What’s the betting some future James Bond movie, or similar thriller, features an arch-villain who devises a scheme for sabotaging the LHC to make it start producing strangelets or black holes.

The script writers had better get their skates on though, because the mystique and (to some) fear will be dispelled once it starts running at full pelt, after which a plot on those lines risks being received more like a lame millennium doomsday scenario released in 2002!

The world has been slow to react when there is legitimate scientific concern about something, even when there is a strong scientifc consensus about it. Take e.g. CO2 emissions. We knew in the mid 1980s that this would be potential problem, but only now are we starting to do something about it.

I guess that this has to do with people being apprehensive about new developments. In case of curbing back on CO2 emissions, it means that our lifestyles have to change. This is balanced somewhat by the prospect of having to deal with sea level rise and other consequences of global warming.

Typically, what you see in such cases is that the nedia are biased in favor of the people who argue that we don’t need to do anything until you get a huge scientific consensus that says that something must really be done.

Another example: GM foods. In this case, there isn’t any evidence that this is dangerous. But, since we can do without it and you don’t have huge scientific consensus that says that we must have GM foods, the media are biased in favor of the GM sceptics.

Oh, and for the umpteenth time, it’s not the London Times. It’s the Times. Or the UK’s Times, if you prefer.

Dear Ginger Yellow. I’m a big fan of the Guardian, as you’ll see if you look through my previous posts. The science coverage is the best of British papers, and I’m particularly and of Ben Goldacre’s columns.

As for calling it the London Times; as a Brit, I am well aware of how calling it just “the Times” can lead to confusion with the NY Times over here, and I’ve usually found it simplest to just add “London”. Not sure what you mean by “the umpteenth time” – I don’t recall seeing you make that comment here ever before.

CNN have a decent article too, except for the flashy headline :

Big Bang experiment creates excitement, fear

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/09/08/lhc.collider/index.html

See the readers’ comments; one even argues LHC might trigger the Rapture, resulting in the Faithful and children suddenly disappearing (to heaven, presumably), leaving behind Earth, LHC, and the less faithful; I’d certainly miss the children.

Frank Wilczek even received death threats, says “Der Spiegel”

http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,576906,00.html

No translation on their English page yet, but in a nutshell: no fear-mongering.

On the bright side, the BBC just published a very nice article about the subject. They lead with the scary end-of-the-world stuff, but the meat is about why people keep predicting the end of the world. To my mind, that’s the interesting part of the story.

I’m not sure that any article about the subject, with or without the right disclaimers, is something to be happy about. If these issues are marginal,as they surely are, they should be treated as such, namely neglected in favor of issues not so marginal. Just imagine such articles about the US elections, barely mentioning those guys Obama and McCain, instead focusing on some obscure candidates with a support base of a few dozen eccentrics. How many articles like that in the NY times and the Washington Post are too many?

I wonder if you have all read

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0009204

So: does the LHC meet Kent’s criterion for “acceptable risk”?

In addition to that, there is the question of trust. As a non-scientist put it to me: these guys who built the LHC have invested their whole working lives in this thing. They might well be prepared to take risks that the rest of us would consider intolerable……not that I agree, but you have to bear in mind that academics generally are not particularly well-regarded these days; they are seen as just another pressure group. For many people, the only benefit arising from running the LHC is that a few people will get tenure and a few students will complete their PhDs. When the benefits are so low, the cost [computed a la Kent] had better be *really* low…..

jeebus, Iblis, steve, I don’t think I can do a better job than Giddings and Mangano themselves did in demonstrating where Plaga went wrong. They take issue with a lot of things he says, including incorrect quoting and sloppy, out of date, selective referencing.

Plaga is considering a warped extra dimensional scenario. In such models, there is a regime in which one is allowed to use the four dimensional quantities and laws, and a regime in which the phenomenology is described by the five dimensional laws (I describe this a little, in a simpler model, here). In their rebuttal, Giddings and Mangano point out that Plaga is applying four-dimensional formulae where they don’t apply, obtaining an incorrectly high result. This is perhaps the main clear problem.

The “four year period of decay” is interesting. Imagine that a non-evaporating black hole did get produced – how long would it take to eat up the earth? Just for fun, of course. I’m not suggesting this will actually happen but it would be interesting to know how long it would take if it did. Would the earth disappear in a microsecond or would it be a slow and painful death?
Anthony

Mark, glad to hear it. Goldacre is pretty much my favourite journalist. Incidentally, you should definitely check out his new Bad Science book, if you haven’t already. It’s superb.

As for the Times, I understand the need to differentiate it from the NYT (or the LAT for that matter). That’s why I suggested the UK’s Times. The point is that it’s not a London newspaper, it’s a national newspaper. The UK media may be very London-centric, but there’s a world of difference between the sorts of things the Times covers, and the sorts of things, say the Evening Standard covers. Let alone truly local London papers.

On the subject of calling these people crackpots: it’s worth noting that at least one of them was involved in a similar scare with RHIC, the accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory, which turned on in 1999. Almost all of the counterarguments that apply to the LHC case were articulated then in a safety review commissioned in response. Ignoring previous rebuttals of ones position is one of the classic signs of a crackpot. I talked about it a little bit here.

16. Steve from Brisbane wrote:
“I am aware that Margano and Giddings have rebutted it in their comments at Arxiv, but for the layman like me, it is hard to understand the “inconsistency” that they claim for Plaga’s argument.”

Giddings and Mangano spell out in detail the mistake in Plaga’s argument. Read the
paragraph in their paper beginning: “Where did [1] go wrong?” ([1] is the Plaga paper).
You only need to read that one paragraph to understand exactly why Plaga is wrong.

Let’s be clear: it is not the case: “that there are physicists possibly still in dispute” on this point. There was one paper, with an elementary mistake in it, put on the arXiv by someone who has never before worked on black hole radiance. When examined by an expert in the field of black hole quantum radiance [Giddings] the mistake was immediately found, and a paper posted indicating the mistake. Calculations are not a matter of opinion; you either do the calculation right or you do it wrong. Giddings has made a career of doing these calculations right; Plaga had never tried one of these calculations before, as is clear from the elementary mistake that he makes.

I feel real sympathy for Giddings, who is one of the world’s true experts on quantum black holes, and who had to take time away from his own research program to write a rebuttal to a trivially wrong paper by someone with no prior record of work on black hole radiance. Sadly, I expect to see more of this in the future, with active research scientists having to take time from their own research programs to debunk alarmist nonsense on the web.

The first time I heard about any of this was this morning on the BBC. I was listening on my drive to work and when I heard Otto Rössler say the bit about the micro-black holes consuming the earth the first thing I actually shouted “COOL!” I mean come on, if the world is going to come to an end it might as well be black holes eating it from the inside out. My only fear is that if it does happen the government will just cover it up and we will never know.

You gotta love those crackpots.

I find the word Crackpot to be one of the best words we have for quickly defining another person and the views s/he is presenting. It’s someone off the mainstream to such a degree they have become more entertainment than rational.
Our problem with crackpotism is not that they exist (I challenge any of us to walk by a good crackpot on a soapbox in Hyde Park without pausing to collect a quiet inner smile.) No, the problem is the dissemination of their views. The problem comes when reporters have so little discernment that they can’t spot a crackpot and instead write them up — an effect which snowballs of it’s own until significant editors who have perhaps 20 seconds to decide on how to fill an issue does a reprint which gets our attention.
How to stop? No way. It’s going to happen and keep happening. The why of it is that the many thousands of reporters who start the spread come from a population of which is unable to know a crackpot from a scientist. 50% of Americans believe in creationism. Think about that. It’s a miracle it’s not being taught in schools. It’s a miracle that 49% of Americans take the humble route and accept they are “in over their head” and permit the more intelligent to prevail. They are not crackpots — because they accept consensus over personal belief. The 1% who cherish their pet beliefs as correct in the face of reality AND insist on soapboxing are the crackpots. But still, it’s the publishing of their lunacy (insisting their personal mistakes be considered for everyone) which is the difficulty. Calling reporters and editors to account will mostly likely have the widest affect, not being surprised that crackpots exist! Shoot, there’s nothing like a nice entertaining crackpot — just not published in the Science sections!
Me, I don’t believe gravitons will ever be found because “gravity” doesn’t exist per se — that it’s really really really just probability that something will “choose” to decohere or exist where there is higher probibility of existence, and so likely there are other things “choosing” to exist nearby. Now I can write that theory up, work up the math and present it, or I can shut up, or I can assume you should take on my delusion too. But nobody should support me until I write it up and get some peer review. If someone publishes me in Times Science section, that doesn’t make me a crackpot. I was already wrong, or, not. It’s the publishing of junk that’s the problem and real crackpots are not bother without the publishing.
So say I. And I’m right. *smile*

.

I wonder how the inventor of nitroglicerine arrived to the production of this explosive.Was he or she on purpose trying to make it, or was it rather an accident?
When we talk about stranglets and micro black holes, we are worse off.In the case of black holes no matter model of quarks, and gluons, or anything else is out there to serve as a guidance to propose the make up of the grid of particles that make up the substance a black hole is made of.In classic physics there is not minimum size per se of stables blach holes,perhaps because size is a dimension that for those regions of space does not make sense.
So we do not know in truth the Minimum critical mass for one to be made.As for stranglets same case, no data about the minimum mass of strange quarks to start a stable one…
In both cases with the tangible,practical knowledge comes death….same case like with Eve in paradise long ago…Human stupidity…Maybe Adam should have sent Eve to eat the apple far away from paradise with the warning of NOT comming back if it was not good.Same case with the LHC.Perhaps it could have been a good idea to buid it in mars…far away fom earth,just in case we come intentionally or not to the production of cosmic nitroglicerine.

Steve from brisbane on Sep 9th, 2008 at 6:40 pm writes:
“None of the above: it was not easy for a lay person to follow that paragraph. You might spent all day reading papers with maths and physics terminology at a university level discussed in them: most of the world doesn’t.”

Well if you can’t read the papers you can certainly look into the credibility and credentials of the people writing these allegations. That IS something even “most of the world” can do.

As an example of one blogger out there who has looked into the credibility of Rossler and Plaga see:

http://onscreen-scientist.com/?p=34

Having read that don’t you think that “most of the world” could easily have come to the same conclusion as Mark as to whether these individuals are crackpots?

Not a single expert I know (and I know many) would agree that there were ever any sensible concerns about black holes at colliders. Your account just doesn’t gel with reality, as understood by people who know about the physics involved.

Mark says I am wrong. I have citations for each sentence. I tried to post them, repeating each sentence and listing the citations that back it up. I kept getting the error message: “Duplicate comment detected; it looks as though you’ve already said that!” apparently because I am quoting things I said earlier. I sent my post to an administrator. Perhaps it can be posted by hand.

There may be crackpots associated with collider concerns, but those concerns are not all crackpot. It was questionable for collider advocates to predict black hole production, and posit for a safety factor a Hawking radiation questioned in the literature. The collider/cosmic ray analogy was also questionable, Mangano was willing to question it. If we are looking for a high level of safety, as is appropriate when earth is at stake, the safety factors provided before Gidding and Mangano were not the high level of safety that we deserve.

The issue goes beyond colliders. There are several areas of science and technology that may pose risks. We need a protocol for consideration of such things. Crackpotism is not helpful, but neither is hubris on the part of scientists who state that “nothing can possibly go wrong” without careful consideration.

As noted in the post Walter L. Wagner is a crank.

But it’s far worse than that, Walter L. Wagner is a complete and total fraud, and dangerously mentally ill. He is not now, nor ever has been, a “Doctor” of any kind. He is not a lawyer, and the details of his ‘law’ education are disturbing to an astounding degree. His not a doctor of physics of any kind – and the most he can point to is some undergrad coursework in general physics and some time as a minor lab tech. He’s been convicted of disturbing crimes, and is currently under indictment for embezzlement in Hawaii. Every single thing this man has claimed is a complete and total fabrication and a construct of his disturbed mind.

Confirmed and validated details can be found at the following links:

Stonekettle Station

Refugees from the City – The original post which turned the baleful eye of the UCF blogger community on Wagner in the first place and where Wagner’s and Tankersley’s (jtankers) credentials are soundly debunked in the comments thread.

Refugees from the City Where wagner’s so called science is debunked and James Bloggett gets handed his ass and change.

The blog of Siram a summary of the events.

and finally a detailed examination of Wagner’s law career can be found here along with the most damning evidence regarding Wagner yet.

Note all of these blogs are linked together are part of the UCF online community. Both Wagner and jtankers have construed this to mean that we are involved in some sort of conspiracy to cloud their ‘message.’ Make of it what you will.

Jim Wright, Stonekettle Station

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