No what if about it, the LHC WILL prove someone (maybe everyone) wrong. The thing about these disaster scenarios is that they need us to be wrong in a very specific type of way. The number of possible ways for us to be wrong are limitless. There’s no reason to think that we’re going to be wrong in the one way that will kill us all, instead of one of the countless ways that won’t.
You have to put the LHC into perspective. It’s new, but so are 10,000 experiments that go on every single year. For all we know, some dude at ADM has just bred “Corn of Doom” which mutates into a super plant that will overtake all plant life on planet earth, and be poisonous to humans. Somebody working on AI may have created an intelligent computer that is secretly working to take over all computing and crush the human race.
There is nothing unique about the LHC that makes it especially capable of destroying us, in fact, I’d put it far below CoD and SkyNet, in terms of likelihood of killing us all. At least the LHC replicates events that already happen trillions of times without noticeable incident.
But have all those other experiments had physicists express concern that they might destroy the world? When they genetically engineer vegetables, does anyone raise the possibility of a black hole being created? Do you see what I’m getting at here? What is it specifically about the LHC experiments that cause scientists - even obscure, outcast ones - to bring up the possibility of world destruction? The end of all life on the planet, in the blink of an eye?
I’d like to see some kind of debate between the CERN scientists and these guys who are positing the end-of-the-world scenarios. If CERN has not already invited these people to come in and debate them, in a public session open to the press, they are fools.
I’m also bothered by the lack of effort on the part of CERN and the scientific community at large to try to proactively build bridges between them, and the majority of people who are not particle physicists and might be wary of these kind of experiments. “Don’t worry, take our word for it, it’s going to be fine!” is not sufficient assurance. If they’re so certain that this thing is safe, they should be aggressively promoting it outside of the scientific community to try to, you know, reach out to people instead of alienating them. And as I have said before, it wouldn’t kill them to try to offer some sympathy and understanding to the people who really are worried about it. Like, “we understand your fears. We realize that this sounds like very scary stuff, and if I didn’t have a PhD in physics, I think I’d be pretty damn worried about it too if some group of scientists said that it could create a black hole. We want to reassure you that no such thing will happen.”
Instead of acting like people’s concerns are a joke - laughable, absurd, and oh so hopelessly uneducated - which is the vibe that I’m getting not just from the people on this forum but also in many interviews I’ve read with scientists on the issue - why don’t they try seeing this from the other people’s perspective? If there’s one thing I’ve gathered from all my experiences with scientists, it’s that even the nice ones tend to have a heavy sense of superiority over those who don’t understand science. They view them as ignorant, as if they are willfully ignoring and rejecting science instead of just not understanding it or not having the natural aptitudes required to do so.
You’ve been told there is no risk. After that what more is there to tell? How many times should it be explained by the scientists to those that don’t understand what the scientists are doing. Should they stop what they are doing until the least educated bumpkin can understand enough about physics to calculate that the scientists are right in their statements? Or, just until you can understand they are correct? Maybe they have set the bar at a higher level than what you can, or are willing to, comprehend?
People ARE ignorant. About a great many things. So are the Scientists in question about a great many things. But you don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs, she’ll laugh at you if you do. No different than the scientists who look at you like a loon for suggesting their experiment will end the world especially if they’ve already explained to you that it won’t.
Black Holes are scary, planet eating monsters. If you have a PhD next to your name, bringing up a ridiculous, nigh impossible result involving something sexy like a BH means you get to talk to reporters instead of spending the day holed up in a 8x8 office. People suddenly find you interesting instead of just a pathetic, unkempt nerd.
The scientists at CERN, and other scientists have put thought into the concept of the LHC destroying the planet. The accepted models of the universe do not support this concept, in addition to the fact that these interactions happen all the time and don’t destroy jack shit.
Reporters don’t talk about geneticists destroying the world because there’s no sexy, scary way to explain it to laymen. They’d rather tell us about cloned meat and irradiated foods because those sound scary. They’ll drum up fear about irradiated foods, when it’s just food that has passed under special lights, killing e. coli that is actually dangerous to us. Then they tell us about the latest e. coli outbreak, because that’s scary, too. Then they tell us about the latest scary disease that 2 people in Timbuktu have caught.
Maybe if the Physicists at CERN weren’t getting death threats from ill-informed doom and gloomers and repeated legal challenges based on debunked scientific premises from those outcast fringe scientists you mention, they would extend their efforst further and take you by the hand and discuss directly with you why your fears are baseless. But in fact they have already done exactly as you’ve asked many times - they’ve had numerous meetings with scientists in the field, there are scientists who have taken on the job of publicly answering the fears of the public, there have been many scholarly and plain-language works published about what they’re doing and what they hope to accomplish, and there have been many solid discussions in a wide variety of formats about exactly what you ask. They are agressively promoting their efforts within the scientific community, and knowledgable physicists and others in similar fields are eagerly awaiting the results of their experiments, and they’ve opened up educational resources around the world to add to the sum of human knowledge. Hell, the BBC did an entire day of programmes about the LHC and how cool it was on ‘Big Bang Day’ last week!
You’ve been provided links to discussions, papers, and news stories, as well as had interpretations of the facts from knowledgable people right here on this board. But you either haven’t read them, or you haven’t listened. You’ve said it yourself - no amount of information from CERN or any other source will assay your concerns; you said “so be it” to remaining ignorant and seem to think that the scientists are hiding something from the public. You don’t trust them, and yet you plaintively call for them to open their books and share their knowledge with you but you won’t listen to anyone, here or anywhere, who have already tried on several occasions to allay your concerns.
A mechanical clock. Gears, escapements, weights and/or springs, the kind of clock that has been around for close to a thousand years. Explain, precisely, how it functions.
If you get that right, then move on to a radio. Explain exactly what’s going on inside the box, what all the components do, how sound is converted to radio waves and how the crystal and/or transistors transform those waves back into sound. We’ve had wireless voice transmission for over a century; presumably you have a full understanding of the now ubiquitous devices.
Most technology, to be blunt, is essentially magic to the lay person. Joe Average in the street could no more explain how a light bulb works than he could the LHC. Neither, I assume, could you.
And if Joe Average can’t grasp these common everyday technologies, what exactly will be accomplished with your hypothetical educational outreach? The project has been explained to you repeatedly with terms both simplistic and complex, and you’re still sitting in the corner soiling yourself. What more can be done?
But you see some people don’t want to be afraid things that could happen (i.e. an engineered virus). It’s so much easier to masochistically revel in completely unsubstantiated fears for that warm glow of the elect. The kind of people that know we’re not doomed but crave the adoration for standing up to “scientists” and risking nothing. Mental cowards the bunch of them.
And since the scientific community has repeatedly engaged and attempted to educate the public at large your comments must mean that they now need to engage the mental cowards and willfully ignorant. I can’t image why they would.
Argent, Controvert I would like you to perform a small experiment.
Drop a metal paperclip on the ground.
Take a small fridge magnet and pick up the paperclip.
Did you notice what happened? Your small fridge magnet (mass 10[sup]-3[/sup] kg) managed to defeat the combined gravitational force of the earth (10[sup]24[/sup] kg). In other words, your fridge magnet defeated a mass that is 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 larger.
Now imagine the incredibly anemic force a mass that is 10[sup]-27[/sup] kg could exert. That should give you an idea of the magnitude of attractive force your imaginary blackhole would have in its surroundings. Do you get worried that a passing proton will destroy you?
That is the fun part. They may find the Higgs bosun. They may find proof of extra dimensions. They may get info on dark matter. They may find proof of super symmetry. Who knows. It mat shake things up.
I wish they’d just fucking do this already, so I don’t have to worry about it for even longer. Also, the fact that they can’t even make the machine work properly doesn’t exactly inspire my trust that these people know what they’re doing.
A.) What’s to worry about? If the impossible happens, you’ll never know about it. One minute you’ll be here, the next you won’t. The only reason you should worry about it is if you’re afraid you’re going to have to answer to God for what you’ve done with your life. (In which case, you probably ought to get your shit together now, since nobody knows when they’re going to die.)
I’m guessing you don’t have much experience with prototype development. I’ve designed probably upwards of 150 electronic devices, all of them far simpler than the LHC. Only 3-4 times have they worked exactly as intended on the first try. Usually they work pretty well by the thid try or so. A few I never was able to get working right.
How do we even know for sure that it would play out like that, instantaneously? How do we know that the end of the world in this scenario would be in the blink of an eye and not an agonizing destructive event that took at least long enough for people to suffer?
Anyway, the “impossible” cannot, by definition, happen. So that phrase doesn’t really make sense. Either something can happen, or it can’t. In this case, it seems that it can happen.
You’re correct. The “If it happens, it’ll be too fast for you to realize it” argument isn’t terribly compelling. But the “It’s much, much more likely that you’ll be killed in a horrible fifty car pile-up tomorrow, or an earthquake, or wild animal attack, or…, and yet you’re probably not staying up nights terribly worried about any of those” argument remains quite strong.
It’s not the same. Those other things are at least to some degree within my control. Fifty-car pile-up? I think I drive well enough to be able to avoid an accident, and in any case I live in a small city and I don’t drive on the highway, so a pile up is not going to happen. I don’t live in a place that has earthquakes capable of harming anyone. I can shoot a wild animal before it kills me. See what I mean? There’s a level of security that I can have, being secure in the knowledge that even if these things DID happen somehow, at least I can deal with them. At least I have a chance to survive.
If the world instantaneously disappears - caused by guys in Switzerland, thousands and thousands of miles away who I can’t do anything about at all - it will be completely out of my grasp and I will be utterly powerless to do anything about it.
Yeah, the world doesn’t revolve around me. That doesn’t mean that I’m terribly happy with the idea of my life being taken from me by other people, when there are still so many things that I want to do.
