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."

Comments

Re:STFU

[wagnerrp]

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?

Re:STFU

[AK Marc]

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.