I think reports from CERN would be interesting, so us outsiders can get a backstage look at what is going on there, not just the science, but the "human interest" stuff too.

No problem. With the LHC quiet at the moment, this thread has become much less active, but I suspect that will change as things get going again.

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Cosmic ray collisions producing 'any' sort of reaction should be recorded if possible in case there is information obtainable from them. Most telescopes are not configured to view the edge of the atmosphere so it is unlikely to be an area of much competition. Cosmic Rays hit an area of the human hand at a rate of about one a second at the earth's surface so numbers of events is not a problem.

So is the reaction like grand scale Cerenkov radiation viewed from the one point of impact for each cosmic ray event. The point is do all the components have to be measured or can an extrapolation from a limited set of data be used to determine what sort of particle is produced.

If just enough big stuff showed up alright and the hunt is only for the Higgs Boson ... it means if the Astronomers can focus their instruments they have a five or six month lead on the particle accelerator boys.

Hmm, I think you're confused. The thousands of tonnes of measuring equipment we have in CERN isn't for show, you can't measure the kind of detail we're looking for with the many, many Cerenkov detectors that are currently scouring our atmosphere all over the world, and as I said earlier the atmosphere makes it impossible to gather much data from the primary collision which starts the whole process.

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This is good! So you're saying saying it's impossible for anyone to know what the probability is! But that would seem to imply that there is no guarantee that the LHC is safe. . . . .


I'm glad that an actual or at least future CERN employee is willing to discuss the safety of the LHC in an open forum like this one. Just be careful: you're violating their gag order! Really, you should have chosen a more anonymous "handle". There are hundreds, if not thousands, of employees at CERN--but even so, how many Zachary's from London can there be?

A particle facility will measure the myriad of smaller particles and form a detailed map of the initial collision. Much like taking an object made of glass and smashing it taking a series of pictures of the bits and their trajectories.

At no stage is there a visual of the actual collision. The atmospheric collisions at many millions of times the individual energies offers the chance to view the actual collision. Additionally it can be viewed in a variety of frequencies just as in stellar astronomy.

I am not anti trying to know what it all means, I would just choose different and more natural means of measuring. I am very much against CERN and operating the LHC at a combined collective energy of millions of times the second per second energy is not a path I would choose or recommend ... ever.

Aaaaaand we're back to square one.

The chance of you dying in your sleep from falling out of the bed and breaking your neck is higher, why don't you start worrying about that instead?

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According to your figures, we can calculate the number of hours it would take to swallow the entire Earth, that weighs 6 x 10²⁷ gm.


Solving for yrs, I get about 1 year 4 months until we are all dead.

I do worry about breaking my neck! Everyday out at the rig we have a safety meetings where we analyze all the possible ways of breaking one's neck. "Pinch points" are what we call them. Were I to break my neck anyway, there are probably a few people besides my mother who would consider that a tragedy--perhaps even a couple on this forum--but it woudn't be a global catastrophe. So since we do worry about breaking our individual necks, shouldn't we worry all the more about breaking our collective neck?

Warren,
I don't know how you calculated to get your result, but:

(Weight of the earth)/(rate of matter-eating per hour) =(number of hours to eat the earth)

6x10 ²⁷ grams ÷(4x10 ^-16 grams/hour)=1.5x10 ⁴³ hours

converting the hours to years:

(1.5x10 ⁴³ hours)÷24x365=1.7x10 ⁴⁰ years

You have to understand that black holes are living things--and like all living things, they like to eat. And when they grow, they tend to grow exponentially. As the thing grows, its power grows as well; therefore, we shouldn't expect the suck-in rate to be flat. It's diameter will increase, and its gravity will as well. Eventually, it will cause cavitation; then the "solid" Earth will immediately collapse on the thing, force-feeding it. So I took your growth rate of 0.4% per half hour, and just extrapolated that.

OK. I agree with your figure, if the growth rate is exponential and that Hawking radiation is turned off (or does not exist) until a dangerous threshhold size has been reached, where it does not impact the BH growth.

Well for one I do not want you to break your neck. When dealing with humanity it is only with a one to one or individual assessment that shows people in their best light. Unfortunately an outside observer would have to be blind or have impossibly rose colored glasses to view the whole of humanity as anything better than an infestation.

It really is a moral dilemma because humanity if given access to time would be their own worst enemy. Alternately if an advanced civilization had access to information transmitted back in time it is still very bad for humanity. The only groups that might miss us are a few parasitic groups that find us convenient. Information of who we are and access to it and we risk destruction. Even in a multi universe our similar equivalent could and if like us would access our line and make destructive stupid changes (because if given a chance it is a certainty that we would).

I do not want CERN to work or find a solution to humanities questions and curiosities because of what we would do with the knowledge. Scientists do stand accused of the practice of science with little regard to morality because as Feynman put it:- "science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it."
—Richard Feynman

Someday and maybe someday very soon we will reap the reward of ducking responsibility.

I saw this earlier and have been meaning to respond to it: Actually, there is no point where big science can just decide to go forward. Substitute the word "oil" for "science" and you'll see what I mean. No doubt Exxon had "addressed concerns" before the Valdez oil spill. Just as big oil must undergo strict review by governental agencies, including the courts, if need be, similarly, big science must also be subject to formal governmental review. This has not happened for the LHC, beyond environmental impact statements (EIS's) associated with the construction of the tunnels themselves. That is, the concerns regarding the destruction of the entire Home Planet have not been scrutinized by a governmental agency with the power to shut down the LHC if deemed necessary. And the two or three times the LHC has made it to court, the cases were argued on procedural technicalities, rather than the science itself.

The reason the LHC safety has not been reviewed is not because the LHC is safe, but because the threat it potentially poses is wholly unprecedented.

Well, there was the worry that the first atom bomb would ignite the atmosphere (and the atmosphere can ignite--it happened during the K-T mass extinction event). And like their atomic forbears, the CERN people are seeking to make the LHC a fait accompli.

A real review, like we have to undergo out here if we want to develop a new oil field, would critically examine the claims of safety themselves, and would also force CERN to do an alternative analysis. At least Giddings has worn out his fingertips trying to justify the LHC's safety. But not one CERN scientist has offered an alternatives analysis. This is what Michael Noonan was trying to get at with cosmic ray studies. Is it possible to discover the God particle from cosmic ray experiments??? I don't know because none of the physicists involved have answered that question. Also, could a single beam collider produce identical results expected from the LHC. We don't know because the physicists haven't addressed that issue.

And there is also the alternative of going slow versus going fast.

The fact that the CERN people insist on going fast reveals them to be the irresponsible, gloryhound cowboys that they are better than the media-spinning, the name-calling, and all the Philip Glass operas put together.

ETA: And yes Jim, this here is an ad hominem argument--but not for its own sake. It's a serious point. The technical term for what the CERN scientists suffer from is a severe case of "confirmation bias". That's why we need independent governmental review over this project. The CERN people remind of that kid on that Christmas movie with Darren McGavin, where all the kid wants for X-mas is a BB-gun. Do you think that kid would ever write an essay that concluded that a BB-gun is too dangerous for him to play around with??? And after all, how many BB's do you suppose get shot out of a BB-gun before one pokes somebody's eye out? 1 in 50,000,000? Sounds safe to me as well, except for the fact that we are talking about ending all eyesight for all time.

ETA2: And if calling someone a "cowboy" is insulting, keep in mind that the B.A.'s pal Brian Cox called anybody who disagreed with him--so I guess that includes me--a bloody "twit". Except he didn't say "twit", like that kid in the movie who didn't say "fudge".

Cox didn't say it in this forum though.

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Sure, every time an oil company, for example (at least in the US) builds a new refinery, they have to go to the appropriate agencies (more often state and local than federal) and get the appropriate air and water and other permits. And there are even mechanisms for others to appeal those permits and ask them to be reviewed, all the way up to the courts.

But my point was that there was some end to that process. Once you've asked the EPA to review, then asked the courts to review, you can't keep doing a never ending "questioning" of the permits, so as to hold them up forever.

So, what I said was:
So, I'm asking you Warren, what would be the endpoint (if any) for you? Is there a possible point where you would be satisfied that the LHC is safe? Or have you concluded it is not, no matter what else is presented.

But the LHC has been reviewed.

I assume the indented bit is a quote - could you give the source?

And the bit about the first atom bomb igniting the atmosphere has been discussed multiple times, it never was a serious concern, and it was in fact reviewed very carefully.

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I have researched this enough to convince myself that there is a recalicitrant risk that cannot be argued away, until the experiment is actually carried out. Moreover, this risk is not of the burrito in the microwave variety of risk. There are regions--albeit small regions--that have yet to be empirically ruled out within the theoretically allowable parameter space that are, shall we say, potentially problematic. Considering what's at stake, I don't think the risk is worth it personally. Whether there's a "God" particle is a nice-to-know, not a need-to-have. Mother Earth, on the other hand, is a need-to-have.

But that's only half of what bugs me about this episode: the other half is the total lack of accountability and governmental oversight.

If the project were scrutinized by the European equivalent of the EPA, the Corps of Engineers, the USFWS, NMFS, USFS, BLM, etc.--along with a formal public comment period--with the actual power to put a stop to the project and to force CERN to consider alternatives (e.g., do nothing, single-beam versus double beam, the possibility of using cosmic rays to do the same thing, as well as the power to force CERN to perform mitigation by going slowly and cautiously if it is also determined that the societal risks are minimal (at least to common radiation standards--no more than a 1 in a million chance of causing 5 deaths per year on average) and if none of the alternatives are deemed practicable (i.e., there is no other way to learn about the "God" particle), then I would at least have the satisfaction that the LHC had been properly and fairly permitted by society.

As things stand now, the foxes are in charge of the hen house. Or to put it another way, it's like being taken for a cab ride by a driver with no regard for traffic law. If you were to arrive at your destination without a scratch, and the driver crowed "See--I told you so--nothing happened you Fear Monger, you Doomsayer!" you would be justified in thinking that the mere fact that you are unscathed is rather beside the point.

That's my point.


See above.

That wasn't a quote, it was an aside; I should have enclosed it in parentheses.

As for the igniting the atmosphere, if it wasn't a serious concern, then there would have been no need for careful review; also, nonphysicist governmental agents were responsible for reviewing the project and had the power to stop it if deemed unsafe; also, in marked contrast to the LHC, there was an overriding societal benefit to be realized from the bomb--namely bringing about the world's worst war to a swift and favorable conclusion.

Having tried to read through all of this very long thread, my impression is that (please correct me if I am wrong Warren...), that Warren's basic argument is that we can not be 100% sure that our physics correctly understands Black Holes to the point that we can exclude any risk with the experiment, no matter how small.

You've hit the nail squarely on the head.

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The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

Yes , so just dismantle the thing and make good money with all that steel and copper and other metals. And these kind of tunnels are great to store wine or to grow mushrooms !

Yeah, I was waiting for someone to say that. But most other people go on to mention that there's a nonzero chance that someone zapping a burrito in a microwave will also destroy the planet. I just heard Michio Kaku the other day on the radio claiming that he has his graduate students calculate the probability that all their atoms will spontaneously tunnel through a brick wall and harmlessly reassemble on the other side.

These are seriously misleading analogies.

For one, the destructive effects of microwave ovens and probabilities of quantum tunneling through brick walls are frequentist, statistical examples, whereas when considering the LHC, we are considering the Bayesian prior probabilities that certain physical parameters will come to be recognized as Nature's true choices--assuming civilization lasts long enough. Conflating the two is an obfuscation--not an argument.

In the one example, we are told that there is a nonzero probability that just about any action whatever, like turning on a microwave oven, could cause a weird quantum chain of events that could destroy everything. In other words, someone could turn on a microwave 10¹⁰⁰⁰ times, but on the 10¹⁰⁰⁰ + 1 time, the microwave tunnels into a dangerous black hole that destroys the world; so the probability that a microwave will destroy the world is 10^-1000 (or whatever), which is technically nonzero, we are told, and that the LHC is like the microwave--thus we are led blindfolded by the nose and invited to believe the conclusion that there is no more physical theory behind the idea that the LHC could destroy the world than weird quantum tunneling events that apply equally to microwave ovens.

Few arguments are further from the truth.

The question is whether machines like the LHC wherever and whenever in the universe they are built will produce world-destroying miniblack holes every single time they are turned on. And so discussions of what is the magnitude of the Bayesian prior probability that the LHC will destroy the world (p[sub]catastrophe[/i]) is an attempt to decide on the liklihood that the frequentist probability that the LHC will destroy the world is either 1 or 0.

And the physical argument that the LHC will destroy the world doesn't depend on weird quantum tunneling. It depends rather on whether Hawking radiation exists (it's never been observed), whether we exist in 5 to 7 dimensions, and whether neutron stars are superfluid.

In this regard, I should note the fact that we humans in our early state of technological development are apparently the only technological species in the galaxy, when the law of large numbers and evolution suggest that the galaxy should be teeming with technological life. The standard explanation for the so-called Great Silence is that other species that came before us destroyed themselves through technological hubris.

While I don't see any evidence that the LHC is any real danger whatsoever---and I thoroughly support its operation---it does concern me that so much hostility is shown to anyone even daring to ask the question. What happens one day when some experiment could destroy life on Earth?

As I think I said in the beginning of this unending thread, some means for addressing such concerns should be found and agreed upon, internationally. "Trust us" doesn't work for me and shouldn't work for any of you.

James, this is totally unfair. Besides, you know better than this because I know you've read my posts in this thread. I've never insisted on an absolute standard of proof. I wrote this back on post #1333:

I've been accused by both swift and Celestial Mechanic [and now cjameshuff] of "demanding an impossible to achieve level of certitude" or "absolute proof" with regard to the safety of the LHC. This is not true, as I made clear about 20 pages ago, but apparently bears reiteration here.

I do not demand absolute certainty. We all agree that there is a nonzero probability that practically anything can happen.

On the other hand, we need a standard of proof that is more stringent than "beyond a reasonable doubt". That's because the risk is not merely hanging an innocent man. So I proposed a new standard of proof that might be called "reasonable certainty". We can be reasonably certain that a microwave oven or yours truly will not destroy the planet. All I want to see is an argument that makes a clear case that we can be reasonably certain that the LHC is as dangerous as a microwave oven. I do not see that yet. I don't think that case can be made without trying out the experiment and seeing what happens.

The consequences of being wrong are unacceptable.

The reason I insist on reasonable certainty is because "beyond a reasonable doubt" is not good enough--not when the very existence of Planet Earth is at stake. If you'll read the Wiki article on standards of proof, you'll find a study cited that juries convinced beyond a reasonable doubt were wrong up to 30% of the time. At the same time, I've studied enough philosophy to know that absolute certainty is a chimera. Therefore, we need a new standard of proof: what I and Dr. Plaga call "reasonable certainty".

Thus, when I get on a plane, I know "beyond a reasonable doubt", that I will make it to my destination in one piece. But I cannot say with a reasonable certainty that I will make it out alive.

Similarly, if I buy a Powerball Lotto ticket, I know beyond a reasonable doubt that I will lose; I cannot say with a reasonable certainty, however, that I will not win, because, after all, people do win those lotteries.

On the other hand, though I cannot say with a reasonable certainty that turning on a microwave oven will not catch fire and burn down my house (even though I know beyond a reasonable doubt that it will not catch fire), I can say with a reasonable certainty that turning on the microwave will not destroy the planet. However, I cannot be absolutely certain that the microwave will not destroy the planet.

When our entire Home Planet is at stake, and all our lives, and all the lives of people who are not even born yet, we need a standard of reasonable certainty. To doubt the existence of Hawking radiation in just about any other context would be unreasonable doubting. After all, it was proposed by Steven Hawking who is rarely wrong--though he has some doozies under his belt.

But when Mother Earth herself is at stake, such unreasonable doubts must be fully weighed and considered. After all, there has been as of yet no empirical detection of Hawking radiation. Therefore, we cannot be reasonably certain that Hawking radiation does in fact exist--though beyond a reasonable doubt, such radiation must surely exist.

Do I make myself clear?

Warren,
I find it good that you stick to your guns. The whole black hole, Big Bang, pre-Big Bank etc. areas have really been evolving a lot lately. New ideas and concepts are cropping up, like dark energy, quantum fluctuations during the inflationary period, or even pre-BB...

Hawking Radiation is a big question mark also. Math looks good, but is it really so in nature? How sure are we really in the black hole area?

Good to have someone presenting an alternate view, it provokes thought. Thanks

Precisely. Just in the last week there is now an understanding that black holes formed before galaxies. This is a start that I am very pleased with.

It is only a start however (because I have a different opinion of what is being seen) it is a start that is worthy of a lot more investigation.

I think this mischaracterizes the argument. Quantum events do not have a threshold as you describe here. It's not a matter of doing something N times and then having an event occur on the N+1st instance. Tunneling, for example, is stochastic. A particle can tunnel on its first collision with a barrier, even though, on average it takes many.

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If I have been hostile, I apologize, though I don't believe I have. And, if you look at the responses (both my own and others) to others who have asked questions, I believe they have all been polite.

What I find frustrating is going over the same stuff over and over again with the same person.

Warren, I give up. I have nothing further to say to you about this topic. Feel free to carry on. But if you really are so concerned, why don't you bring your concerns to the attention of someone who could do something about them, like the governments of Europe or the administrators of CERN.

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I don't think Daffy was referring to BAUT specifically: because BAUT is well-moderated, the level of explicit heat has been relatively low, although there has definitely been much "circling of the wagons" by the local science groupies who liken dissent to intelligent design-style anti-science. However, you can cut the hostility with a knife just about anywhere else:

cf. physforum.com (WARNING: "adult"-only language).

At least I've answered questions put to me. Like I said above, what would make me feel comfortable is if the collider were located well off-planet. Failing that, I would be OK with running the thing in single-beam mode only. Failing that, if they are dead set on running the LHC in double-beam mode, then they should at least go slowly and cautiously. They should at least try to replicate RHIC's results first. In particular, they should try to replicate the one-off "black hole precursor" that RHIC detected that one time. Besides being safer, I would think it makes better scientific sense to thoroughly understand everything that's produced at lower energy levels before they go cranking up the voltage to maximum warp.

Since I've answered your question, I have one for you:

CERN has already learned the hard way that there are good engineering (and hence economic) reasons for cranking up the power levels slowly and cautiously.

Can you give me one or more good scientific reasons why it is necessary to crank up the power levels to maximum warp ASAP???

You know as well as I know that it's a nonstarter trying to get through to the administrators of CERN. And the governments of Europe have apparently not yet felt it politically expedient to go on record as opposing the LHC. Me, as a lone American, would have little influence on them, and I don't have standing in European courts. I was thinking about filing suit against CERN under the American Endangered Species Act (ESA). If there are 50,000,000 species and there is a 1 in 50,000,000 chance that the LHC will destroy the planet, then the expectation is that the LHC will cause the extinction of at least one species, and that is a violation of the ESA. The beauty part of the ESA is that cost-benefit analyses are specifically disallowed when considering the cost of preserving species. However, even if I had the funds, and were successful, it would only halt American federal involvement with CERN. They would happily continue without American meddling. So I do the only thing I really can, and that's to keep working the court of public opinion. The only way to stop the LHC is direct action in the form of mass protests in Europe. In order for that to happen, people need to realize that the emperor wears no clothes.

No need to apologize!

My point is simply that I get the impression a lot of folks would rather the questions not be asked at all. I have a problem with that in any situation...questioning authority is important, IMO. OTH, one must be prepared to listen to the answers with an open mind, too.

The LHC doesn't concern me at all...all the evidence says it's harmless. It's future developments I worry about. I am not sure what the answer is...but questioning things is definitely a good place to start.