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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."
The LHC will not destroy the world.
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.
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