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:We'll save the justice system first....

[snowgirl]

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.

I seem to recall that some physics thought that before the Trinity Explosion, that perhaps an atom explosion would vaporise the entire atmosphere.

One guy on the site is even ranting about the LHC actually being a "quark cannon", and says that (paraphrasing) "cosmic rays are single atoms" and in the same sentence (because it's a runon, like this one) that we've never observed a quark in cosmic rays. All credibility is lost with that, and that's the problem with even debating this issue... the average person has no real decent understanding of the actual risks involved, but if they know about it, they get all paranoid, and someone breaks out the SciFi.

In a way I blame certain scientists

[NotSoHeavyD3]

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.

Re:No

[MichaelSmith]

Brian Cox: "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat."

To which I will invoke Clarke's first law:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Arthur C Clarke would have loved this debate BTW. I am sorry he can't be here. I am off to read Childhoods End again.