester understanding of physics, but I, for one, would not hire anyone as my lawyer who demonstrates not only a complete misunderstanding of physics, but also the inability to even perform a Google search on the subject.
There is another possibility of course; that they'll simply attempt to ignore it.
He forgets a third possibility: that the physicist who does respond will expose his ignorance in a very public and demeaning manner. The more charitable physicists might simply dismiss the charge, but if I had to respond, it would be very difficult for me to refrain from calling him incorrigibly stupid and recommending him for a career digging ditches, as digging himself into a hole is the only talent he's demonstrated. The only recovery possible from such a ludicrous position is to admit you've found Jesus and have changed from your old, vindictive, lying, self.
* - Yes, I understand there are, really, genuinely crazy people denying global warming. However, there are also well-reasoned arguments calling into question the connection between burning fossil fuels and global temperature (for example, we can only account for about half of the carbon burned as fossil fuels; it's going somewhere, but it's not staying in the atmosphere...) But that's nowhere close to the notion of LHC-created black holes destroying the earth. Even if we could create black holes with the LHC, they would possess the same mass and gravitational attraction as their constituent particles - negligible. Unlike global warming, the LHC issue is not a matter of an unresolved scientific question, but rather, a misunderstanding of basic physics.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
the absence of detectable advanced civilizations may result from the inevitable destruction by black holes of such civilizations once they acquire the capacity to build an LHC-like device. Hence, the LHC will destroy the earth.
I think that "Redundant" mod refers to your use of "cockroaches" and "lawyers" as separate.
Myself I'm fearful Neros creepy red matter transport spaceship was ruined so he is now personally overseeing the development of the LHC to destroy the earth from a location other than San Francisco Bay.
Its pretty sad there are still crackpots out there lacking basic knowledge of the relationship between matter/energy and gravity.
if you take 3 minature black holes and place them into the horadic cube ?
Problem solved?
The reason why the LHC physicist are the only ones who've done a risk analysis is because they're the only ones for whom the trouble of formalizing the arguments that are well known in the community is worth it. There are two really simple lines of argument. The first, and best, is that events like what we will be producing in the LHC are not unprecedented. There are many more far more energetic collisions with the atmosphere every day. If such collisions were capable of destroying the planet, the planet never would have made it past the first few million years, let along a big target like Jupiter, the sun, or countless other stars.
The second argument, also, true, is that the gravity produced by a black hole isn't some magical all powerful destructive force. If I were to take the mass of the Earth and to suddenly compress it into a black hole the rest of the solar system wouldn't even notice. It isn't because the Earth is a tiny part of the solar system's mass, either, it's because the gravity outside of a few times the radius of the black hole is the same as though the mass inside weren't a black hole. So a black hole that the LHC might produce would be no more capable of eating the earth than a gold nucleus or a clump of a few thousand neutrons.
... the cumulative IQ of the "jury of their peers". Over 2000? (Imagine the sort of questions that'll be asked of the potential jurors by the defense counsel.) Ah, heck. With the way most courts seem to work nowadays, it'd probably be lucky to break 1000.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
``But most worrying of all, it points out that the safety analyses so far have all been done by CERN itself.''
If we say it's dangerous, we don't get funding. We lose.
If we say it's safe and we're right, we get funding. We win.
If we say it's safe and we're wrong, we'll all be dead and it won't matter.
Therefore, we're gonna say it's safe.
Not saying that there is any risk that LHC will destroy Earth, nor that I believe CERN's analysis went that way, nor even that I believe that CERN really was the only party doing the safety analysis. But having one party assess the safety of its own planned activities, without any independent verification, is a bad idea.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Great, now legal challenges will delay the LHC experiments until December 12, 2012.
I'm not saying that LHC is dangerous, but it would definitely take a government to cause any serious damage to this planet. In a free society, doing anything potentially dangerous would result in you being flooded with demands for transparency and lawsuits from your neighbors (possibly millions of them) and their representatives, making many of the more insane scientific ventures downright impossible here on earth. That's what outer space is for! Most mining and manufacturing would eventually take place there anyway, and dangerous experiments should as well. And once you beat gravity getting offa this rock, getting to the other side of the solar system is no trouble at all.
The analysis discusses the problem with expert witnesses, which is that any particle physicists would be afraid for their livelihoods and anybody else afraid for their lives.
Pardon me, Mr. Lawyer, but you missed one.
The problem with testimony from a lawyer regarding such a potential lawsuit is that any lawyer would assume that a lawsuit and the testimony of opposing expert witnesses is the best way to answer the question.
The folly of this is clearly encapsulated in the statement above. First it mentions expert witnesses, then it implies that people who are not members of the set "particle physicists" could be expert witnesses. That notion is rooted in the fundamentally flawed and intrinsically lawyerly hypothesis that both sides of any supposition have equal truth value until a couple lawyers get paid and a judge decides which one is more persuasive.
To put a fine point on it, Mr. Lawyer: Your implicit supposition that a lawsuit can add anything of value to the discussion is prima facie ridiculous. Your law degree and professorship are considerable achievements, but they are not sufficient to give your opinions any merit regarding matters of particle physics -- no more than you would care about my opinion on the validity of a complex corporate contract.
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then why didn't the risk assessment team place the risk at zero? If the risk is greater than zero, then why take a chance with the entire planet? Within a few decades this would be entirely possible to do on the moon.
What's up with this box everyone has to think inside of or outside of? Why does there have to be a box?
Surely one significant problem in the study (this being Slashdot, I of course haven't read it myself) is the premise that only professional particle physicists can understand the subject matter well enough to be an expert witness? I'd bet there are a good number of (non-particle physicists) here who understand the theory well enough.
What if someone had reached a critical mass of enriched uranium before we knew it would start a fission reaction... And did so in a lab within a major city... I do think LHC is safe. But who knows. Yes the earth has been bombarded by higher energies than those in the LHC. But are they doing so under the same conditions as those inside the LHC. What if there is something we don't know that happens with say high energy collisions in a high very magnetic field (which probably doesn't happen naturally).
I hear what you're saying, but I also notice that you didn't address the most common rebuttal to your explanations... In the earths atmosphere there is little matter to absorb in the (near-)direct environment, while there likely is within the LHC. And once more mass comes in that Hawking radiation lets out...
Dear Mr. Layman,
We lawyers often have to quickly develop expertise in this or that technical subject depending on the case, and we have to know the subject matter cold in order to engage in meaningful examination of the witnesses. ("Isn't it true, Mr. Developer, that you typed 'i++' instead of '++i', causing the stack to overflow and necessitating a scram of the atomic pile?") You might remember the episode of "ER" where they had a lawyer who knew his medicine so well that the doctors would let him operate on people.
In the LHC scenario you describe, a successful civil action based on negligence might require service of a summons with near-infinite mass traveling at 0.99C. We're used to this.
Epicycles were never a scientific theory, they were an idea based on a preconceived notion that the Earth is the center and everything else rotates around it, then the observed data was fit to support this 'fact'.
You can't handle the truth.
The big problem is if it's the wrong incomplete.
Your so-called "argument" doesn't even begin to address the question.
It's basically a knee-jerk reaction to a lawyer describing science in a way you don't personally approve of.
So basically anyone that builds a proper doomsday device can legally get away with it? AWESOME.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
It's not about black holes, it's about the creation of the Higg's field. The debate boils down to whether the Higg's particle (messenger particle of the Higg's field) can exist without being observed. If it only comes into existence when it is observed, then the Higg's field will be created by the observers. The function of the Higg's field is to destroy and recreate the universe. That's why the Higg's particle is called the 'god' particle. And that is what they are looking for. Wave function theories fall on two sides; one, that the particle must be observed to exist, two, that there are an infinite number of universes hiving off from this one every instant, and we exist in the universe where the particle has been observed. If the first scenario is correct, our universe will be recycled and we will not exist. The other prediction is that we will pop up in a universe where an 'accident' has prevented the observation from taking place (it took place in an alternate universe). Of course, the universe we pop up in may be slightly different (worldwide economic collapse, religious wars, 'bama/'sama, palin/putin, climate collapse etc.) I figure it will take another half dozen 'accidents at the LHC before we smell something fishy in Switzerland, and it won't be the cheese.
No, you haven't heard that.
Please post a link to where climate scientists (as opposed to scaremongering denialists) have said anything like "we may have started a runaway greenhouse effect"
We'll wait.
With Schrodinger jokes, on the other hand, you never know whether it's going to be funny or not until you tell it, and by then it's too late.
The solution of course is to tell the joke in a box with no one else there and never come out.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
And how big was that black hole?
It's already known that a star passing through the solar system can suck up the earth and burn it. Or throw it out of the solar system to freeze.
You're the one making the meme you're complaining of.
Try a little education.
Is the real problem that the LHC is not in the US?
Let's see:
flying monkeys crawling out your rectum > LHC destroying the world > homosexual leprechaun giving you magical money tree that grows $100 bills for leaves and has cocaine filled nuts
Of course, it's kind of hard to prove any of those is absolutely impossible, but you sure can calculate them as having absurdly low odds.... (So low, that if you tried to count the zeros between the decimal point and the first non-zero digit you'd fall asleep long before you got to it. That's why scientists like using those funny looking math formulas most of the LHC haters can't understand.)
Sorry Slashdotters, but I'm getting sick of this paranoid ignorant jihad to crucify a rather expensive but potentially critical piece of research.
If you want to whine about how much money is being used, fine, it's a bloody lot. (Though it's less than the cost of 10 stealth bombers.)
If you want to whine about how 'pure research' isn't useful, fine. (When electricity was still in the 'pure research' stage and the question was raised as to what use was it, a famous scientist replied "what use is a baby"...)
If you want to spout conspiracy theories (yours or other peoples), please go back to your paranoid blogs and leave this stuff to people who actually passed grade school math and science classes without cheating. (Many slashdotters have actually passed college level classes on trig, calculus, and even physics.)
Now lawyers are jumping into the mess when they aren't asked to.
What are the lawyers going to do next, threaten to sue people for not preparing for the fantasized, err, 'predicted' 2012 world disaster?
At least these media spawned circuses keeps the reporters from investigating my secret genesplicing experiments to create parasitic miniaturized colon dwelling hybridized eagle-macaques.
Thanks, take a break, and laugh at the stupidity before you drown in it...
Attorney tries to triumph a natural law with a judical law. Well, let's see who wins.
All this squabble about the LHC and "possible black holes" makes me think 90% of the population has the mindset of the middle-ages. No, there is no hope for humanity.
I somehow see the focus on black holes as a red herring. Yeah, sure it's likely the LCH won't produce any Earth-wrecking black holes. If Sir Stephen says so, it must be true. So here's where the car analogy falls apart: What about the other dangers of having all that energy concentrated in one place? Have we received any guarantees that such release will not trigger some other natural catastrophe? No more destructive than a car crash on a speedway, you say? But how much energy does the LHC pack in comparison to a car?
Epicycles were used because they had, wait for it, predictive power - they predicted future events quite well. In the state of knowledge at the time, with observations made from the Earth, it was natural to use the Earth as the frame of reference. The simple heliocentric theory is equally "wrong" from that point of view - the center of the Sun is not the exact center of the Solar System.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Sure, let's put lawyers in charge of science experiments. After that, imploding into a black would be a relief.
My favorite quote doesn't fit into 120 characters. Now no one will like me.
Wrong. You just need a sufficient mass within a small enough volume; the graviton is something else again, about which the LHC says nothing. The theory causing panic is that the energy in a collision in the LHC is large enough that, if it were compressed into a volume the size of a single Planck length (believed to be the smallest possible length), it would form a black hole. This can be checked by simple arithmetic. This assumes, of course, that it can actually achieve (by unspecified means) the Planck length (10^-35 m, 10^20 times smaller than the proton), which is many orders of magnitude smaller than the smallest thing we know. Of course, according to current theory, such a tiny black hole will, as you say, evaporate within a time too small to measure. But, say the worriers, suppose the theory is wrong? Three answers to that:
Firstly, the theory that says that the femto-black-hole will evaporate is from the same body of physics as the theory that says it can be created in the first place, You cannot pick and choose: if you throw out one half, you cannot call upon the other. So where is the theory that says the black holes will be created?
Secondly, the chance that the particle is created at rest with respect to the Earth is negligible. With the huge amounts of energy pumped into this tiny mass, a minutely small residual energy will give this black hole a residual velocity far in excess of the Earth's escape velocity, so it will instantly whizz off into space at some significant fraction of C.
Thirdly, even if it does stay in the earth's proximity (and if the the direction of whizz is through the Earth in the previous paragraph), it is so tiny that its chance of interacting with any other atoms is truly negligible. People have done the calculations, and the rate of accretion is so slow that it will not become a problem within the expected lifetime of the Earth.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
I would rather see a law about how ALL nations (and I mean all, not just Iran and North Korea) should be strictly forbidden to have any kind of nuclear weapon. That yes, seems to me a real threat to the planet.
Will it , won't it they'd be wondering...
Though personally I'd sooner be on the earth and be sucked into a black hole than be left orbiting in a tin can wondering whether to just open the airlock and end it all or wait until the orbit decays and you're swallowed up anyway.
Physicists keep telling everyone this but the knuckle draggers and pig ignorant arts graduates just keep on whining away anyway.
Though its the usual story - anything scientific that isn't commonplace and they don't understand they automatically don't like whether it be GM crops, MMR vaccines, stem cell research etc etc.
Morons , the lot of them.
Why believe only the parts of the maths that sound dangerous if the same scientific work also says that it's *not* dangerous? That's just like taking a sentence of somebody's speech and quoting it out of context. If the argument is "but the maths might be wrong" then you might as well disbelieve it all, which a) means that you've eliminated the suggestion of danger in the first place b) means that if you want to argue *anything* you need to come up with some new maths to prove them wrong (and revolutionise the discipline of Physics, get a guaranteed Nobel Prize and be remembered as the saviour of mankind for thousands of years)
I, for one, welcome our new Combine overlords
The question is "how should one approach life?", and forty-two represents a word, derived from the Latin fortitudo, that Merriam-Webster defines as "strength of mind that enables a person to encounter danger or bear pain or adversity with courage"
and the law won!
electrons and quarks don't have a size, they're singularities.
Every singularity has a size, namely that of its surrounding event horizon.
Considering how many threads are devolving into circular arguments, I'm wondering if we're creating black holes from all the energy being expended.
I'm pretty sure we have as time is becoming distorted the longer I spend reading the comments.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
- on your part too. I don't know what goes into the estimations made by the folks who do such things at the LHC, but your comment indicates that you believe you have a *complete* understanding of the problem and can further assign risk from that assessment. Now, you may be right, or very close. People can be right as well as over their head and arrogant. Either way, I don't care. What struck me about the comment - it reminds me a bit of all those quants who thought they had a near complete understanding of a complicated problem and could accurately assign risk to derivatives.
I see this sort of thing all the time. I'm a research scientists. Part of what makes research interesting are the unexpected, confusing results. Emergent phenomena from really complicated interactions. Yet many or most of my colleagues have this kind of surety and arrogance. I don't get it.
46 & 2
Then there were the calculations that physicists used to reassure the public that another accelerator called RHIC was safe. These too turned out to be seriously flawed.
Can someone elaborate on this comment?
Right off the top there would be a huge issue with jurisdiction. When people are blithering about creating a black hole that could swallow the entire planet just about every government could claim authority to act. Really bad places like Nigeria or Iran might insist that their verdicts are the only correct verdicts.
We haven't even really decided jurisdictional authorities within the US when things like the net or sales over the phone are involved. One day it's the sender's end of the line that has authority, the next day it is the receiver's end of the line. the next day the feds jump in and cite some really obscure law from a third state that they can put in play. Once in a while it is even a state in which the communication passes through without being viewed that grabs the authority. Even more absurd, deeply encrypted materials that can not be opened or viewed while passing through a state may still be subject to a powerful state action.
Black hole - is that the top of the mankind capabilities they could "create" ? Why nobody was able to find any alien civilizations yet ? - That's because of there are black holes in place of them now.... Why not ? For every small problem with collider smart scientists say: ohh well, - we didn't account for that small issue. Keeping things this way, there could appear the moment when there is nobody left to say: ohh, - we didn't account for that small issue. 99% of population are delegating their future and safety to the remaining 1%. They also hope that this 1% knows all possible consequences. Isn't that scary ? If present science are so sure about all possible consequences of creating black holes using Large Hadron Collider or any collider that size, than why any expirements needed ? How theese government founded scientists can guarantee any HollyDolly mother, that she's childs are in safe place, if they are going to create something that they know nothing about ? Especially if this nothing has one way information flow. Information can enter black hole but can't escape. Especially if this nothing has recommended self as dangerous thing to be played with ?
One would think the scientists are at least as worried about their lives as they are about their livelihood.
Can you imagine them saying "Let's destroy the planet so that we can get this grant."?
Doesn't really make any sense.
My UID is prime. Hah!
Will people please get into their heads that if the LHC could generate an earth absorbing black hole,
we would not have been around to build it. The sort of events that happen in the LHC happen in the atmosphere
every day because of cosmic radiation. The LHC just takes a closer look at this process, at much lower energies
than what nature can produce.
I'm tired of these wild speculations of black holes emerging from the LHC. Get over it!
Future of the world by experiment: isn't that topic for global voting ? Doesn't this account for everybody's safety on this green yet planet ? Who was asking any mother - do she wants their childs being placed under unique experiment with their future being here ?
It would have the same mass as the earth
Wait, what?
I thought black holes worked by not letting photons escape due to a sufficiently large gravitational pull towards the centre of the black hole. And gravitational pull is caused by mass.
In my mind, if the earth had sufficient mass to be a black hole, which I think is what you're saying, it would already be a black hole. But gravity sufficient to keep photons contained would also crush (evul villain voice) the puny little bones in a frail human skeleton (muhwahahahaharrr...). This doesn't appear to happen.
Where's my wrong assumption or misunderstanding?
Where's the big "foot" icon? Why isn't this link marked as "humor?" Stupid CERN, Be. More. funny!
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Toro
So...all particle physicists are concerned for their livelihood. Well sure, everybody is. But to argue that they're all concerned for their livelihood more than their lives? Some are a little crazy like that, but how brain dead do you have to be to assume that they're all psychotic and ready to kill anybody at all for their research, let alone willing to kill themselves? It's just a stupid argument to say that because their livelihood is at stake, they're not willing to consider the values of their lives. Assuming all experts in this field are sociopaths? At its core, this argument is yet more anti-intellectual propaganda.
I think the main problem with peoples' view of CERN is that they think CERN is doing something completely new. The fact is, Fermilab has been doing the same thing for 30+ years. CERN is just going to slowly up the energy level to about 10x what Fermilab topped out at.
The other problem is that people don't understand the terms flying around. Words like tevatron, large hadron, high-energy particle accelerator and 'energy level of the Big Bang' lead people to think that this is the next step past nuclear bombs. What they really need to understand about colliding protons at energy levels of a trillion electron volts is that an electron volt is pretty much the smallest way to measure energy that we use, and the collisions only involve two protons. Seriously, you should be more worried every time you get your teeth x-rayed.
It's absurd to think that they'll hit a tipping point where the energy being put in will be enough to blow up the Earth. It's absurd to think that they could create a micro black hole that would engulf the Earth (if micro black holes are actually possible, AND could engulf a planet, then the universe would be dominated by them).
Is this what I think this is about, without RTFA, I tend to think that anyone playing around with creating black holes (however small)
is messing around with stuff they should not, especially if for some reason they open that rift, and can't close it again....I do not know if a small hole turns into a big one eventually...but too me, I would tend to think EVERYBODY on the planet would have to say no to a scientist in his backyard producing small black holes, so why should these guys be any different?
It is not because it is for the US government that it is any safer or less dangerous.
And once we start playing with black holes, do we stop any other country from being allowed, as like the nuclear arms race, we could have terrorists with small black hole making machines deposit them all over cities in the US, and start like 100 of them all at once....
Just saying...we should not allow this to happen, for ANYONE asking to try this....being that it could affect the hole planet.
Yes, all of the scientists working at CERN are colluding together to...
1.) Cover-up the statistical odds of the destruction of earth so they can get grants to...
2.) Implement LHC, which will....
3.) WHOOOSH....
4.) There would be no profit.
Nevermind that much higher energy cosmic rays hit our atmosphere every minute, and we've somehow never been gobbled up. But hey, perhaps we should go back to becoming hunter-gatherers because "fire" may cause an uncontrollable reaction consuming the very earth itself! We'd better not risk it, 'lest the gods become angry.
The author appears to me to be an idiot of the 'global warming isn't real' type.
Troll, Troll, go away and flame again some other day
I wouldn't worry about destroying the earth but there's a good probability that those scientists are going to turn into orange rock people and stretcho dolls.
It's not the mass alone that makes something a black hole, it's the density. For an object of the same mass as Earth to be a black hole, it has to be really tiny. But since the Earth's mass is spread out across the Earth's volume, it's just a normal planet.
One guy on the site is even ranting about the LHC actually being a "quark cannon"
Actually his credibility is lost there. The LHC is far better described as a gluon collider. The cross-section for gluon-gluon collisions is a lot larger than for quark-quark.
This is a relatively short and nontechnical paper that discusses this. See p. 7. For more detail, see this paper, pp. 16ff and 79ff.
First you have to assume that black holes could be produced at the LHC (which requires some nonstandard physics like extra dimensions), and also that they don't evaporate immediately due to Hawking radiation (which violates basic principles of quantum mechanics). Then you have a black hole that is typically produced at a velocity greater than the earth's escape velocity. If it happens to be emitted in the downward direction, it passes through the earth once without stopping, and therefore accretes a negligible amount of mass. However, the velocities are random, and some small number could be produced with velocities less than the earth's escape velocity. These would oscillate permanently in the earth's gravitational field. They would therefore have unlimited time to do low-probability accretion events, so even though the cross-section is small, they can end up accreting significant amounts of matter.
Your calculation underestimates the radius for capture. This is discussed on pp. 16ff of the second paper. The radius for capture depends on the dynamics. For instance, if you release an atom at rest with respect to the black hole, then it will be absorbed with 100% probability from any radius, because it will simply slowly accelerate toward it; the radius for capture is infinite. In reality you have nuclei that are bound into atoms, and the black hole is zooming past at high speed. The actual radius for capture is therefore bigger than the Schwarzschild radius, but smaller than infinity. They estimate it to be about 10^-16 m, which is small, but not as ridiculously small as the Schwarzschild radius. (Your Schwarzschild is wrong, because the mass isn't equal to the mass of the proton. It's more like a TeV.)
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Back to the middle ages, where theologians and secular law at universities determined what was to be considered the be truth.
LHC was designed to shed light on why there is matter at all in this universe.
No, it was designed to determine why fundamental particles have mass. It may shed some light on the matter/anti-matter imbalance but that is not its primary design goal.
But, matter is not all that matters, there is also justice.
Indeed there is. First it is worth mentioning that law is not the same as justice and never has been. It is a best approximation to the concept that we have come up with but laws are by no means always just. Additionally since the LHC is built in Europe and NOT the US it is European law/justice which is relevant. So frankly this study is not worth the paper it is written on since US courts can huff and puff all they like and make not one whit of difference - expect perhaps preventing US groups from working on it which, since it is already built, will probably only caue a delay in analyses. Of course it would be very damaging to US physicists and even this threat will make it harder to convince the international community to build any future facilities in the US where such idiocy apparently has a better chance of success.
Its seems there is nothing anybody can do, mostly because nobody really cares.
Correction: nobody really believes the idiots going around predicting the end of the world. This is a very good sign because it shows that deep down the majority of people really do believe in science and not what the latest scaremonger with a tenuous grasp of reality thinks will garner them the most attention.
before electricity was commonplace, there was a concern that the generators being built around the world would cancel out or otherwise screw up the planet's magnetic field. The electric companies calmed the critics by having generators built with opposite rotational directions. So for every clockwise generator, there would be a counterclockwise spinning generator.. Yeah pretty dumb, but it calmed the scaredy cats.
Read up on degeneracy pressure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_degeneracy_pressure
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
The law review article upon which the linked story is written is 80 pages long. It is, as best I can tell, totally consistent with known science (it doesn't postulate "black holes destroying the universe" or any such nonsense). It is an attempt to do 3 things:
1. Ask how a court ought to address a science experiment that could, by some very unlikely chance, destroy the earth. He uses LHC as an example, but also suggests Strong AI and nanotechnology as possible future examples.
2. Analyze how a non-expert court can, or should, evaluate highly technical and possibly controversial scientific claims for and against the safety of a bleeding-edge research project.
3. Analyze how logical or cognitive errors could realistically lead a scientist to accidentally or intentionally understate or mischaracterize the risks of her research.
Anyone on this board droning on about "Shut-up-the-LHC-can't-destroy-the-world" either DRTFA or totally misunderstood it. I will now quote the author:
If he had chosen anthropogenic global climate change as his topic of analysis, I think there would have been a more interesting debate on Slashdot, but apparently any mention of "LHC" in the same breath as "black hole" causes some sort of hysterical allergic reaction in some people.
All stated opinions are subject to further review
It's not the mass alone that makes something a black hole, it's the density
So, another way to put it is to say that this is where the point-mass simplification breaks down? This is where you can't just treat the earth as having all its mass in the centre---as opposed to trying to solve Newton's three-body problem, or plotting the paths of space vehicles, where it might work out OK.
Point-mass simplification really becomes less useful the closer you get to the center of mass. Think of it this way - the closer you are to the center of mass, the stronger the force of gravity according to Newton's own equations, right? Problem is that once you get close enough to the Earth's center of mass, you'll actually be within the Earth's radius, so the gravity will be pulling you in all directions, mostly canceling out. A black hole's event horizon is simply the extreme case.
My internal philosophy majour Is absolutely fascinated by this whole idea. The ethical complexities (and how we have decided to to put them into law) are totally cool, though perhaps in a rather morbid way. Forget the science: How do we deal with potential no-win scenarioes and, more interestingly, how scalable is the law?
The properties of "can" is rather limited. The only decidement that can be made: Let's wait for results of experiment by the world !
It's clear that most of the posters on this thread have not read it. I highly suggest that you do so regardless of your position on the issue.
The author (a lawyer, not a physicist) does not attempt to judge the science of the issue. He also specifically considers and discusses many of the arguments that have been set up as straw men elsewhere in the thread, e.g. "the earth has been subjected to cosmic rays for millions of years", "the objections are just the paranoid rantings of luddites and uneducated lunatics", etc.
Before I read the article I was of the opinion that opposition to LHC was simply paranoiac raving; after all the physicists at CERN understand the underlying physics, right? After I read the article I am actually moderately concerned and I hope that a court does hear a request for an injunction (I have no opinion whether an injunction is warranted but I want someone OUTSIDE the physics community to review the risk analysis done by CERN).
The author first does a really thorough job of describing the scientific literature around the proposed risks of the LHC and CERN's responses.
The second half of the paper addresses the issue of "if a request for an injunction against the LHC comes before a court, how is a judge to decide"?
The author considers and rejects both the testimony of expert witnesses (he discusses US Supreme Court criteria for judging the testimony of expert witnesses and notes that in this case there are two difficult (perhaps insurmountable) problems with expert witness testimony in this case- personal bias and testability of theories- pp55-58). The author also considers and rejects use of cost-benefit analysis which evidently is a common tool courts use to decide whether to grant an injunction (pp58-65). Instead the author poses 4 frameworks that courts could use to decide the matter - analyzing the theoretical grounding that the scientists involved used to assess risk (e.g. are the scientists basing risk on known knowns, known unknowns or unknown unknowns), analyzing for faulty scientific work (e.g. mathematical errors in calculating risk), analyzing for mistakes in risk assessment due to "credulity"- e.g. predisposition and/or groupthink (you can see that all over this thread), and analyzing for bias or negligence.
I found the table on p71 of the pdf (and the associated discussion) to be pretty damning for the dismissive position taking by LHC proponents. The bottom line is that CERN made its risk assessments and arguments for the safety of LHC, but that every time one of these arguments has been challenged, the argument was not defended, but rather a new argument was made. If it's safe, then the arguments that it's safe should be able to withstand some scrutiny- this is the empirical nature of science, right?
I am not saying that LHC is unsafe but rather that CERN hasn't reasonably proven that it is and that their behavior has raised my suspicious rather than lowering them.
Given the undesirability of the worst case scenario (destruction of the planet), it seems that there should be plausible arguments for the safety of the device that withstand moderately intense scrutiny. I'm not claiming that every nut job with a wacky theory should be able to derail such endeavors. However in this specific instance I believe that there are plausible concerns that have not been adequately addressed.
I'm not going to drill into further details of the paper but as of this writing, the author of the paper had addressed the arguments proposed in every concern (or dismissal) that I've read in this /. thread at +3 or higher moderation.
http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I say Balderdash!
This is nothing more than sensationalism, plain and simple. And for the record it's not a Black Hole that "may" be created it will be a Quantum Singularity. Which as we all know was invented by the Romulans to power their interstellar vessels; however, we have never been able to duplicate their technology.
Therefore, it is illogical to assume that the Earth will be destroyed since the energy consumed in the creation of said hypothetical quantum singularity can not be maintained. And since the reaction of the particles in question will be contained inside a magnetic chamber it is unlikely that a chain reaction will occur outside the said chamber. Resulting in a dissipation of unharness energy at the conclusion of the experiment thereby quelling the irrational fears of the uneducated and ignorant.
Even if a remote possibility exists that a hypothetical quantum singularity is created and would somehow be stable enough and powerful to consume the Earth. It would also be powerful enough to consume the rest of our solar system. In any case it hardly matters if such a hypothetical situation is even possible since the irrational quorum of imbeciles have already concluded based upon the Mayan Calendar that the world shall come to an end on December 21, 2012. A full 4 days prior to the estimated date of the world ending experiment.
Once the LHC makes a black hole that swallows the earth, I'm sure there'll be plenty of lawsuits!
J