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Large Hadron Collider feedback needed

Mr. Blodgett,

Here is the issue for me. You have not shown that there is a possibility of risk. So far the models you have used have some sort of flaw in them, which would indicate that the risk is very very very low.

Now if you can show that the models are wrong, that is fine.
Or if you can show where the risk is, that is fine.

But to say that 'there is a possibility and therefore we should stop' does not make sense to me.

If there is the possibility of these 'micro-black holes' and it is high enough a probability that the LHC will create them, then there should be plenty of them that exist in the universe. The energies in super novae are tremendous, as are the cosmic ray energies. If the possible risk is as high as you suggest, then these processes should create observable effects from the processes that already exist. And they should be occurring at existing accelerators as well.

Now the difference between possible and probable is not one that I should have to explain.

13 million children die from preventable causes every year.

Now if I use probabilities the way you do and I make the following comparison,

What is the ratio of known risk here, and known cost vs. your possible risk?

Chance that the LHC will destroy the earth 1/1,000,000 per year of operation (I just made that up and I made it as 1 in a million)
Chance that 13 million children will die each year from preventable causes 1/1

So for one year we have

6,000,000,000 x 1/1,000,000,000 = 600 lives cost on average
13,000,000 x1/1= 13,000,000 lives cost on average

So the cost of children dying of preventable causes every year/ cost of destruction by the LHC is

21,667 which would seem to indicate that even if there is a 1/1,000,000 chance that the LHC will destroy the world each year that there is a much higher moral responsibility to perhaps address other issues.

Now the question is this, where have you demonstrated risk and why if the probability is 1/1,000,000 are there white dwarf stars in the sky?

Seriously if the energies and collisions at the LHC have that high a risk of creating micro-black holes that do not evaporate and they can accrete faster than expected then why are not millions of them created in supernova events, and why then do we see white dwarfs of great age that are in the areas where said supernova events have occurred?
 
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James Blodgett said:
Toby Ord’s paper [1] makes the point that the low probabilities of trouble asserted by collider advocates cannot be true because the probability that their theories are wrong is higher than that.
Click to expand...

Precisely the same can be said about any theory which predicts that NOT turning on the LHC is low risk.

Until you can provide a convincing argument that the risk of turning it on is greater than the risk of not turning it on, you have absolutely nothing to say. Not only have you not provided such an argument, I have provided a good one that says just the opposite.

Our safest course is to proceed with the experiment - to say nothing of the intrinsic value of science and the pursuit of truth, the potential benefits to humanity, etc.
 
BenBurch said:
Thanks, Hans, you are more patient with this fellow than I find myself able to be.

I am less willing to suffer fools than I used to be, but I ought to try to educate at least the bystanders who will get it even if the fool WILL not.
Click to expand...

This bystander appreciates it :D
 
sol invictus said:
That's really the end of the story. To make anything in those theories dangerous requires all kinds of made-up and nearly impossible hypotheses. Physicists do enjoy thinking about such things, just for fun - it's good mental exercise - but it has no relation to the real world.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info.

It does seem to me that the theories about danger and the destruction of the Earth are of the form, "Yes, but what if you're wrong?" And then, that morphs into some sort of "probability" of being wrong. That's a bit of a misuse of probability theory, if you ask me.

At any rate, I think I will rest easy, not believing that I and my family will be sucked into a black hole due to an accident in Geneva.
 
It has been roughly one week since the last Tevatron update on June 9th... that's 5-6 more days that the Tevatron at FermiLab has been operating in the TeV energy range with no ill, black-hole-making, planet-destroying effects.

Meh :rolleyes:
 
James Blodgett said:
The sociological discipline of ethnomethodology studies social order and social expectations and the methods by which they are maintained. One of their methods is what is called a “breaching experiment.” This involves breaching social expectations, and observing how participants try to restore social order. I have written to several ethnomethodologists, suggesting that they look at this thread, and the whole collider issue, and analyze it as a breaching experiment.
Click to expand...

Hmmm... still no math. Only posts labeling physicists as some kind of deviant in the analysis of this self-declared "sociologist" - essentially an ad hominim attack against the physics community.

Color me unimpressed :rolleyes:
 
SHC?

Why aren't we doing this in outer space? Isn't space a vaccuum, and doesn't that solve the problem of pulling particles off the equipment? Wouldn't it also allow us to build on a smaller scale? Wouldn't it also minimize the risks?

Also, the possible black hole seems far-fetched, but what about a wormhole? Couldn't that wormhole release supernova-magnitude energy?

Just trying to understand some stuff here.
 
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ProdigalGuru said:
Why aren't we doing this in outer space?
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It's a ring 27km around, with huge quantities of equipment, thousands of staff, enormous detectors. Putting something like that in space is totally out of the question.

Also, the possible black hole seems far-fetched, but what about a wormhole? Couldn't that wormhole release supernova-magnitude energy?
Click to expand...

Sure - so could a dragon. But I'm more worried about the turtles the earth is balanced on walking away.
 
ProdigalGuru said:
Why aren't we doing this in outer space? Isn't space a vaccuum, and doesn't that solve the problem of pulling particles off the equipment? Wouldn't it also allow us to build on a smaller scale? Wouldn't it also minimize the risks?
Click to expand...
If there were risks then building the LHC in space would minimize them. But there are insurmountable problems:
  • The vacuum needed in the LHC is in fact a better vacuum than that of space.
  • We would have to launch about 1600 superconducting magnets into space - most weigh over 27 tonnes (43,000 tonnes = 95,239,697 pounds). And then there is the supporting equipment and personnel. It costs about $10,000 to put a pound into orbit.
ProdigalGuru said:
Also, the possible black hole seems far-fetched, but what about a wormhole? Couldn't that wormhole release supernova-magnitude energy?

Just trying to understand some stuff here.
Click to expand...
Wormholes cannot be formed in the collisions.

The scientific consensus about the safety of the collisions at the LHC is that they are safe.

If our current knowledge of physics is correct then the risk is zero, e.g. micro black holes (mBH) evaporate essentially instantly by Hawking radiation.

If our current knowledge of physics is wrong (e.g. no Hawking radiation and mBH that accrue matter much faster than we think they can) then there is a risk. In my opinion there is no way to put a reliable number to the risk since that depends on how we are wrong. But we have observational evidence that it must be low.
  • The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider has been doing collisions at 0.2 to 0.5 TeV center-of-mass energy since 2000 and the Tevatron has been hitting particles together at .98 TeV for a couple of decades (LHC will collide particles at ~7 TeV). So we have to ask what is so special about the change from ~1 to ~10 TeV collisions.
  • The universe has been doing collisions at LHC and greater energy for billions of years. If mBH or strangelets were formed then we would see effects from these such as the ages of white dwarf stars would be lower (as they get converted into black holes by collisions with the mBH or destroyed by strangelets).
I can think of another observation that seems to be evidence that the risk is low - stellar black hole candidates. Astronomers typically find these by looking for binary star systems where one star is not visible (but produces a lot of X-rays). Monitoring the orbits of the stars allows them to measure the masses involved. The lowest mass found for a black hole candidate so far is 3.8±0.5 solar masses (XTE J1650-500). If there were mBH wandering around turning stars of any mass into black holes then it is strange that we have not observed any candidate with a mass less than the theoretical upper mass limit (~2.7 solar masses) for a neutron star.
 
ProdigalGuru said:
Why aren't we doing this in outer space?
Click to expand...

Because, as others have already noted, we can't get it there. Tens of thousands of tons just in magnets and detectors, hundreds of thousands of tons in total for the whole structure, plus thousands of people, life support, food and so on. Not going to happen.

Isn't space a vaccuum, and doesn't that solve the problem of pulling particles off the equipment?
Click to expand...

To a certain extent, yes. I'm not sure about the LHC in particular, but modern accelerators will generally have a vacuum of around 10-8-10-9 bar. The interplanetary medium also has an average pressure around this. However, this is highly variable, and close to a planet or during a CME the pressure can increase by a few orders of magnitude. This means that a sealed vacuum system would still be necessary, and you wouldn't actually gain anything from being in space.

Wouldn't it also allow us to build on a smaller scale?
Click to expand...

No. The big problem with building higher energy accelerators is energy loss due to synchrotron radiation. This occurs when any charged particle is accelerated, and since colliders tend to be circular, that means lots of acceleration in the dipole magnets that bend the particles' path, and therefore lots of radiation. Synchrotron radiation scales with the 4th power of energy, so once you get up to the kind of energies the LHC will be using, that's an awful lot of energy being lost.

One way to reduce the energy loss is to make the circle bigger, so the bending radius in the magnets is smaller, and this is ultimately the reason the LHC is so big. Moving it to space would not affect all this in the slightest, so you'd still need to have either a very big ring or put a lot more power into replacing the lost energy.

Wouldn't it also minimize the risks?
Click to expand...

No. Even assuming that all the claims about black holes, strange matter and the like were entirely justified, moving to space wouldn't help. Obviously you couldn't just have an accelerator floating around in space, it would have to be in orbit. And that means that any black holes created would have just as much chance of being gravitationally bound to the Earth as if they were formed at ground level. There would be slightly less matter for them consume, and therefore slightly less chance of them growing and destroying the Earth, but given the hundreds of thousands of tons of accelerator right next to them, there'd still be plenty.

Also, the possible black hole seems far-fetched, but what about a wormhole? Couldn't that wormhole release supernova-magnitude energy?
Click to expand...

You think black holes, which are known to exist, are far-fetched, but you think wormholes, which are entirely theoretical and may not exist at all, aren't? In any case, you can never get more energy out than you put in. You can't get a supernova out of your collider unless you put in enough energy to cause one, and that's so far out of our league it's not even worth fantasising about.
 
ProdigalGuru said:
Why aren't we doing this in outer space? Isn't space a vaccuum, and doesn't that solve the problem of pulling particles off the equipment? Wouldn't it also allow us to build on a smaller scale? Wouldn't it also minimize the risks?

Also, the possible black hole seems far-fetched, but what about a wormhole? Couldn't that wormhole release supernova-magnitude energy?

Just trying to understand some stuff here.
Click to expand...

From one layman to another, I'll spout off on what I've gleaned from reading this thread, and a few other media oriented pieces. I'm hoping the physicists will correct any errors.

The idea that there is risk is a misunderstanding. It starts out with an observation that under some circumstances, strange phenomena might be observed as a result of high speed collisions of particles. The theory predicts that these phenomena, which have been labelled micro black holes, although all I really know about them is that somehow gravity is involved, will do absolutely no harm to anyone.

Along comes the non-physicist, who asks, "Hey, what happens if the theory of their formation is correct, but the theory of their danger is incorrect?" In other words, he's worried that they might be correct about the formation of
"micro black holes", but incorrect about how long they will last and what they will do. He asks us to assign a probability that the theory is wrong, and then uses it in some calculations to show that there is substantial risk in turning on the LHC.

There are two major mistakes involved. First, the same theory that predicts their formation predicts thethat they will be safe. The theory can't be "half right". The second is applying probability theory to the idea that a theory could be incorrect. I don't have time to go into it now, but that just isn't the way probability theory makes sense. If you want to treat probability mathematically, you have to follow the rules. Discussing the probability that you don't know the rules is an inherent contradiction. It renders the numbers absolutely meaningless, although it can easily be wrapped into an argument that sounds plausible, until it is inspected further.

When I started reading about the risk of the LHC, I got the impression that there was a theory that predicted a one in a gazillion chance that the Earth would be destroyed, but that scientists figured that it was worth it. That's not really the case. The theory predicts that there is absolutely no chance that the Earth will be destroyed. Earth destruction is simply not a prediction of the theory, with any probability at all. When stripped away of the pseudoscience, the anti-LHC argument seems to fall into the category of, "We've never done this before. What if some strange thing we don't understand happens? After all, you scientists don't know everything."
 
Meadmaker,

Spot-on.

Some people latch on the strangest things to get a phobia about. I call this type the "Frankenstein Phobia." The fear that science is going to release a monster that will destroy us.

It has a grain of truth in it, too; Newcomen's steam engine, Otto's engine, and Diesel's engine may indeed wind up wiping out the civilization they helped create.

But as it typical of phobias, the common real dangers are not what they obsess about but the imaginary things that are not danger at all.

-Ben
 
Meadmaker said:
When I started reading about the risk of the LHC, I got the impression that there was a theory that predicted a one in a gazillion chance that the Earth would be destroyed, but that scientists figured that it was worth it. That's not really the case. The theory predicts that there is absolutely no chance that the Earth will be destroyed. Earth destruction is simply not a prediction of the theory, with any probability at all. When stripped away of the pseudoscience, the anti-LHC argument seems to fall into the category of, "We've never done this before. What if some strange thing we don't understand happens? After all, you scientists don't know everything."
Click to expand...

Meadmaker has nailed it :)

Btw folks, it's been a couple of more days since the last Tevatron update. That's two more days with ~1 TeV proton-antiproton collisions taking place, and no planet-eating blackholes or strangelets were created to prevent me from typing this sentence.

Carry on... we'll let you know when The End of the WorldTM is imminent :rolleyes:
 
Ben and Matt, (and Sol and others)

Thanks for posting the information that allowed me to sort it out.
 
One additional thought:
If these hypothetical stable, fast accruing micro black holes can be created via the high energy of collider collisions then why did they not form in the early universe? (see primordial black holes).
If they could then I would not expect the universe to exist as it is today. It would probably be just one big black hole.
 
Reality Check said:
One additional thought:
If these hypothetical stable, fast accruing micro black holes can be created via the high energy of collider collisions then why did they not form in the early universe? (see primordial black holes).
If they could then I would not expect the universe to exist as it is today. It would probably be just one big black hole.
Click to expand...

Well, as I mentioned there is a current concept that perhaps ALL particles are black holes.

Which would also be a Grand Unified Theorem if we could test that.
 
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