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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."
If it actually occuurred, an LHC black hole wouldnt swallow the solar system. It wouldnt even swallow the moon. It would have the same mass as the earth and would continue to follow roughly the same orbit (not accounting for solar wind and photon momentum).
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.
It only has to escape an earth mass black hole, so about 12km/s will do.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
There's plenty of scientists who can discuss these topics rationally and humbly, they just make for really boring television. Nobody wants to listen to details or actually learn the theories and math behind the headlines, we just want a fight.
more likely it would have the same mass as an LHC, or rather a particle in the LHC which would almost certainly vaporize before it ran into another particle to swallow given the average density of particles on earth.
"String theory" is just a hypothesis. No one's managed to actually predict anything useful with it. Until a testable prediction is confirmed it's nothing but interesting math. Also, the strings are one dimensional singularities, so even if it's correct they're still singularities (like a ring black hole.)
Not a sentence!
That's entirely the attitude the article addresses: hubris. The scientists don't think that it will explode, but do you understand the issues involved or are you blindly listening to them? No one really understands string theory or what might happen when you smash particles at high energies. The chances are small that a major event would occur. However, if the LHC causes great damages, who pays? Would Anonymous Coward be held responsible?
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Hey that reminds me, electrons and quarks don't have a size, they're singularities.
You fail at quantum mechanics.
Electrons aren't particles in any truly useful sense, they're waves. If they weren't, we wouldn't have electron orbitals and absolutely none of organic chemistry could work. (OK, they're quantized waves, which gives them some particulate characteristics, but not ones like "position" in any sense that matches the concept used for singularities.)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Electrons and quarks are NOT singularities, they're described by wave equations. They're not balls or points or anything like that either. They are "spread out" in space and time if you will. Only because they have significant momentum due to thermal motion, their spread is so small they look like points. If you cool them down to fractions of a kelvin you get Bose-Einstein condensates that actually do look like waves.
Oh yeah, I agree completely. Chances are such a small singularity would pass through all other matter and not touch anything.
But on the outside chance that it did touch something and start growing, eventually consuming the earth, it would pretty much stop there. There's simply no other mass to pull in that isn't in a stable orbit.
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?
No one really understands string theory or what might happen when you smash particles at high energies.
Correct.
The chances are small that a major event would occur.
Incorrect. For billions of years, the earth has been bombarded with energies higher than what the LHC is capable of producing. However, they were random in nature and couldn't be observed because they were gone before anyone knew they happened. The LHC approximates some of these larger collisions. They can do nothing there that hasn't happened trillions of times already. And if it was going to do something, it would have by now.
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