Believe it or not I have a nutcase lady at work that blames her toothache (that she claims started when the LHC was switched on) on the LHC.

Does she still have a toothache now that the LHC has been (temporarily) turned off?

Note: It's been turned off because it created <insert favourite sounding physics particle> and the government is covering it up.

Heh

Pete

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PJE

There's so much I don't know about astrophysics. I wish I had read that book by that wheelchair guy.

Really? Do you have absolute proof (as you demand of CERN) that nuclear war has a ZERO probability of causing the extinction of humanity? Please present your proof.

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One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

Is it possible for you to respond to a post without twisting at least one key word? I did not mention disease, I suggested bio-weapon research gone wrong, as in freak accident combining three lethal virus to one with airborn capabilities, and oops the omg-turn-it-off-gene fails. Do you really believe that there is ZERO chance of any such thing happening?

Says mr. let's assign a dollar value to a planet..

Who made you judge of my morals?

Straw man. Nobody is advocating such, and only your imagination makes the LHC a likely candidate to cause excinctions.

Yeah, that would be a pretty dumb argument. Fortunately, that was not what I was saying at all, was it? Then again, can you guarantee that there can never be a deranged lunatic scientist who would do that?

So you trust politicians and the bad guys' leaderships, and those that they let handle the big red buttons, to never ever mess up. Really?

But we were speaking about chances of things going wrong, remember? And how for humanity it would make no difference how its accidental extinction would come to pass. And how we allow other much bigger human dangers to the human race to remain in place.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin
"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson
Meet the OOONG TOE.

The difference is this--for the third time : Nobody I know advocates launching an all out nuclear war against both Russia and China on October 24 in order to see what will happen. Were such an attack to be made, it might or might not cause our extinction, but no one advocates trying the experiment to find out. Unlike as is the case with the LHC. The nuclear war thing is a false analogy.

Nope. And no one advocates creating such dangerous creatures--unlike as is the case with the LHC.

You tell me how to value an entire planet and 1 billion years of future history.

I have a master's in environmental ethics--you do not. I am an expert--you obviously are not.

Why don't you argue the science instead of making suppositions regarding my imagination.

Of course I can't. Welcome to the new world order, my friend, where just about any violation of civil liberties will be justified in order to stop such lunatics, because the risk is existential.

Are you advocating that the US unilaterally disarm in a world where Russia is playing chicken with nuclear bombers, China is selling fighter jets to Venezuela, Iran is hellbent on developing nukes, North Korea is selling nuclear tech to the highest bidder??? You can forget about that.

Or perhaps you are arguing for a preemptive first strike? Might as well get it over with now, establish a one-world government, before the weapons get really terrible--is that what you want?

I disagree that it makes no difference how humanity's extinction happens. An all out nuclear war isn't very accidental, is it? And if a big asteroid whacks us tomorrow, there's nothing much to be done about it. The LHC, on the other hand, is a totally avoidable risk. There is no reason to take such a risk. The potential gain in knowledge is trivial in comparison to the risk. Who cares about particle physics? Not me--I can say that for sure. There are about 10,000 physicists and about 100,000 science groupies who don't understand it anyway who give a crap--i.e., about 0.002% of the world's population. Yet this tiny, Faustian minority is willing to risk the lives of everyone else in order to test a few pet theories.

And don't talk to me about medical imagery. If medical imagers are not good enough, then work on building better imagers. An 8 billion euro collider isn't necessary for that.

Of course it's a false analogy, but not for the reasons you stated.

It's not an accurate comparison because while nuclear war * could * destroy us, the LHC could not.

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Prove it.

Warren, you twist my words around and then attack the straw man. It's a waste of time trying to adress a point, correcting the twisting, only to see it twisted again. I raise the possibility of an unintentional disaster happening resulting in nuclear war, and somehow that makes me a first strike advocate? If that is how you need to reinforce your fears, so be it. I refuse to waste more time on it. I've made my points, for those who care to read them.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin
"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson
Meet the OOONG TOE.

Sorry slang. I know you don't advocate nuclear war. Nobody does. But that's the difference. No one advocates nuclear war. Yet many people advocate turning on a machine that could destroy the planet. You say if I'm against the LHC then I should be against nuclear war as well. Well, guess what, I'm against both, OK? I'm consistent--you are not. If you are against the avoidable risk of nuclear war, then you should also be against the avoidable risk that the LHC represents. Your whole nuclear war argument is in my favor, I hope you realize.

This is the fallacy in bold. Right there.

No- it can't.

There is a "Non- Zero" chance that it could.

There is an even greater non zero chance that the planet could be destroyed by natural causes long before the LHC could.

A large enough GRB is much more likely to wipe us out within the next 100,000 years than the LHC has in 1,000,000 years.

Yet, you seem to have adopted the notion the LHC is Planet Destructive Capable and assigned it as a "BELIEF."


Warren Platts, there is a Non Zero Chance that you personally could destroy the world.

There is a Much Much greater chance that you personally will destroy one or more lives within your lifetime.

Will you hide in your house, never drive and do everything possible to keep yourself in stasis because you could, potentially, kill someone?

Only in your mind. We choose to keep nuclear weapons. You explicitly did so, with your "bad guys first" comment (and I do not disagree with it). Without nuclear weapons there would be no risk at all from them causing unintended catastrophy causing human extinction. Yet we choose to keep them. Why? We think freedom is worth that risk.

The chance that all high energy particles from the universe to hit Earth in 4.5 billion years failed to do what the (orders of magnitude less energetic) LHC might do if all our physics is wrong, is incredibly vanishingly small. Whatever invented value should be weighed against it doesn't matter. Divide by zero and all that. Knowledge is worth it. I know, you disagree. No need to state it again.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin
"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson
Meet the OOONG TOE.

This bears repeating in bold.

Just n case anyone, for whatever reason, didn't catch it.

Just a random example of something from real life that people who are not me find scary.

You know, Mr. Platts, reading the things you say about the LHC makes me even less likely to read your arguments against the ISS that I would already be.

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

OK, I think I see your argument. We tolerate the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons, therefore we should tolerate the existential threat posed by the LHC. Two points:

1. Unilateral disarmament by the US will not eliminate the nuclear threat because several nations run by tyrants and Islamists will still possess nuclear weapons, whereas the risk posed by the LHC can be stopped with a simple court injunction. Ought implies can. We have no duty to eliminate risks that we have no power to eliminate. The LHC is eminently stoppable through ordinary legal means.

2. The reward for running the risk of nuclear war is different than the reward for running the risk posed by the LHC. As you mentioned, freedom from tyranny is a value worth dieing for. Better dead than red, as they used to say. However, there is nothing that will be gained from the LHC that is worth the risk of death, at least not for everybody.

This is a separate argument, and it's not very clear. I hesitate to answer it, lest I be accused of twisting your words. Could you rephrase? I don't know what you mean by "Divide by zero and all that."

The first sentence/premise, however, is definitely a red herring. It ignores the fact cosmic ray induced mBH's will have a velocity relative to Earth that is many orders of magnitude greater than the escape velocity of the Earth, and therefore, any such cosmic ray induced mBH's will pass harmlessly through the Earth in fraction of a millisecond.

On the other hand, LHC induced mBH's--since they would result from a head on collision involving two beams with equal velocities--will be basically at rest with respect to the Earth. That is, the velocities of LHC induced mBH's would be less than the escape velocity of the Earth, and would be captured by Earth's gravity. And I'm sure you know this to be true because nobody--not even the CERN scientists--dispute this point.

To summarize:

LHC induced mBH's ---> trapped by the Earth

CR induced mBH's ---> not trapped by the Earth

Warren Platts,

Demonstrate that the LHC actually IS a Threat OR a Substantial Risk.

So far, you are basing ALL your arguments on the assumption that it IS a threat.

I'd have thought that not all CR induced mBHs would have such high velocities. With all the billions of collisions going on over billions of years, some would would have low enough velocities to be trapped by Earth's gravity, surely.

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There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand ternary, those who don't, and those waiting for a bus.
If logic doesn't work, then surely it does.

Or for that matter, just happen to have the right trajectory.

What, * every * particle that hits the Earth's atmosphere is just going to skip off and go merrily on its way? BS.

Some will be aimed in such a way that it doesn't matter how fast they are going. The particle winds up hitting ground in the Earth.

That's why things such as neutrino detectors, etc. work on Earth - because those particles are getting through our atmosphere and down to the shielded areas below the surface of the Earth.

For Warren to claim that:

a) Micro-black holes "skip away" when created by cosmic collisions
b) Cosmic particles are moving too quickly to be captured by the Earth

Is utter and complete nonsense as demonstrated in other areas of physics.

If black holes are created from these collisions, they are already captured by the Earth just by having the right angle when they are coming in.

Since gravity is so strong in Warren's view of MBHs, these black holes would indeed drop into the center of the Earth and destroy it.

That hasn't happened yet - meaning, it can't happen or it would have already.

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My view? Maybe you missed a quote there, Drunk Vegan

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There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand ternary, those who don't, and those waiting for a bus.
If logic doesn't work, then surely it does.

The fact is nobody knows for sure whether the LHC is Planet Destructive Capable or not. I'd rather not find out. I don't understand your curiosity.

Unless of course you're not curious at all, in which case, you really need to read some more history of science. You're not old enough to have personally experienced any radical shifts in scientific paradigms and the weird cognitive dissonance that such revolutions produce. I remember sitting through lectures in the 1980's on cosmology by Michael S. Turner, and I even saw a lecture by the great Stephen Hawking on how the universe was eventually going to slow down and then enter a "Big Crunch" phase. If you had asked me then as a brash 20-something scientific dilettante what I thought the odds were that the universe is accelerating, I probably would have said something like 10^-21 as well. And I would have been dead wrong. When the reports first started coming out, I couldn't believe them at first. It was too crazy: physics couldn't be that wrong, could it? Yet it is so.

Now that I'm older, I'm more humble. The sure things of today have a nasty habit of turning into tomorrow's obvious mistakes. And I must say that I am a little perturbed that the most cocksure scientists who yell the loudest like Giddings and Cox are fairly young--younger than I am anyway. They are running a risk, and they know it. They think it's a long shot. They think that everything will probably turn out OK. But they have never experienced what it is like to have a core theory totally upended. You know how young people are--it's always the other guy who's going to get it.


I thought I already did. . . .

Interesting argument, Neverfly. At least it's a new one! But it can't fly either. Yes, I might through gross negligence kill someone in the future. That would certainly be a tragedy. But I can't kill everyone, even if I wanted to.

Moreover--and this is something other people on this thread don't seem to grasp--killing everyone is not like killing one person and then multiplying by 6 billion. Killing everyone is a superkilling. Killing everyone kills more than lives--it kills life itself. It kills not just the present, it also kills the future. It kills not only species, it kills all speciation. This cannot be allowed to happen.

My apologies, post has been edited to make it clear that I am referring to Warren Platt's conspiracy theory.

For that matter, why is this thread in General Science?

I think it has been disproven to such an extent that it belongs in the Conspiracy Theory forum.

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It's nothing to do with theory. Even if all the theories are wrong, and mBHs are created and hang around, then they have been already for ages. Your argument is like saying that because of the pioneer anomalies we shouldn't go dropping any objects from the Leaning Tower of Pizza just in case our understanding of gravity is off and we destroy the earth. Your argument is that stupid.

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There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand ternary, those who don't, and those waiting for a bus.
If logic doesn't work, then surely it does.

I'm well aware that you don't want to find out. You have resisted it passionately throughout this thread.





This has nothing to do with the LHC.

Total Straw men across the board.

If you are trying to claim with this that Hawking Radiation is not "proven" I will remind you- AGAIN- that H.R. is not required for the LHC.

No Comment.

Your strange character ad hom attack on two strangers- in which you try to claim you understand or know what they think is absurd.
The LHC was built to expand theory- it was NOT BUILT ON JUST theoretical physics!!
You are treating it like it was. It wasn't.



Irrelevant to the argument that people cannot huddle in FEAR.

Oh good, then you have nothing to worry about.

That last statement was made- Entirely- on the assumption that the LHC is a threat.

Will You get off the "I love Earth" pedestal long enough to make a scientifically rational argument?

ETA: Worzel: Excellent way to put it!

You guys should really try to learn at least a little of the science you're trying to defend. From Mangano and Giddings (2008):

Here "D" stands for the number of dimensions. Apparently, if the universe exists in 7 or more dimensions, mBH's trapped by the Earth would grow too slow to be dangerous, but if we exist in 5 or 6 dimensions, even M&G admit that mBH's in that case would be "problematic". That's why they bring in the white dwarfs.

"Relativistic" here means "relativistic velocity", i.e., close to the speed of light c. In other words, much larger than the escape velocity of the Earth. M&G then discuss possible stopping mechanisms of CR produced mBH's. There are two, according to M&G: (1) there is so-called Coulomb scattering where the mBH loses energy through gravitational interaction without actually coming into contact with a target particle; and (2) accretion slow-down, where the mBH actually collides with and absorbs other particles. They then go through a series of about 20 more equations and arrive at the following conclusion:
Here, d₀(E) is "the length required to slow-down the black hole to the non-relativistic regime." The diameter of the Earth is 1.3 × 10⁹ cm. G&M continue:

Here, despite weasel words like "typical" and "small but finite", M&G admit that at least a few LHC produced mBH's will likely get trapped by the Earth's gravity. (It was Gidding, after all, who coined the term "black hole factory" to describe the LHC. If his theories are halfway correct, the LHC will produce millions of mBH's.) Therefore:

Sorry guys: all CR produced mBH's are relativistic. They won't get trapped by the Earth. It is your lame handwaving that is BS, Drunk Vegan. To summarize:

all CR produced mBH's ---> not trapped by Earth

some LHC produced mBH's ---> trapped by Earth

It will be interesting to see if any of you all are capable of admitting a mistake.

Sheesh Warren Platts, could you have twisted Mangano and Giddings words anymore?

A slim but finite possibility that some MAY get trapped in Earths gravity well- And even so they will still be harmless...

And you turn THAT into "The End Of The World!"

WHATEVER!!

You refuse to get off your soapbox is all it is...

Miss Yeves! Say it ain't so! I oppose the LHC and the ISS for entirely different reasons. The ISS will merely delay the American return to the Moon for several years; the LHC could very well kill us all!

So you continually Proclaim...

There's a lot more to it than that. And reread the passage above: M&G do not use the word "MAY"--and they are very sensitive about being misquoted, if you'll recall.

My point tonight is merely to make clear that a cosmic ray produced mBH has never been trapped by the Earth, whereas if string theory is true, then LHC produced mBH's will get trapped by the Earth--for the first time in history! Maybe you think that trapping black holes within the Earth for the first time ever is a good idea--but that doesn't make sense to me.

Did you know string theory also predicts that black holes would be made at the RHIC in Brookhaven. Seems it didn't so why are you so sure that the LHC will when the RHIC didn't. Besides, is your worry going to change anything besides causing you to lose sleep, look foolish and possibly create all sorts of GI problems for yourself.

Then why are you doing it?

That isn't what I read in what you quoted at all.

It will take me a moment to go through the whole link you posted.