Neverfly buddy ole pal,
I did and do want the experiments to take place, I'm a big science fiction and fantasy buff and I love this stuff.
But
I did not believe the veracity of CERN's safety statement(s), I do now.
I did believe they "could" create an unstable blackhole, I do not now.
I did not believe it was "the same as nature does everyday", it's still not exactly but cjameshuff set me straight on the time for the dispersement of the mass and energy so I'm going along with that all trees are fruit trees(in an orchard) analogy. They forgot to mention the orchard, but I was too ignorant to notice they were standing in the orchard when they said it? (sorry I love my analogies).

So yes I was in agreement with Warren about there being the 1 in a trillion chance of them blowing up the world. The difference was, I happy with those odds and he wasn't.

And another thing! hehe
I was soo angry when that Cox fellow said that they had no theories on particles being able to move between the extra dimensional space and ours!
Yes it did scare the willies out of me, but being the scifi buff I am , I was like "ooh cool extra dimensional bug-eyed monsters!" Very disappointed about that.

Yeah, and I'm still waiting for my flying car.

Where's my flying car, Cox, you miserable rutter?

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Relight the Firefly!

"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

Maybe its just me, but I did not find any of the CERN information hard to understand. I thought there FAQs and similar stuff were clear and well written for the general public.

My humble opinion - I suspect, that part of the problem might be with the expression "for the general public". There are other categories of "users" which might run into problems with the information they gave.

One category are people in the "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" category. These are the people with more physics knowledge than the average accountant (sorry all you accountants), but less than a PhD in Physics. The average accountant is not going to ask questions about the relative particle density of cosmic rays versus the LHC beam, for example. And so CERN didn't address those kinds of things, that level of detail.

The second category are the people who are looking for trouble, who are trying to find fault with CERN, the LHC, and the experiments. Like the moon hoax people they are going to wordsmith and nitpick to find they answers (or the lack of answers) they are looking for.

The third category are the media. Like category number 2, they are looking for trouble, no matter what CERN says, though their motivation is to sell newspapers and to give a "balanced" presentation of the issue, no mattter how wacky the other side of the issue is.

I leave it to others to decide if any posters here fit either of these categories.

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Is it an ad hom if I assume Warren is category 2 and Pippin category 1?

To recap:

Even assuming * EVERY* single one of Warren's assertions is correct (an incredible leap of the imagination, but let's pretend):

THE EARTH CAN NOT BE DESTROYED BY THE LHC.

Because even if all the conditions are right for this "worst case scenario" - the math shows that the black hole would indeed be MINIATURE - so small, in fact, that the black hole could not consume a single proton, much less the entire Earth.

I'm even presuming for the sake of argument that Hawking radiation doesn't exist.

But even WITHOUT Hawking radiation, the black hole still cannot consume anything because of its ridiculously small size and consequent weak gravity.

Conspiracy theorists, do you understand the concept of gravity?

The reason that the Earth and the solar system and all the stars in the Milky Way are not presently plummeting headfirst into the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy is that gravity is WEAK.

And that black hole is enormous - a Schwartzchild radius of over 7.7 million kilometers.

If gravity worked in the kooky way that they seem to think it does, then yes, a black hole smaller than a proton could consume an entire planet.

Since it doesn't, I'll sleep fine tonight.

The fact they can't accept this fact after this many pages of scientific rebuttal to the doomsday conspiracy theory shows that they are trolls and no one should waste their time trying to get them to come around.

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If CERN had had to come to court and argue the case instead of the judge rightly throwing it out, would that have shut the doomsayers up or just given them credence they don't deserve?

Remember my thought was that an argument in open court would have laid this to rest, or would it, given how the HBs bang on (to pardon the expression)

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I don't know, but I'm comfortable with the guess that no, it would not have shut them up. It might have even made it worse, proving to the doomsayers that the court was in on the conspiracy.

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They hadn't even finished the tunnel when the project was shut down. (Fifteen miles had been drilled of the planned 54 miles.) There were some buildings on the surface; they were eventually sold to a trucking company, JB Hunt.

The sad part is that Congress killed the SSC because they thought it would go over budget ($12B vs $5B), but the tunneling was ahead of schedule and under budget.

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Not to semeingly support the decision...

But how was the tunneling budget in proportion to the rest of the budget?

I can see how the tunneling budget can be doing fine but the rest of the budget going over...

I'm not a scientist. I didn't pass Algebra 1 in high school. But it occurs to me that scientists, are by their very nature curious, and so, would not one have asked the question, "What are the chances this machine could destroy the world?" and then another one would, you know, do a bunch of math to figure out the answer?

I'm just not that bugged about it.

I know that science can go awry. I read comic books. ;-) I just trust that these people know what they're doing. I'm sure I will live to eat those words one day.

Name the last time that a Scientific experiment got out of hand and did massive damage.

Which, if you read through this thread, or some of the links in it, is exactly what happened. The scientists at CERN have calculated the risks involved and have found them to be, for all practical purposes, zero. That doesn't seem to be enough for some people.

By the way, shaka37, welcome to BAUT.

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Thanks for the welcome!

I can't point to one. I suppose one could make the claim that the nuclear bomb is science gone awry, but that logic has a major kink in it. These fears, I think, are heightened by science fiction. It's the old chestnut: Scientist creates machine that will bring about change, discovery and power ... and the next thing you know, you have Doc Ock. Trust me, that's where these fears are born.

I shudder to tell you what I do ... but ... I'm a journalist. Though, lately, I'm starting to question my profession. That aside, I did read through the threads, and I have read scholarly articles, and I have read news reports, and I have talked to people I know who understand science and things involving math (which because I am a journalist, I am predestined at birth not to understand <--- sorry, inside joke), and I'm satisfied that the "they know not what they have done" scenario doesn't appy here.

And if the world did get sucked into a black hole, well, I can't stop it and I wouldn't have time to lament my fate ...

And not just the scientists at CERN. There has been quite a bit of work outside CERN. If it were just CERN alone, I'd be concerned. If there weren't already examples in nature for what will be happening at CERN, I'd be concerned. If there weren't multiple, independent safety arguments, I'd be concerned.

I'm not concerned.

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As "bad" as a nuclear bomb might be, it isn't a good example of scientists not figuring out all the technical consequences of their work - it works exactly the way that scientists designed it to work. The problems with it are political.

Personally, I think it is the fears generated by bad movie science fiction (and maybe some SF literature). A lot of good science fiction examines science more fairly.

Excellent. We need more journalists like yourself, who are interested in the science and are willing to educate themselves and others about it. The lack of journalists like that is half of our problem.

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I guess I meant splitting the atom and then using that breakthrough for other, more nefarious uses. But I wholeheartedly agree with you ... it isn't the same logic. ;-)

And I also agree that movie science fiction is a major culprit. That, and conspiracy theorists who watch the history channel shows on Nostradamus and the Bible Code and other end of the world predictions (2012 anyone?) when they should be watching "Friends" reruns.

There's way too much time on the various channels to talk and less talked about. It's cheaper for people sitting around a table to endlessly rehash the same thing than to go out and get something new.

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I can not find it amongst the morass that google throws up, but I sem to remember that in the UK a medical trial had to be halted and the test subjects almost died. One ended up in a coma.

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oops did I just switch sides

Switches back quickly

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Yeah, but failure is one of the costs of doing business. That is why we have people testing, after animal testing, because test animals may be like humans, but 'like' is the operative word. Most often there will be some reaction one didn't expect, and it is better it happened in ones experiment, then for thousands, if not millions of people after approval.

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That is why we have controlled clinical trials.

The question asked was name a scientific experiment that seriously went wrong, and I thought that a clinical trial having to be halted because of the test subjects all having a violent reaction might be going wrong. (Or is it - I could be wrong here)

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I would call it going wrong if someone didn't notice a severe reaction,and it is released to the public. Or if fears are quashed for business interests, that is definably science gone wrong. However, that happens only in conspiracy theories and fiction, right, right?

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That depends a bit on how you define massive damage.
When I have time, I read In The Pipeline: and from what I read there organic chemistry labs can have things go really outrageously bad most of which are gathered under the heading How Not To Do It.
I'll just include a single example which was the result of some brainac "fixing" both the pressure relief and rupture disks on a 1200PSI nitrogen cylinder by removing them and sealing them off with metal plugs:

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Ok, I don't mean idiots doing things all wrong...

I mean when the scientists conducting the experiment got their figures all wrong.

The main danger from the LHC is creating yet another pun that does not bear mentioning on this family-friendly board. (hint: switch certain consecutive letters in one of the three words)

Don't be to hadron them. Sticks, I'll support you by saying I have a similar recollection on a recent medical trial going awry, but I too draw a blank on remembering the details.

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There was the clinical trial that was using a virus to deliver some gene therapy, or something, and one of the participants died of the virus. That's fairly minor except to the dead fellow and his family.

You want widespread? Try thalidomide. But that wasn't an experiment, it was acceptable treatment until the side effects appeared.

I can't come up with a case of an experiment with expected result X actually producing unexpected horrible widespread result Y.

Fred

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This was the trial at Northwick Park of the experimental anti-inflammatory TGN1412, which put the six men who received the active drug in intensive care. If memory serves, it was an utterly unexpected reaction in humans, which hadn't been seen in animal trials, and it certainly did pretty nearly kill them.
Google on the drug and hospital names, and you'll find detail. The drug company involved was TeGenero.

Grant Hutchison

That wasn't science gone wrong...just another event in the war between engineers trying to make things idiot-proof and the universe coming up with better idiots.

A better example might be the Starfish high altitude nuclear tests. IIRC, EMP effects were predicted, but the extent of the effect was higher than expected, and it caused unintended damage to power grids, electronics on the ground, and numerous satellites.