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Large Hadron Collider feedback needed

Reality Check said:
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.
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An excellent point. But there's another reason as well - if you don't do the math, then your math cannot be critiqued, and that allows you to make loony claims which sound believable to people who don't know the math anyway.
 
Meadmaker said:
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.
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Ever heard of a little something called the World Wide Web? That was created at CERN. The irony when people say there is no benefit to such science while using the Web to do it is so thick it could be cut with a knife...

Not to mention, there are other benefits to particle accelerator research that no one ever anticipated. For example, at FermiLab they have a neutron therapy center which has a good track record of treating some soft-tissue cancers.
 
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Thanks for the info, everyone.

Yes, I was thinking that the solar wind included particles that are referred to as "cosmic rays", and I didn't know that the collisions involved in the LHC were more energetic than those that could be produced in the sun.

sol invictus said:
You don't find the idea of tiny black holes destroying the earth crackpot?
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Not inherently. You have to understand that most people have no clue what any of this means. I was totally serious when I said that I knew a great deal more than most people on this subject, despite the fact that I knew almost nothing. I studied electrical engineering at the University of Illinois, which usually gets credit for the WWW by the way, so I had to take three semesters of physics. During the last of those, we got an intro to quantum mechanics. Also, in semiconductors, we had to know just a tiny bit about the subject to understand tunnelling and some of the junction physics. In other words, I just barely scratched the surface, but even at that level, that puts me way, way, ahead of a typical layman.

So, along comes someone who says that these energetic collisions can produce tiny black holes. Well, why not? But black holes are things that suck in everything around them, so, that seems bad. Earth could get sucked up. :eek: Then, he starts spewing stuff about momentum and orbits and all that sort of scientific sounding stuff, and I start wondering.

That's the beauty of pseudoscience. It sounds just like the real thing. Of course, there were a couple of things that suggested there might be a problem. First, where's the math? Or at least a link to it? Every time I see real people talk about real QM, they seem to be speaking in weird languages that involve lots of symbols. There ought to be some math somewhere. Second, why is it that the only people who have bought into the possibility seem to be people that aren't really involved in the field? It's like all the engineers that are relabelled as scientists by the creationists. If the theories are sound, why can't any physicists be persuaded?

So, those facts tended to suggest that it might be crackpot, but there are other possibilities. One thing that made me at least think it might not be crackpot were statements made that were similar to "that won't happen, but if it did....." It suggests a degree of uncertainty. Are we dealing with a possibility within the current theory, or something ruled out by the current theory, or something that is ruled out by current theory, but about which there is some dispute, but that dispute needs experimental data to resolve? It's quite difficult to decide what's really going on in that case.
 
U of I is where Netscape came from. But before Netscape, there was the CERN browser and Netscape only was a new implementation of the CERN work of Tim Berners-Lee which itself was influenced by an older text-file linking system CERN had implemented by 1983 (which is when I learned of it.) But Tim Berners-Lee deserves 99.5% of the credit for the WWW's invention - his system was entirely novel though hypertext as an idea goes back to the Xanadu project of Ted Nelson. Nelson's project never produced anything of general utility.
 
I am very much a layman to physics.... Though, I have often wondered if dark matter and the hypothesized negative matter might be the same thing.
 
Meadmaker said:
One thing that made me at least think it might not be crackpot were statements made that were similar to "that won't happen, but if it did....." It suggests a degree of uncertainty. Are we dealing with a possibility within the current theory, or something ruled out by the current theory, or something that is ruled out by current theory, but about which there is some dispute, but that dispute needs experimental data to resolve? It's quite difficult to decide what's really going on in that case.
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First off, given the laws of physics as we know them, the LHC will not produce gravitational resonances (I'd prefer not to refer to them as micro-black holes). Full stop. To do so would require an accelerator approximately a thousand trillion times more powerful, which is completely impossible.

The only way they could be produced is if some extremely speculative ideas about extensions to the known laws of physics are correct. Those new theories have zero experimental support and are rather suspect in terms of their internal theoretical consistency, but they are not ruled out by data so far.

Now, in those very speculative theories, extremely short-lived gravitational resonances could be produced. They pose no danger whatsoever, but they are the very distant relations of black holes, and black holes are scary.

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.
 
I am practicing the Comtean “mental health” I described in my last post by writing without reading your recent comments. I doubt that I have missed much.

I might get around to reading some of them. I am street orator. One of my biggest motivators is a stupid statement that needs to be set right. You guys are a wonderful source of stupid statements. You may know some physics (your knowledge of even that subject is specialized, not balanced) but you are incredibly stupid on everything else. Did anyone here ever take a course in economics? And I can reuse elsewhere some of the material I generate here. Therefore I might get around to reading some of your comments. Or maybe not: I have more important audiences to work off of right now, and better things to write about.

There is occasionally value among the stupidity here. Sol Invictus’s statement that not doing the LHC is more risky than doing it is simplistic but promising, a nice thing to riff off of. The LHC is a low probability risk, with a subjective probability that has varied, increasing substantially as safety factors eroded, then improving considerably with Mangano’s study, but not going to zero. Read Toby Ord’s paper for one reason why it is not zero. [Toby Ord, Rafaela Hillerbrand and Anders Sandberg, “Probing the Improbable: Methodological Challenges for Risks with Low Probabilities and High Stakes”] Rational people don’t want Earth subjected to even low probability risk unnecessarily. People don’t think well about existential risk; the mathematics of expected value is a good corrective. We bring in Sol’s point when we acknowledge that the appropriate math considers benefits as well as risks. Even the humongous negative value of existential risk (even if improbable) might be countered by a small probability of a transcendent discovery that, for example, might increase the human race by orders of magnitude and reduce risk in other ways. An example from crazy science fiction is a Star Trek space drive that would let us inhabit the galaxy. I think a discovery of that magnitude, a discovery that could be made by the LHC but in no other way, is quite improbable. But we are talking about improbabilities here. An improbable galactic conquest, or other transcendent discovery, might balance improbable existential risk.

Note that a space drive could also be an existential risk. Just get your space ship near light speed and ram Earth. The results of science are not always positive. Consider the atomic bomb, a previous product of physics, in the calculus of the costs and benefits of science. We are very lucky that production of enriched uranium and plutonium require massive resources. Make the costs in the range individuals can afford, and civilization would not last a year. Upcoming science may put similar powers in the hands of individuals.

I acknowledge, and wonder at, the marvels that science has produced. Look around yourself in an urban environment. Almost everything you see is a benefit of science and technology. Nevertheless, it is not obvious that science is automatically good. Actualization of just one existential risk would wipe out all of these benefits. Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal of England, estimates that the probability that humanity will not survive this century is 50%. I think him pessimistic, but he has a point.

Someone here sneered about Luddites. (I don’t get how “mad scientists,” who in the LHC case have been quoted with several precise equivalents to “nothing could possibly go wrong,” come across sneering about stereotypes.) The Luddites have been more or less wrong economically for 200 years. However, is not obvious that they will be wrong forever.

The Luddites were concerned that technology, in the form of the power loom, would put them out of work. It has turned out that technical change does put people out of work, but this turns out to be a minor problem. A few who can’t transition may suffer, but the majority find work in other fields, doing things that machines can’t do, and the economy becomes more productive. In the 200 years since the Luddites were active technology has expanded marvelously, the economy has become marvelously more productive, and, with the exception of a few recessions, we still have more or less full employment in advanced economies. However, the Luddites may very well be right about machines putting people out of work in the long run, when artificial intelligence gives us inexpensive machines that can do EVERYTHING better than humans. Now, even intelligent machines are not likely to do EVERYTHING better than humans. For example, technology already can make recordings that sound better than any but the best human music groups, but some still find advantage in, and pay a premium for, a live orchestra. And some may prefer the human version of sex, and the human result. Nevertheless, machines able to do ALMOST everything better than humans would be sufficient to trash our current economy. But we can solve that. I used to joke that we could solve the problem by employing the inefficiency of communism. A better solution is to revise an old IBM slogan, “Machines should work, people should think.” Artificial intelligence that can think better than humans might generate the revised version: “Machines should think, people should bowl.” We could solve the money problem by considering all humans to be inheritors of the legacy of the past, and paying each dividends on that legacy. This would solve the Luddites’ problem about jobs. But the Luddites were still right if the machines become an actualized existential risk.

Incidentally, I think that artificial intelligence is an existential risk, a risk with a higher probability than LHC risk. But AI has more loci and so is harder to turn off than the LHC, and AI has more immediate benefits. AI risk has been the subject of many bad movies. At least AI researchers, unlike LHC physicists, acknowledge this risk. But they aren’t doing much about it. One group does propose making the machines friendly, a good idea, but some promise that they will prove friendliness mathematically in advance, probably impossible. (I have a bit of a conflict of interest when it comes to AI research. I would like to do it myself.)

The benefits of science are obvious, but the future is not clear. Some think they see a declining marginal return to science and technology. There are still important inventions, but the size of the research establishment required to produce them is increasing. Others cite things like Moore’s law to see acceleration of technology. Some think that acceleration of technology will give use a “singularity” in the near future where magic nanotech and so forth gives us god-like powers. [See Kurzweil, “The Singularity is Near,” and quite a few others.] Note that this is not automatically good: while some legendary gods were good, others were not. The idea that there is some science that should not be done has been implemented at Asilomar.

The LHC may teach us magic stuff. On the other hand, I am guessing that someone gets the Nobel for finding the Higgs, but nothing much else comes of it. We risk earth for this?
 
Oooh, the "you're all stupid" retort. From a woo peddler who still can't present his data or maths to support his assertions? Well, now that was original and unexpected ;)

And opening it with a "nyah-nyah, I ain't listening" paragraph? Well, that's nice touch. It says "rational debate" and all that ;)

Though the really touching part is the using "I am street orator" claim as if that's some kind of claim to glory. As opposed to just saying "I'm the dysfunctional personality type who'd invent problems to preach about at street corner" ;)
 
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