He probably got alcohol poisoning and made his own end.

Your criticism of Phil’s first reason is flawed. He does not say “so it won’t end now”. Rather, he says:

so odds are pretty good it won’t end tonight. Historically, it’s the way to bet.

Your conclusion that “therefore the world will never end” is a misinterpretation.

Reason 2, IIRC, is in several parts. This is from memory, so I may get some things wrong. First, the chances of creating a mini black hole or a strangelet is so infinitessimally small that it is as good as zero. Second, the hypothesis that does conclude that a mini black hole could be created also holds that such an MBH would go poof almost immediately. Third, even if an MBH were to stay around for an extended period of time, it would be far too small to actually do anything. Someone in one of the other threads did some calculations to figure out its size.

This is just my stab at this as I understand it. Phil or someone else may be able to shed a bit more light on it.

Reason 1 is vacuous:
‘The world hasn’t ended before, so it won’t end now.’
Therefore the world will never end.

Reason 3 is accurate, but hardly reassuring:
‘They haven’t started yet.’

Reason 2 may be the money-load:
‘It can’t happen – we’ve been over it’
the link to why it can’t happen is broken. i’m hoping that there is a good reason why it can’t happen, or rather what it is that can’t happen. Can the mbh’s not be produced in the first place? Or are they not a problem if they are?

I am getting surprised/worried that the only evidence of safety given by the proponents of this is the cosmic-ray argument, coupled with the fact that all the scientists say its ok. DO CERN really expect these mbh’s to appear? Then what? That they will cease to exist, but that some might stay in existence and grow at a linear rate?

WTF are CERN not properly debunking these claims?

- KC

I’m not sure about the cost effectiveness of the LHC vs. other means of detecting mini black holes, but I imagine that one of the major benefits of the LHC is that there is a greater amount of control. We can detect the particles when we want, whereas other methods may be a wait and hope we get lucky approach.

Granted, I’m not a particle physicist (or any other type of physicist), so this is just my guess.

Aside from Shane’s response, I still don’t have an answer. And Shane apparently misunderstood me. Nowhere did I say portable. In fact, I happened to be thinking of neutrino detectors as I wrote the post, and those are large, massive, and deep underground. The question, where mini black holes are concerned, rests on three points:

1. Is is possible to detect naturally occurring mini black holes?
2. How does the cost of such equipment compare to the LHC?
3. Is the theoretical frequency of naturally occurring mini black holes high enough that the number of detectors can be built for less than the cost of the LHC?

I’m not arguing that it can be. But I will point out again that one of the arguments that the LHC isn’t going to make a black hole that will consume the Earth is that collisions from cosmic rays should form mini black holes all the time, and we’re still here to talk about it. That implies that cosmic rays have enough energy that they could form mini black holes on a somewhat regular basis, and that smells like an opportunity for a dandy experiment.

That also raises the question of whether Hawking Radiation could show up in other experiments. If it’s not – and if it could be detectable by those experiments – does that mean we already have an answer for some of the theories floating around?

Now, I’m open to the possibility that the LHC is the most cost effective way of doing this. Yet I admit to a certain attraction to the idea of particle physics on the cheap, running in in major universities all the way down to small junior colleges. The latter may simply be a pipe dream. But I wonder if we’ve used particle accelerators for so long that we’ve convinced ourselves this is the only way to do this sort of science.

I also wonder if the ship has sailed on this particular thread, and if waiting for an answer would be a bit like waiting for Godot.

Sigh.

- KC

Any physics book will say, that when dealing with particle physics gravitational forces are very weak compared to electromagnetic. Orders of magnitude weaker and often ignored. It stands to reason that the only real gravitational force is from the planet.

And apparently there is some mainstream questioning as to the existence of Hawkin Radiation – neither have some of his previous theories worked out. Other stuff that separates this from cosmic rays are that these are apparently “symmetrically generated“ whatever that means. And that there will be a much higher rate of collisions at CERN, than would take place naturally.

But where would the mbhs generated around the planet go? How do they all escape the earth/moon gravity? and when they do, space is full of charged particles for them to eat, and so surely some would be detected. But maybe there aren’t that many particles compared to those that comprise a planet. Don’t know.

Much of the doom stuff came from http://www.lhcfacts.org/. Some proponents talk about tin-foil hats. Both Dr. Rainer Plaga, Dr. Otto E. Rössler may be way out of the mainstream, but they are scientists who claim that the the mainstream are not scientifically refuting their theories. They also claim other worried scientists.

The stakes were never potentially this big for other ‘doomsday’ scenarios. Even igniting the atmosphere from the nuke would not of destoyed the universe – unless space is full of nitrogen, and maybe not even the the planet. A worst-case here wont even give the cockroaches a chance. If it comes to that, they could hardly do worse.

To correct this, I suggest a reread (yes, surely anyone calling themselves a scientists has read this book) of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

the first comment is the funniest “I think I know how the big bang began. It started when scientists decided to build a Large Hadron Collider about 13-14 billi0n years ago to find out what the origin of their Universe was.”

[quote]Not that I think things will go catastrophically KAA-BLAAAAM!

(… & sure enough they haven’t! Mind you, they’ve yet to do any actual particle colliding if I believe what I read here & not what was in the TV news … which said they did collide atoms – but of course they didn’t. Ah the ever (un)trusty news media.)

I just don’t like the 5 % or even 0.05% chance that they might.
[/quote]

And yet you’ll get into your car tomorrow and drive to work with supreme confidence despite that fact that the chances of you killing someone, or yourself, while behind the wheel are much, much higher.

most Hubble images are kept and ’sat’ on to give the scientists time to analyze the data and publish their work.

Actually, I recently attended a conference where one of the talks was about the IT side of getting space photos out to the public. The presenter said that the year-long delay between data collection and publication was to give them time to Photoshop out the space aliens.

People feel like they always need to be afraid of something. The fact that people actually believe that a light is going to shine out of the Indian Ocean and a biblical end, will come to earth is silly. People will believe anything.