http://hasthelhcdestroyedtheearthyet.com/

The particle collision will result in a resonance cascade scenario and open up a dimensional portal to Xen. Vortigaunts will then kill the scientists for their hubris, and then the government will send in marines to “handle” the situation.

Valve already told us all this.

For that matter the Earth could be acquiring new micro black homes through cosmic bombardment provided holes and/or monopoles that were created in the first three minutes of the expansion phase of the Big Bang were still around some 10 or 20 billion years later.

I have to agree with the other comment about the doom-sayers being generally anti-science, motivated by occult superstitions as being the most vocal in opposition to super kitty colliders — and everything else that’s not mentioned in the classical Christanic mythologies.

Man, these scientists are FAIL. They’re not trying hard enough.

PS would some PLEASE look into this zombie cat idea? As a ‘cat person’ I feel I would be drawn to them & so would be among the first to fall victim to their brain munching :S

Are these the same ones that thought all matter cosisted of:

Exactly! This is the strength of science, it can improve our understanding. [Though to be precise, much of what you refer to is from times before the scientific method started to work. I'm not sure even the old naturalists were responsible for those ideas.]

Are these the same ones that thought all matter cosisted of:
- ‘good’ and ‘bad’
- fire, water, earth, air and worms or something like that?
- atoms?
- Electrons and Protons in a shell?
- Electrons, Neutrons and Protons in several shells, some of them spinning?
- Electrons, Neutrons and Protons in orbitals?
- quarks, strings and other invisible crap?

…if you’re being honest, scientists don’t know how the universe works, they just assume it and bring up some theory to find out later they were wrong. That makes them f*cking dangerous…

I’m 99.99% sure that mankind’s doom will be initialized with some scientist saying “Don’t worry, it’s secure!” (no matter if the final cause will be a doomsday machine, robots or nanomachines killing us all, genetic mutations, or a black hole eating earth from inside out…)

Oops. Sorry. Can of worms just went sproing.

Salaam=Shalom=Peace, I understand your concern – after all, this is the only
planet we’ve got and leaving it for another is not yet an option – but I think
that basic science is worth some risk. I also think that science is for anyone
who is curious about our world, not just for the elite. This very website is a
good example of sharing science with interested laypeople. I believe that
human curiousity is enough to justify building the LHC.

Kilgore Trout, the book you read is a good popular book. I’d also recommend
The Unconscious Quantum by Victor Stenger (another popular book).

Were any opponents of the LHC given an opportunity to review its safety measures?

I’d suggest that anyone remotely qualified enough to review its safety aren’t concerned.

then came Chernobyl and Three-Mile island and nuclear waste.

You do know that death toll for both incidents can be measured in the dozens and no-one died at Three-Mile Island. Nobody. Zip. Do you know how many Chinese coal miners die every year? Thousands die from accidents every single year. Another 10000 die from respiratory illnesses every single year. You tell me which is the safer industry.

opened our eyes about the damage DDT caused our ecosystems and environment

Some researchers think as many as 30000000 people are dead from malaria as a direct result of the ban on DDT.

If we’re all wrong and the world does end in 11 days you will be perfectly entitled to point and laugh and say I told you so.

> indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?contribId=20&resId=0&materialId=0&confId=35065
“this argument relies on properties of cosmic rays and neutrinos that, while highly plausible, do require confirmation, as can be expected in the coming years.”

It seems Torbjörn Larsson beat me to this, even citing more of the document than I was going to. But I still want to post.

Read that disclaimer in full:

In particular, at the LHC energy, any danger for the Earth on time scales lower than or comparable to the natural lifetime of the solar system can be ruled out on the basis of its contradiction with the observation of white dwarf stars of known mass, age and other properties. This conclusion, while entirely valid for the LHC, would need further work to be extended to conceivable future colliders of much higher energies. A powerful argument applicable also to higher energies is formulated making reference to observed neutron stars, but this argument relies on properties of cosmic rays and neutrinos that, while highly plausible, do require confirmation, as can be expected in the coming years.

Bolding added. In other words, the current argument is founded upon contradiction with observation of white dwarf stars. The suggested argument making reference to neutron stars refers to future colliders of much higher energies.

I checked out the linked website. Now I’m convinced this error above is not an accidental misreading, but a deliberate misrepresentation.

I did not find a cite of Dr. Rossler’s calculation, but perhaps it was in German.

Salaam said:
> …but it still a very good example of the arrogance of these particle physicists and their unwillingness to consider the rights, opinions and even the lives of the rest of humanity.

Right. That’s why they went back and did a second safety review to specifically address the concerns about new discoveries between the first safety review and now.

> What good will it do real people? (As opposed to a tiny scientific elite.)

Who can say what the results will be that follow on from these discoveries? Quantum theory brought us the transistor. Also, superconductors that brought us, oh, maglev trains and MRI machines. The applications remain unknown because the science that underlies the potential applications is unknown.

> What are the ethics of potentially destroying everyone’s lives and this whole planet – the only world with life we know of – just to try and answer some esoteric questions in particle physics….

I would be concerned if it truly were a coin-flip in uncertainty. But there is plenty of empirical validation (read “physical evidence”) that we have nothing to be concerned over, based upon observation of neutron stars and white dwarfs. I agree with rob, I’m much more concerned about Schroedinger’s zombie cat.

> The stakes are too high to let self-interested, reckless, amoral particle physicists always get their way at theexpenseof our planet.

Nice unfounded ad hominem.

>> “For the same reason we have controlled laboratory experiments for anything.”

> Which would be …?

The key word is “controlled”. So we know what is going into the experiment and what all the factors influencing the results are. Observation of natural phenomena is interesting but can only tell us so much without replicating with controls.

>> Well, the universe is really bad about telling us its schedule, and so it’s extraordinarily difficult to set up a set of collectors to gather information on the resulting particles.

Uh, no. It would not be cheaper to set up duplicate sets of these detectors all over the planet and possibly embedded under the Earth’s surface in an attempt to capture one of these events just happening to occur where the detector is set. And no, it would not be any safer. These events are already occurring, so if they’re a danger then they are already a danger. But there is strong evidence by virtue of our continued existence that they are not a danger.

> Besides if these things are happening all the time – as Dr Cox says – then we should be finding their particles and traces all the time too …right?

No, because the decay times for the events is miniscule, which means you have to be looking at exactly the right place at exactly the right time and not blink in order to detect them. And then you don’t know what you’re detecting because you don’t know what caused the reaction in the first place – the mass involved, the velocity, exactly how much energy it started with, etc.

> I’d rather leave this mortal coil a better place than I entered it rather than have all life on Earth destroyed by the arrogance and hubris of the sort of so-smart-they’re -incredibly-dumb people who are too full of their own brillance (or something) to have the wisdom to know when something like the LHC is a really stupid thing to run!

And I’d rather have them doing what they’re doing then listing to a bunch of fear-mongering luddites.

I seem to recall that he was more than a bit annoyed when Stephen Hawking ruined his stories by showing quantum black holes evaporate.