As if we didn't have enough to worry about

Massive miscalculation makes LHC safety assurances invalid
January 28th, 2009 | by KFC |



It just gets worse for CERN and its attempts to reassure us that the Large Hadron Collider won’t make mincemeat of the planet.

It’s beginning to look as if a massive miscalculation in the safety reckonings means that CERN scientists cannot offer any assurances about the work they’re doing.



Nobody at CERN has put a figure on the chances of the LHC destroying the planet. One study simply said: “there is no risk of any significance whatsoever from such black holes”.

Which means we are left with the possibility that their argument is wrong which Ord reckons conservatively to be about 10^-4, meaning that out of a sample of 10,000 independent arguments of similar apparent merit, one would have a serious error.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the LHC is dangerous, only that there is no reasonable assurance of safety which, as Mark Buchanan writing in New Scientist this week says, is not the same thing at all.

Even still, when it comes to the lives of 6.5 billion people, we need to have better assurances than this.



Here is a link to this article http://arxivblog.com/?p=1150





You know maybe they could create a black hole that we could use to store all of our toxic assets. It just seems like the perfect place for them.

I bought a coffin at costco.

Raleigh I'm waiting till they go on sale

I bought a coffin at costco.

I think buying the coffin was a waste of money. If a black hole is created, you will not have time to get in it.

Rich

I think buying the coffin was a waste of money. If a black hole is created, you will not have time to get in it. Rich I think your foresight is faster than my foresight,

I bought a coffin at costco.

I think buying the coffin was a waste of money. If a black hole is created, you will not have time to get in it.

Rich

Actually that is not true, if a sustainable black hole was created it would be so small it would take a fair bit of time for it to eat the whole planet. Their argument was that cosmic rays from space were as energetic or more so than anthing created in the accelerator, however I take it all this is in question now?

Maybe we should have a good Collider and a bad Collider. That would fix it. TM

Maybe we should have a good Collider and a bad Collider. That would fix it.
TM

Witty post of the day!

thnaks!