Large Hadron Collider feedback needed

[BenBurch]

Mind the screen door. Write if you get help.

 

[HansMustermann]

Dude, again, before there can be any risk management, there has to be a proven risk. Period.

And by "proven risk", I mean an even half-way believable theory, not just BS from those who don't even understand what they're talking about.

According to physics as we know it, there is _no_ possibility of such a thing happening at all. We'd have to be utterly wrong not just about one theory, but about several of them, before your scenario even made any sense.

The probability of something impossible happening is 0. Zero. We don't need a statistician or risk management expert to figure that one out.

What you're proposing is no less absurd than saying, say, "but you haven't taken precautions for the case that you roll one six-sided die and get two sevens." It just can't happen. Probability is a big fat zero.

For that probability to be anything else, you first have to make the case that such a lasting, charge-less micro-black hole can even exist at all. Once you do that, we'll plug the numbers in that formula and tell you all the probabilities you want to know. But as long as it's at the stage where it's impossible according to physics as we know it, the probability is and stays zero.

 

[BenBurch]

Hans,

I think we need risk management for the Garden Fairy problem.

Yes, I know that all science and experience says there is not any such things as Garden Fairies, but some people pretend that there are, and what if they are right???

We could have hoardes of terroristic Fairies cheesed-off that we have planted cucumbers this year instead of potatoes attacking our homes and convincing the Gremlins to crash all our airliners.

The Air France thing was just a warning shot!

 

[HansMustermann]

Rofl.

 

[Ashles]

If I am not a physicist, you guys are not risk management specialists

Wow.

Yeah, I'm sure risk management specialists are far more qualified to give advice on the safety of Large Hadron Colliders than... physicists.

ETA: I am flabbergasted.
I have never seen a parting shot in such a debate basically consist of:
"Well what would you know, you're only specialists and experts in the exact field we were discussing. And I freely admit I am not an expert in this field. What we really need as 'competent judges' are complete generalists" (who, if consulted would immediately consult and defer to specialists and experts in the scientific area being discussed).

Remarkable.

 

[ben m]

I know that this is a difficult issue to manage, with some hard judgments to make. I would just like to see those hard judgments made by what looks like competent judges.

And who is qualified to tell whether the judge is competent? You? Perhaps by "competent" you mean "agrees with you".

If I am not a physicist, you guys are not risk management specialists; none have ever been consulted.

Who said we are not risk management specialists? Anyway, the two relevant bits of risk management are the probability of failure and the expected cost. We're telling you that the probability of failure is zero. Call in your best risk manager and they can tell us what cost to multiply by zero.

And the discussion here (and in some other places) sounds more like a kangaroo court than like competent judgment.

Ah, that's a simple thing to fix. Click on "User CP", then "Edit options". Then you want to disable "casual online discussion board" and check "Enable" next to either "Robert's Rules of Order", "Westminster Procedure", or "Infield Fly Rule".

 

[MattusMaximus]

As was demonstrated even after I spelled it out before, I need to say THIS IS A JOKE!

Everything you write is a joke, especially when you're attempting to be serious.

Actually, shutting down existing colliders does make some sense.

Um, no. It doesn't.

Think about it, honestly.

We have, honestly.

Understanding other positions is an important part of effective debate. But I agree that it is unlikely that the rate of black hole creation would be low enough to make it make sense, and I also (as I said) accept that such a thing is unlikely to be politically feasible. And I do understand the gambler’s fallacy.

Why bother debating with someone when it is perfectly clear they are a fear-mongering moron?

Incidentally, I do not “fear” colliders.

Fail. You really should learn how to be a better liar.

I have said several times that I think the probability of trouble is low. I would just like to see appropriate management of this issue, with careful and appropriate consideration of various aspects of decision theory including expected value.

Double Fail. You care nothing for "appropriate management" - you're a nut with a bug up your butt about planet-wide destruction conspiracy theorizing.

I know that this is a difficult issue to manage, with some hard judgments to make. I would just like to see those hard judgments made by what looks like competent judges. If I am not a physicist, you guys are not risk management specialists; none have ever been consulted.

What do you mean "if" you are not a physicist?

And the discussion here (and in some other places) sounds more like a kangaroo court than like competent judgment. I realize that we often have to accept what we can get. The LSAG reports were a lot better than what preceded them, and were not totally incompetent in their judgment aspect. And I more or less accept that the population of the world is voting with their indifference to let the LHC proceed. But I don’t think it is quite over yet. I would like to see appropriate vetting of Plaga, Rossler etc as to whether there is any possibility that they might be right. Some of you guys might actually help with that, if you could approach it with the right attitude. And the final result of public opinion may be less than indifference. It isn’t over until it is over.

Fail². Attempt at playing the martyr card duly noted.

Auguste Comte, the founding father of sociology (but they don’t exactly admit it) had a procedure he called “mental health.” It consisted of not reading things he disagreed with. By this standard, physicists appear to have robust mental health. I should practice the same thing, and stop listening to you guys.

You haven't been listening to anything we've been saying anyway, so what's the difference?

I’m outta here, so I may get that chance. See you in a few days, maybe.

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

ETA: Another couple of days have passed with the FermiLab Tevatron working at TeV level particle collisions. We're all still alive.

 

[BenBurch]

http://xkcd.com/509/

Note the popup-comment when you hover your mouse over the strip...

;D

 

[arthwollipot]

One of the more interesting crackpot ideas is that of the Raulians. The prophet Raul has been contacted by flying saucer aliens. They give him messages....

RAEL. RAELIANS.

Geez, can't even get the crackpots' names right.

 

[steenkh]

In some models , colliders create a black hole every ten years or so of operation, so it is possible that current colliders are about to create a black hole. This might be a reason to shut current colliders down.

You said you were a statistician, right? How can you something like this? If an event happens "every ten years or so", it does not mean that it happens exactly every ten years! It means that within a given ten-year period, there is a high probability that the event has happened once.

That the ten years have passed, and no BH has been observed, is an argument that in all likelihood, the probabilites were wrong from the beginning. It is not an argument for closing down the colliders before the ten years run out!

 

[MattusMaximus]

You said you were a statistician, right? How can you something like this? If an event happens "every ten years or so", it does not mean that it happens exactly every ten years! It means that within a given ten-year period, there is a high probability that the event has happened once.

That the ten years have passed, and no BH has been observed, is an argument that in all likelihood, the probabilites were wrong from the beginning. It is not an argument for closing down the colliders before the ten years run out!

None of our arguments make a lick of difference to pseudoscientific nuts like JB. They often employ what I like to call a "heads I win, tails you lose" mentality - no matter how badly they screw up the math (if they even show any), no matter what the evidence, no matter how they contradict themselves, it all boils down to the same result: they are right.

Thus, no matter what we've done in this thread, JB's conclusion is that particle accelerators are endangering Earth and must be shut down. Go figure.

Btw, just for the record, it's been a few more days that the Tevatron has been operating at TeV levels. No planet-eating mBHs yet. We're all still alive and well.

Of course this is all simply conclusive evidence that The End Is Near^TM

 

[Reality Check]

There is a really good reason that cranks like JB do not do the math (other than their inability to actually do it): It allows then to arbitrarily move the goalposts.

JB: Colliding particles at x TeV or greater will produce mBHs and destroy the Earth.
Scientists: But we have being doing this for n years and we are still here!

JB: Then colliding particles at y TeV or greater will produce mBHs and destroy the Earth.
Scientists: But we have being doing this for n years and we are still here!

JB: Then colliding particles at z TeV or greater will produce mBHs and destroy the Earth.
Scientists: But we have being doing this for n years and we are still here!

etc. until JB falls into a mBH caused by his head imploding

 

[gambling_cruiser]

Haven't read the whole thread but this JB sound similar to Warren Platts at BAUT.

 

[Meadmaker]

And _if_ such micro-black-holes existed, there would be gazillions of them which have been orbiting around the galaxy for several billion years. Plenty of time to become quite a bit slower and quite a bit bigger. Still micro-sized, but maybe millimeter sized by now, and quite non-slippery at all at that size.

Where are they?

Dark matter?





(If my five seconds of uninformed speculation actually turns out to lead someone to realize that this is actually correct, and they work out the math and develop the theory, I would at least like a favorable reference in your Nobel Prize acceptance speech.)

 

[Meadmaker]

because I am sure that the risk of not turning on the LHC is greater that that.

My uncle, now retired, worked on it. I have only met him a few times in my life, and on one of those occasions we were talking about what he did for a living. I was quizzing him about the ultimate practical benefit that could result from his labors. He assured me that there was none.


I tuned into this debate after reading something expressing concern about the imminent destruction of the Earth and I was curious what it was all about. I assumed that there was nothing to it really, and I hoped that someone would be talking about it in a way that could explain it.

I haven't understood everything in this thread. My knowledge of quantum physics is much, much, greater than the average layman. In other words, I know slightly more than nothing about the subject. Nevertheless, I think I've been able to get a handle on the basic aspect of the controversy. Let me see if I can give a basic summary, and then ask a question.

Micro black holes can be a consequence of high energy collisions, including at the levels that will be produced in the Large Hadron Collider. These collisions can also occur at the level found in naturally occurring cosmic rays. For cosmic rays, the collisions tend to occur in such a way that even if an mbh is created, it will fly away and never hit anything and no one will notice. By contrast, those created in the LHC are deliberately created so that they will have relatively low after collision momentum. Some could be slow enough that they orbit inside the Earth. Over time, one could accumulate mass, after which it would have enough gravity of its own to start pulling in more mass, and it would rapidly grow and suck in the Earth, and all of us.

This didn't seem like a crackpot theory to me, but the fact that the professionals didn't buy into it was somewhat comforting. Arguments from authority aren't exactly definitive, but in some cases, it's the best we can do. Nevertheless, there did seem to be at least some uncertainty which gave me a bit of pause.

At that point I thought of a thought experiment, and I would like to see James Blodgett or another LHC opponent address it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the cosmic rays we detect in this neck of the galactic woods are the result of high energy interactions within the body of the sun. When we detect them on Earth, they are whizzing out in a general direction away from the sun. Even if two of them collide, they can't collide head on, because they are radiating from a common source. The rare collisions would have to be bizarre, freak occurrences, or random collisions with a sun sourced ray and one that just happened by from some other star or cosmic event.

However, wouldn't "head on" collisions be extremely common within the sun itself? The sun's pretty big and there is a lot of fusion and all sorts of other stuff going on in there, and within the body of the sun, not all of the produced radiation that we eventually call cosmic rays heads outward. Some of it heads inward, and it would seem that high energy, head on collisions would be far more common within the body of the sun than will be present in Geneva. If there were any concern, wouldn't we have had to worry about the sun being swallowed by one of the created mcro black holes?

 

[HansMustermann]

Dark matter?

The thought did cross my mind, but we'd see more spectacular effects in that case, than we see in reality. Dark matter seems to be a lot more dispersed than that, more like a gas if you will than concentrated chunks, and it seems to not interact much with normal matter except through gravity. A micro-black-hole that keeps getting bigger and bigger by accretion, would eventually start doing nastier things than that.

If nothing else, the gradient of the gravity with the distance is more abrupt the smaller a black hole is. I.e., the smaller it is, the greater the tidal effects it causes in nearby objects.

As a simple mental experiment, if you were to fall feet-first into a super-massive black hole (and somehow all the X Rays didn't kill you), the gravity experienced by your feet would not be noticeably more than what your head experiences. By contrast, a 1mm blackhole would rip your feet clean off without your inner ear even noticing "whoa, change of gravity direction."

Such a black hole going througn a planet or sattellite would cause massive fractures and earthquakes, and quite the pretty fireworks too.

 

[Dancing David]

MattusMaximus and Cuddles object to my comment about shutting down current colliders.

I’ll see that and raise you. Let’s up the anty, and talk about firing all current physicists. Get rid of those folks who gave us the A bomb! A conflict of interest for you guys, but not for me! But then some of you might go to work for Ben Laden.

Colliders would be great for Ben Laden. He could destroy the world from the safety of his cave!

As was demonstrated even after I spelled it out before, I need to say THIS IS A JOKE!

It is also inappropriate and it makes you look really stupid.

Appeal to emotion is not strong argumentation.

Maybe there are other issues you should concern yourself with?

Actually, shutting down existing colliders does make some sense. Think about it, honestly. Understanding other positions is an important part of effective debate. But I agree that it is unlikely that the rate of black hole creation would be low enough to make it make sense, and I also (as I said) accept that such a thing is unlikely to be politically feasible. And I do understand the gambler’s fallacy.

But you do not understand critical thinking, do you.

You do not have evidence to back your ideas, and when confronted with counter argument you run away instead of even trying.

Incidentally, I do not “fear” colliders. I have said several times that I think the probability of trouble is low. I would just like to see appropriate management of this issue, with careful and appropriate consideration of various aspects of decision theory including expected value.

Man, you just want people to agree with you.

maybe you should acre about real issues.

How many women and children are beat down in your down?
how many people who live in poverty?

I know that this is a difficult issue to manage, with some hard judgments to make. I would just like to see those hard judgments made by what looks like competent judges.

Dude, you have ego intoxication, there are some very competent people who gave you some very cogent answers, maybe you should try to understand the answers and debate the real issues.

If I am not a physicist, you guys are not risk management specialists; none have ever been consulted. And the discussion here (and in some other places) sounds more like a kangaroo court than like competent judgment.

Ah yes, when in the wrong because you can't provide evidence that you might be right, resort to spinning.

What is your RPM?

I realize that we often have to accept what we can get. The LSAG reports were a lot better than what preceded them, and were not totally incompetent in their judgment aspect. And I more or less accept that the population of the world is voting with their indifference to let the LHC proceed. But I don’t think it is quite over yet. I would like to see appropriate vetting of Plaga, Rossler etc as to whether there is any possibility that they might be right. Some of you guys might actually help with that, if you could approach it with the right attitude.

You just didn't the answer they gave you , did you. Nope they vetted it and they disagreed.

And the final result of public opinion may be less than indifference. It isn’t over until it is over.

Auguste Comte, the founding father of sociology (but they don’t exactly admit it) had a procedure he called “mental health.” It consisted of not reading things he disagreed with. By this standard, physicists appear to have robust mental health.

Now you are a liar dear sir, the people who are very competent did read your stuff, they just happened to disagree with it.

maybe you should consider that when you say they did not read it, or imply that you did not read it, you are telling a false hood.

I should practice the same thing, and stop listening to you guys.

I’m outta here, so I may get that chance. See you in a few days, maybe.

You haven't demonstrated risk, so what management are you talking about.

OMFSM, they locked the doors on the angel disco on the head of a pin, what if there is a fire.

 

[BenBurch]

Meadmaker,

Yeah, its a crackpot theory. Ruled out by literally every major bit of high energy astronomy in the last 50 years, and also by the fact that we still exist.

Trouble is that with physics you get to things that are only obvious if you understand them at the level of mathematics.

Respectfully,

-Ben

 

[sol invictus]

My uncle, now retired, worked on it. I have only met him a few times in my life, and on one of those occasions we were talking about what he did for a living. I was quizzing him about the ultimate practical benefit that could result from his labors. He assured me that there was none.

Well, I certainly wouldn't claim there will be a practical benefit any time soon. But to claim there will never be is (no disrespect to your uncle) very hard to credit. Every time we've uncovered something new and fundamental about physics it has lead to major, world-changing technologies down the road. Sometimes indirectly, sometimes only after a century, but it always seems to happen.

However that wasn't my point - my point was that if we stop the LHC on these grounds, nothing will stop these or other Luddite cranks from going after every other science experiment. In fact, the LHC is far safer than most experiments, because it's only a mildly scaled up version of an experiment we've done many times before over many years, and because we understand physics much better than any other science. Experiments with genetic engineering, new chemical compounds, viruses etc. are far less known. So, if we stop the LHC, what's to prevent the same argument from stopping the progress of science in general? And if we do that, we have real problems - not just fairy tale nightmares.

Micro black holes can be a consequence of high energy collisions, including at the levels that will be produced in the Large Hadron Collider.

Stop right there. In one class of extremely speculative theories, very unstable, highly quantum gravitational resonances could be produced. They last a tiny fraction of a second and then decay into elementary particles. They are to black holes as an electron is to the earth (i.e. they have almost nothing in common).

These collisions can also occur at the level found in naturally occurring cosmic rays. For cosmic rays, the collisions tend to occur in such a way that even if an mbh is created, it will fly away and never hit anything and no one will notice.

Nope. They will evaporate immediately. Even if they don't, they will get stuck in the earth, because they are charged and very strongly interacting (energetic cosmic rays are mostly protons, and they will collide with protons in atmospheric molecules). The only way to make them fly through the earth is to assume two false things: that they don't evaporate but do get rid of their charge.

This didn't seem like a crackpot theory to me, but the fact that the professionals didn't buy into it was somewhat comforting.

You don't find the idea of tiny black holes destroying the earth crackpot?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the cosmic rays we detect in this neck of the galactic woods are the result of high energy interactions within the body of the sun.

No - the cosmic rays of relevance here have extremely high energy, and cannot possibly be produced in the sun (nor do they come from it - they come from all directions). There is some uncertainty about their origin, but the best hypothesis is that they are produced by "active galactic nuclei", which are believed to be supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies.

If there were any concern, wouldn't we have had to worry about the sun being swallowed by one of the created mcro black holes?

Well, if you buy all the necessary impossible things, the same argument that applied to cosmic rays hitting the earth applies to the sun too (except less so, since the sun is bigger, denser, and has a stronger gravity field). So you do indeed get better constraints, but the best come not from the sun, but from extremely dense stars.

 

[Cuddles]

Dark matter?

The thing about black holes is that, contrary to what the name might suggest, they're not actually black, or even dark. As has already been mentioned several times in this thread, one of the reasons we're sure miniature black holes aren't a danger is because all the theories that might allow them to exist also say they'll evaporate. And they evaporate by giving off radiation. If there really were tons of them floating around in space, we'd see a hell of a lot of radiation from them - they wouldn't be dark in the slightest.

The other reason they're not dark is not because of the black hole itself, but because of the stuff that falls into it. Conservation of angular momentum means that most things can't just disappear inside a black hole. Anything that avoids a head-on collision will first end up orbiting it. As it falls in, the interplay of various conservation laws of momentum and energy result in a lot of both energy and momentum being carried off by rather energetic radiation. In fact, some of the brightest objects we know about are thought to be powered by stuff falling in to black holes. Miniature black holes would be much less bright than the supermassive ones at the centre of many galaxies, but with countless billions of them floating around everywhere, you can be sure we'd have seen something by now.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the cosmic rays we detect in this neck of the galactic woods are the result of high energy interactions within the body of the sun.

No. You're probably thinking of the solar wind, but that is not quite the same thing and is mostly much lower energy than cosmic rays. Cosmic rays travel at pretty much the speed of light, while particles in the solar wind travel at hundreds of km/s - something like 1,000 times slower. Some cosmic rays are certainly produced in the Sun, but most come from outside the Solar system, and probably outside the galaxy.