21 Days until the LHC gets turned on in Geneva! I don’t understand science particulalry well, so I found claims that the LHC might destroy earth a little troubling. But then, I read some more, and have come to realise that this seems to be a poor exercise in public reason. I am not sure what will happen when the LHC is turned on. Neither do the physicists. If they did, they would not say there is a miniscule chance of danger. They are saying miniscule because they cannot think of any danger they could create given the world as they understand it.
My favorite argument against the LHC is the one which takes the form: “According to Hawking’s theory of the universe, black holes will burn off Hawking radiation… but Hawking’s theories are disputed.” Of course, as I understand it, you have to agree with Hawking’s theories about the universe to expect mini black holes MIGHT be created in the first place. I don’t know much about cosmology, but I do think it seems like an unreasonable premise to be worried about a theoretical risk because you do not trust the cosmological understanding that generates the risk in the first place–I don’t think that you can sort of grocery shop what you do and don’t think quantum physics implies the way that critics are doing… maybe I’m wrong.
Mostly, I am thinking about Hume and inductive reasoning. The LHC seems to me to be a revelatory moment that we link our actions to expected outcomes with a strength much closer to habit than reason as to be a little upsetting. Why do I think typing on my keyboard won’t destroy the universe? It’s not because I can mentally rule out all possible catastrophic chains of events coming from writing this as much as because I do it all the time, and in fact, lots of people do it all the time and it seems to be a pretty safe physical collision almost every time (save carpal-tunnel syndrome and writing inflamatory messages). I am not initially scared of a super-collider because I know that it will be dangerous. I am initially scared because I do not know what it does. Even in acquiring enough information to believe that it is safe for the best possible reasons, and knowing that there is an inductive pattern of the same objections against smaller colliders that have all not destroyed earth, knowing that it might work does not provide the same comfort as experience. In that way, it is a great bogeyman of doomsday proclamation to threaten all future experience with destruction from an experiment that could not be more alien to me. Once I am honset about that, it becomes easier to come back to reason to restore my faith in it as how to make public decisions.
July 17, 2008 at 11:38 pm |
Your public tax dollars are paying for CERN’s public relations efforts.
Did you know that CERN supporters including at least one CERN employee is working to censor content from the Wikipedia article “Safety of the Large Hadron Collider”.
The currently included statement is currently being attacked:
“Otto Rössler has stated that micro black holes created in the LHC could grow exponentially, accreting the Earth in 50 months to 50 years, and he has sought scientific debate on his research[23] before the LHC particle collisions begin.[24]”
At least one CERN employee feels that the public should not read about Dr. Rossler’s concerns when you read about the Safety of the Large Hadron Collider.
What else is not permitted? Not permitted are published peer reviewed papers that question the theoretical basis for Hawking Radiation.
Now what is the argument on the bloggesphere?
“you have to agree with Hawking’s theories about the universe to expect mini black holes MIGHT be created in the first place. ”
Actually there is no substance behind this statement that I have heard argued. The theories are not even remotely related, one is a flawed re-interpretation of quantum effects and the other is a variation of string theory.
How many physicists have bothered to read the 2008 LHC Safety Reviews?
It is your planet too.
LHCFacts.org
LHCDefense.org
July 18, 2008 at 8:05 am |
The suggestions of conspiracy have an alternate explanation: the scientific community believes that the arguments that the LHC are dangerous just are not very good. Hence, no wikipedia entry and no peer reviewed articles. If someone were to make a wikipedia entry about myself and then add the entry: “It is believed by Expert X that Steven Maloney is a serial killer,” it seems to me that I would think that not fair to have in my wikipedia entry if the vast majority of people thought it was in no way true.
As for the quantum theory-string theory issue – look I’m no physical scientist, but I would have to imagine that in systematic thinking as complex as cosmology, there are only so many ways that ideas can be constructed together without flagrantly contradicting the larger body of knowledge that is established.
Finally, I am skeptical of your claims because you seem to have little interest in giving the plausibility of the LHC being safe any sort of due measure whatsoever, which is inherently unscientific on the most fundamental of methodological levels. I have noticed that you post on many sites and claim conspiracy and doom, but never say why the LHC scientists might be right or might think that they are right. You have a narrow hypothesis that they are hubristic, arrogant mad scientists, and that since your theory fits your view of the world, you leave it at that. How can that possibly be considered a scientific point of view in and of itself?
July 18, 2008 at 12:20 pm |
The most interesting thing about conspiracy theorists are that they are incapable of considering alternatives without subsuming those alternatives to their own theory. They lack what Arendt (following Kant) called the ‘enlarged mentality,’ the capacity to put themselves in another’s shoes and consider the world from their perspective. You needn’t agree with a person’s perspective to take it up and consider it, but your contributions to public discourse will be seriously flawed insofar as you cannot make that move of imaginative inclusion.
This flaw is at the heart of being ‘worse than a coin flip,’ to continue another discussion of ours.
September 14, 2008 at 4:39 am |
In many ways we don’t know what will happen in the LHC experience.
When the Atomic bomb was invented nobody care about, was secret and only in Japan we knowed those great effects.
The LHC is a simmulate black hole and theorical a Atomic Bomb inverted with those effects nobody knows.