Comments on: Law Vs Law

By: JTankers

JTankers — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:21:34 +0000

Actually a copy of the full text of the legal action including affidavits is posted here: http://www.lhcconcerns.com/LHCConcerns/Forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=29&p=537&hilit=law#p537

I read it the first night it was available, I find it well written, reasonable and compelling.

But what I find scary is Professor Rossler’s calculations (which have been released for peer review) predicting that a stable micro black hole might actually accrete the planet in a time period not closer to 50 million years, but instead closer to 50 months.

Two of Prof. Rössler’s papers have been posted (one after the other in the same PDF) at: http://www.wissensnavigator.com/documents/OTTOROESSLERMINIBLACKHOLE.pdf

By: Plato

Plato — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 22:29:10 +0000

what could move faster then speed of light…in water of course.:)

By: Plato

Plato — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:30:55 +0000

While it would would seem nonsense, I was lead to wonder about strangelets back when the disaster scenarios were first presented. To try and understand what was being said.

It seemed strange to me that was was being done at LHC in terms of the reductionist possibilities, was and had to be presented within the context of “particle collisions from sources in the cosmos. It was brought into perspective this way for me. Pierre Auger and the experiments, by John Ellis.

It was then that such presentations seem to present themself in terms of muon detection, that being with uneducated thought I began to think about what ICECUBE, what could move faster then speed of light (cerenkov radiation) and, the addition to LHC whichcould move through the earth and appear at Gran Sasso.

Sorry Clifford it’s not perfectly clear, but this issue has been around for sometime with various posts having been left on different blogs. Mine one of them

By: Elliot

Elliot — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:02:33 +0000

although not likely to be relevant here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument

is a somewhat interesting exercise in trying to figure out how long humanity will actually survive.

By: Haelfix

Haelfix — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 07:55:13 +0000

This is an example of how you go about getting lots of publicity in science. Make an idiotic claim, alarm the goodfolk with a bunch of jargon and vocab that reminisces the imagery from cheesy 1950s flics, throw in a lawsuit to make it sound official, and there you have it… Instant attention and notoriety.

By: Clifford

Clifford — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 02:45:46 +0000

Phil, yes, we are in agreement. One should always go to reasonable lengths to verify the safety of any experiment. No question. (By the way, the spam checker held your second comment in limbo for most of the day. Sorry.)

-cvj

By: Elliot

Elliot — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:22:02 +0000

It seems unlikely that the court would enforce this without some “serious” physics to back it up. Martin Rees considered such a scenario in a recent book but I imagine most physicists think this is a very unlikely outcome.

But just to get folks out there a bit worked up… wouldn’t this resolve the Fermi Paradox in an interesting way? Civilizations that have advanced to our level all ultimately self destruct when they cross a certain energy threshold in their experiments to understand reality.

hmmmm….

By: IrrationalPoint

IrrationalPoint — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 20:17:13 +0000

On the bright side, if the LHC does make a “dragon” that eats us up, we won’t be worrying about it for very long. Hehe.

–IP

By: Phil Plait

Phil Plait — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 15:51:43 +0000

I agree, conditionally. I think that we should be looking into any potential problems, of course, but that it should be done evenly and fairly. These guys strike me as ambulance-chasers, especially since the potential problems *were* investigated, and shown to be no concern.

By: Clifford

Clifford — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 15:40:29 +0000

Thanks Phil. Well, sure… but I’d say it already reads like crackpotty stuff from the get-go, reading the suit itself. No need for “unification” websites. What bothers me more than the claim or concern itself is just the irresponsible scare-mongering and misinformation. It annoys me intensely and is potentially damaging to the cause of basic science.

Cheers,

-cvj

By: Phil Plait

Phil Plait — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 15:20:12 +0000

I posted about this just yesterday. I think the claims are worth investigating, but once that’s done you see that they don’t hold water. The most interesting thing about this, in my opinion, is that one of the two litigators, Luis Sanchez, could charitably be called a crackpot once you look at his website. While that doesn’t make him wrong, necessarily, it certainly colors the case.