While we're sitting around waiting for CERN to release its revised safety assessment, there is still some detailed coverage in the press turning up.
Physicist M Mangano appears to be wearing the brunt of the effort to re-assure everyone that they won't accidentally end the Earth prematurely, and it's important to note the tone he takes here:
Michelangelo L. Mangano, a respected particle physicist who helped discover the top quark in 1995, now spends most days trying to convince people that his new machine won't destroy the world.It's not clear whether or not he is referring to someone other than Walter Wagner here; after all, Wagner's experience as a phyiscist has been called into question by some.
"If it were just crackpots, we could wave them away," the physicist said in an interview at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, CERN. "But some are real physicists."
According to the article, Mangano himself is currently writing the updated assessment. Let's hope he finishes it in time for it to be properly considered by the rest of us before they power up the machine.
(As I said in an earlier post, the fact that the report has been somewhat delayed is not exactly comforting.)
2 comments:
Hi Steve
Thanks for your continued involvement with this. One needed point you make is that there are a wider range of those affected than just physicists. This underscores perhaps the deepest point in this - that society does not yet have the proper arms-length disinterested institutions of governance for this type of risk. Those associated with the collider seem oblivious to these dimensions of the issue. For example they seem quite unaware (or, worse, do not seem to mind) that the in-house lsag group doing the safety assessment must have a conflict of interest.
I have identified 6 layers of protection discussed over the last decade and more regarding the safety of the LHC coming online this summer:
1. NO BLACK HOLES WILL BE PRODUCED.
2. BLACK HOLES WOULD EVAPORATE TOO QUICKLY TO INTERACT WITH THE EARTH.
3. PERSISTENCE OF EARTH, MOON, AND OTHER BODIES IN SOLAR SYSTEM PROVES SAFETY OF mBH BOMBARDMENT.
4.THE VASTLY HIGHER ENERGIES OF SOME COSMIC RAYS STRIKING EARTH ARE PROOF OF SAFETY.
5. THE COLLISIONS HAVE LESS ENERGY THAN A FEW FLYING MOSQUITOS, so must be safe.
6.EVEN IF THE PREVIOUS PROTECTIONS FAIL, THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO DANGER BECAUSE:
[At that rate, even if one did not take into account the fact that each black hole would slow down every time it gobbled up a proton, and thus suck down matter at an even slower rate, 'about 100 protons would be destroyed every year by such a black hole, so it would take much more than the age of universe to destroy even one milligram of Earth material]???(6)
All of them fall if you examine them critically, and the last one contains a fatal math error:
In a nutshell:
Can a growth process, with a built-in positive feedback loop, be linear?
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