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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."
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.
What's the point of living but to try to understand our universe and find the true answer to life,universe, and everything. Everything else is just fluff.
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.
Seems to me the same arguments could be made for the "expert witnesses" (and if you take the Climate-Change-will-destroy-humanity crowd at their word, the cost-benefit analysis as well) in the AGW debate.
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
We're neither dead nor alive so long as nobody looks into this issue. :-)
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).
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.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
If we don't agree to the shrinkwrap terms, can we take the LHC back to the point of purchase for a full refund?
You misunderstand the meaning of the statement, it has the opposite implication.
Death is not redressable, which means if you do in fact destroy the entire planet the cost of doing so is 0. So you might as well go ahead and take the risk no matter how large.
If you make a tiny black hole you start a race between evaporation and accretion. The black hole may well evaporate before it collects enough mass to be stable, but it is difficult to be completely sure about this. In theory the black hole can start from the mass of an atom and increase in mass to the mass of the Earth (plus us of course).
http://michaelsmith.id.au
As long as Magrathea has a backup I say we go for it.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I know there's a joke in there somewhere, I just can't quite figure it out.
This ain't rocket surgery.
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.
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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The lawyer is basing his findings on a false premise: "any particle physicists would be afraid for their livelihoods". This is not the case. There are a lot of particle physicists that are not working for CERN and whose research does no depend on CERN nor the LHC.
Also the bit about "anybody else afraid for their lives". I am not afraid for my life.
I am neither a particle physicist nor afraid for my life, there is no problem.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
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.
There's plenty of scientists who can discuss these topics rationally and humbly, they just make for really boring television.
The LHC webcams, on the other hand, make for really panic-inducing television.
I think that "Redundant" mod refers to your use of "cockroaches" and "lawyers" as separate.
There's a morbid mathematical-legal job called an actuary who practices in dealing with the estimated worth of people. See, there's no value in a person's death, but what the person would have earned should they have not died at that point can be computed and awarded to to the estate in a wrongful death lawsuit. Go ask O.J. Simpson. The LAPD bungled the investigation to the point there was reasonable doubt in the criminal trial... but O.J. got held liable on the more-likely-than-not standard in the civil trial, and now any money he touches belongs to the family of Ron Goldman.
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.
then why didn't the risk assessment team place the risk at zero? If the risk is greater than zero, then why take a chance with the entire planet? Within a few decades this would be entirely possible to do on the moon.
What's up with this box everyone has to think inside of or outside of? Why does there have to be a box?
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.
I once asked a distinguished but elderly scientist whether there was a large elephant on my head. He said he thinks that a large invisible elephant sitting on my head is impossible. Since he is very probably wrong, that means it is more likely than not that I've had an elephant sitting on my head for many years and didn't know.
In other words, that's just silly. The LHC will produce smaller collisions than found in nature. It just does it where we can see the results. It has the same chance (I'll grant as non-zero) of destroying the planet as crashing the latest Ford over at the IIHS or NHTSA test sites. Just because no other crash has created a black hole among the tens of millions of automobile crashes in the wild and other test sites, doesn't mean the next one won't, right? The chance of that Ford making a black hole and consuming the earth is the same as the LHC. Except the LHC is approximating something that hasn't been done just tens of millions of times, but trillions of times or more. All without incident. Yet the one done by man will end the earth when all the ones in the wild never did? Sure, and the IIHS crash test will end the world as well.
Arthur C Clarke would have loved this debate BTW.
No one enjoys debating with the willfully ignorant. Arthur C Clarke included.
Learn to love Alaska
Dear Mr. Layman,
We lawyers often have to quickly develop expertise in this or that technical subject depending on the case, and we have to know the subject matter cold in order to engage in meaningful examination of the witnesses. ("Isn't it true, Mr. Developer, that you typed 'i++' instead of '++i', causing the stack to overflow and necessitating a scram of the atomic pile?") You might remember the episode of "ER" where they had a lawyer who knew his medicine so well that the doctors would let him operate on people.
In the LHC scenario you describe, a successful civil action based on negligence might require service of a summons with near-infinite mass traveling at 0.99C. We're used to this.
Let's see:
flying monkeys crawling out your rectum > LHC destroying the world > homosexual leprechaun giving you magical money tree that grows $100 bills for leaves and has cocaine filled nuts
Of course, it's kind of hard to prove any of those is absolutely impossible, but you sure can calculate them as having absurdly low odds.... (So low, that if you tried to count the zeros between the decimal point and the first non-zero digit you'd fall asleep long before you got to it. That's why scientists like using those funny looking math formulas most of the LHC haters can't understand.)
Sorry Slashdotters, but I'm getting sick of this paranoid ignorant jihad to crucify a rather expensive but potentially critical piece of research.
If you want to whine about how much money is being used, fine, it's a bloody lot. (Though it's less than the cost of 10 stealth bombers.)
If you want to whine about how 'pure research' isn't useful, fine. (When electricity was still in the 'pure research' stage and the question was raised as to what use was it, a famous scientist replied "what use is a baby"...)
If you want to spout conspiracy theories (yours or other peoples), please go back to your paranoid blogs and leave this stuff to people who actually passed grade school math and science classes without cheating. (Many slashdotters have actually passed college level classes on trig, calculus, and even physics.)
Now lawyers are jumping into the mess when they aren't asked to.
What are the lawyers going to do next, threaten to sue people for not preparing for the fantasized, err, 'predicted' 2012 world disaster?
At least these media spawned circuses keeps the reporters from investigating my secret genesplicing experiments to create parasitic miniaturized colon dwelling hybridized eagle-macaques.
Thanks, take a break, and laugh at the stupidity before you drown in it...
Epicycles were used because they had, wait for it, predictive power - they predicted future events quite well. In the state of knowledge at the time, with observations made from the Earth, it was natural to use the Earth as the frame of reference. The simple heliocentric theory is equally "wrong" from that point of view - the center of the Sun is not the exact center of the Solar System.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
If you make a tiny black hole you start a race between evaporation and accretion. The black hole may well evaporate before it collects enough mass to be stable, but it is difficult to be completely sure about this. In theory the black hole can start from the mass of an atom and increase in mass to the mass of the Earth (plus us of course).
I am not a physiscist, but...
The gravitational pull of a body with the mass of a sub atomic particle is not very great. It won't be sucking matter towards itself like a gravitational vacuum cleaner. Another particle would have to get extremely close to pass the event horizon:
According to google, the event horizon is 2GM/c^2:
So for a black hole with the mass of a proton:
(2 x 6.7 e -11 * 1.7 e -27) / (3.0 e+8 ** 2) = 2.5e-54 meter. That distance is about 2.1e-39 times smaller than the radius of the proton, or some 1/7500th of the planck length.
The escape velocity according to google is:
v = sqrt(2GM/r)
So with the proton mass black hole and at a distance of one proton radius, that would be about:
sqrt((2 * 6.7e-11 * 1.7e-27) / 1.2e-15) = 1.4e-11 m/s
Even something dead and buried moves faster than that due to thermal motion.
If my thinking is correct, I don't see how a microscopic black hole would be capable of any accretion. I haven't dabbled in science in many many years, so what I wrote above is probably mostly wrong, but I doubt it's so wrong that these microscopic black holes actually do function as an all devouring inescapable cosmic vacuum cleaner.
Wrong. You just need a sufficient mass within a small enough volume; the graviton is something else again, about which the LHC says nothing. The theory causing panic is that the energy in a collision in the LHC is large enough that, if it were compressed into a volume the size of a single Planck length (believed to be the smallest possible length), it would form a black hole. This can be checked by simple arithmetic. This assumes, of course, that it can actually achieve (by unspecified means) the Planck length (10^-35 m, 10^20 times smaller than the proton), which is many orders of magnitude smaller than the smallest thing we know. Of course, according to current theory, such a tiny black hole will, as you say, evaporate within a time too small to measure. But, say the worriers, suppose the theory is wrong? Three answers to that:
Firstly, the theory that says that the femto-black-hole will evaporate is from the same body of physics as the theory that says it can be created in the first place, You cannot pick and choose: if you throw out one half, you cannot call upon the other. So where is the theory that says the black holes will be created?
Secondly, the chance that the particle is created at rest with respect to the Earth is negligible. With the huge amounts of energy pumped into this tiny mass, a minutely small residual energy will give this black hole a residual velocity far in excess of the Earth's escape velocity, so it will instantly whizz off into space at some significant fraction of C.
Thirdly, even if it does stay in the earth's proximity (and if the the direction of whizz is through the Earth in the previous paragraph), it is so tiny that its chance of interacting with any other atoms is truly negligible. People have done the calculations, and the rate of accretion is so slow that it will not become a problem within the expected lifetime of the Earth.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
1. There exist distinguished but elderly scientists who are strong atheists (that is, believe that God cannot exist).
2. Clarke's First Law.
Ergo, God exists.
Something seems a bit flawed there.
I am officially gone from
electrons and quarks don't have a size, they're singularities.
Every singularity has a size, namely that of its surrounding event horizon.
One would think the scientists are at least as worried about their lives as they are about their livelihood.
Can you imagine them saying "Let's destroy the planet so that we can get this grant."?
Doesn't really make any sense.
My UID is prime. Hah!
Yet the one done by man will end the earth when all the ones in the wild never did?
The other ones were Natural. These new ones are made from harsh chemicals and might give the Earth cancer.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
It's not the mass alone that makes something a black hole, it's the density. For an object of the same mass as Earth to be a black hole, it has to be really tiny. But since the Earth's mass is spread out across the Earth's volume, it's just a normal planet.
LHC was designed to shed light on why there is matter at all in this universe.
No, it was designed to determine why fundamental particles have mass. It may shed some light on the matter/anti-matter imbalance but that is not its primary design goal.
But, matter is not all that matters, there is also justice.
Indeed there is. First it is worth mentioning that law is not the same as justice and never has been. It is a best approximation to the concept that we have come up with but laws are by no means always just. Additionally since the LHC is built in Europe and NOT the US it is European law/justice which is relevant. So frankly this study is not worth the paper it is written on since US courts can huff and puff all they like and make not one whit of difference - expect perhaps preventing US groups from working on it which, since it is already built, will probably only caue a delay in analyses. Of course it would be very damaging to US physicists and even this threat will make it harder to convince the international community to build any future facilities in the US where such idiocy apparently has a better chance of success.
Its seems there is nothing anybody can do, mostly because nobody really cares.
Correction: nobody really believes the idiots going around predicting the end of the world. This is a very good sign because it shows that deep down the majority of people really do believe in science and not what the latest scaremonger with a tenuous grasp of reality thinks will garner them the most attention.