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The LHC, Black Holes, and the Law

Posted by kdawson on from the nobody-left-to-collect-damages dept.

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."

6 of 467 comments (clear)

  1. Re:We'll save the justice system first.... by cthulu_mt · · Score: 5, Funny

    So even if we blow up the planet we still won't have killed all the lawyers.

    Shakespeare called and he doesn't like your scenario.

    --
    Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
  2. Re:We'll save the justice system first.... by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Fast enough for ya?

  3. Re:US LAW ? by msimm · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yes but it's important and THAT makes it American! ;-)

    --
    Quack, quack.
  4. Re:Schrodinger's Attorney? by grcumb · · Score: 5, Funny

    I know there's a joke in there somewhere, I just can't quite figure it out.

    Not Schrodinger's Attorney. Maxwell's DA.

    See, when you make humourous reference to Maxwell, the joke and the punchline are effortlessly sorted into the right order. 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.

    --
    Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
  5. Re:We'll save the justice system first.... by genner · · Score: 5, Funny

    Actually, in the original context , that "kill all the lawyers" line is in praise of lawyers, for they are obstacles to a tyrant's plans.

    No it was a praise to tyrant's since they kill lawyers. .

  6. Re:STFU by Aceticon · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's not hubris, it's simple probability. The energy levels of the LHC are not that impressive, they are just several times greater than we have ever before produced in a controlled lab environment. The LHC is only rated for operation at 14TeV (1.4e13), while the highest energy cosmic rays recorded are on the order of 100EeV (1e20). If these particles have hit Earth at sufficient frequency that we have detected them on several occurrences, and we haven't yet collapsed into a black hole, what are the chances that the LHC will do so?

    but ... but ... but ... the LHC is on the French-Swiss border: that must affect the laws of physics somehow ...