Slashdot Mirror
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."
It will destroy some people's world when they find out their made-up guy doesn't exist. That's what people really think will happen is this will turn people away from god and they think this because deep down there is something nagging them telling them they're wrong.
> No one really understands string theory
String theory was never intended to be understood. It was designed to make the guys who write papers about it sound smart, without requiring them to actually figure anything out about how the universe works.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.