About the LHC

As I predicted, the great majority of commentary on the legal action concerning the Large Hadron Collider is snarky. Phil at Bad Astronomy, a prominient Skeptic, had an initial post which was fairly restrained, but then followed it with a post linking to others which definitely fall within the "snark" category. Daily Galaxy severely ridiculed the topic, but in the process misrepresented the case completely. Most of the "big" physics sites I visit regularly seem to have taken a view of "the less said the better". I suspect that they probably figure that the less publicity they to anything that could delay the start up, the better.

For a good natured humorous take on it, see Scott Adams' post about it at his Dilbert Blog.

One thing is perfectly clear: most of those who are ridiculing the issue, especially in comments sections, have not read the main websites which have been discussing the issue for the last couple of years.

As I said in my original post on this, I liked James Blodgett's work because he was willing to be shown that there clearly is no risk, taking into account all possibilities (including the failure of the never observed Hawking Radiation to actually exist.) It's true that very, very few physicists doubt Hawking Radiation, but a few reputable ones have speculated that maybe it doesn't. When the CERN risk assessment paper is based heavily on the assumption that it does exist, that's where a legitimate criticism lies.

Much is being made of the background of Walter Wagner, one of the litigants. To be honest, I have no idea about his general credibility; I note that he certainly does seem to have had a very varied career, and the fact that his website was inviting donations was always something that gave me some concern. However, in his posts on the web he generally has come across as pretty rational, and the ad hominem attacks do nothing to address the key issue.

In the New Scientist version of the story, the case is "complete nonsense" according to CERN spokesman James Gillies. He appears to be much more circumspect in the report of the New York Times. In fact, the NYT report emphasizes that CERN physicists have taken the question seriously, and have been looking at safety issues again since last year. One of the most curious parts of the report is that most of the members of the Safety Assessment Group are said to prefer to remain anonymous "for various reasons". I am curious as to why that would be. It doesn't fit entirely comfortably with their insistence that they are being completely open about all of the possibilities they are considering.

I expect that the revised safety assessment will still give the project a clean bill of health, and I hope it does it on the basis of a convincing explanation that under no foreseeable circumstances could thousands of non-evaporating mini black holes floating in and around the earth absorb atoms fast enough to ever be a problem.

I hope the strangelet issue can similarly be dealt with as well.

We will see.