Mini black hole safety report finally here

Backreaction: Black Holes at the LHC - The CERN Safety report

The above post at Backreaction tells us about the CERN safety report which was finally released last Friday.

I haven't had time to read it yet, but apparently, as expected, it uses the example of long lived neutron stars as the major argument as to why micro black holes could not be a danger to the earth.

This may well end up marking the official end of my concerns about this as a issue, but I should read it first. (And one immediate issue I can think of is whether you can really use the cosmological argument as a close enough analogue to the way many black holes could be created in close proximity in a short space of time at the LHC.)

For any of you who think that it has been a waste of time worrying about it in the first place, you should read what actual working physicist Bee says in her comments on the above post:

I think it is good they wrote this report and from a legal point of view I can understand that some people found the issue was not appropriately addressed. CERN should have taken these concerns more seriously earlier then it wouldn't have come so far. In this particular situation I find the argument about the black hole scenario ridiculous, but that's because it's a topic I happen to have worked on and know something about. If I consider experiments in other fields where I couldn't tell exactly what the story is, I certainly would appreciate a similar report. The new CERN report I find extremely clearly written and I hope this will suffice and be the end of this catastrophe scenario.

This is a completely different attitude, and a very welcome one, from that expressed by most physicists when lay people started asking questions. (I'm looking at you, the guys at Cosmic Variance.)