I really do hope this story lede is at least a little bit tongue in cheek. If it’s not, this reporter and his editor should be out of a job tomorrow.
More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.
None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.
Oy, the hyperbole!
Here’s the problem. You can’t get a scientist to go on record to say that there’s absolutely no way in the world this could happen. The reason for that is when you work with really tiny particles and large amounts of energy, there is no such thing as an absolute. We can get very close to an absolute, but there’s always a very small chance that anything could happen.
So, yes, there’s a chance that CERN could fire up the accelerator and we’ll all be swallowed by a black hole. There’s also a chance that daisies could sprout out of our ears in full bloom or that Mad Mahmoud will send a peace treaty over to Tel Aviv. In other words, understanding that there’s a minuscule chance of anything happening, we aren’t going to find ourselves being ripped apart by gravitational forces beyond our ken. To scientists, the phrase “very unlikely” means, “better chance of hitting the Powerball today, sunshine”.
For goodness sake, one of the plaintiffs calls himself an “author and researcher on time travel” and the first plaintiff doesn’t even know in what city the guy lives. My guess is that each of these men have spent more than a little bit of time as guests on the Art Bell show and, as such, have come to believe that their ideas have a lot more merit than they do. I’ve heard the show a time or three and, trust me, the hosts spend almost no time telling anyone that they’re just bat-spit crazy.
But that’s the Art Bell show and not the newspaper with the largest circulation in the US, if not the Western Hemisphere. The Times ought to know better.
(via memeorandum)
What I found most annoying was that they were kind of sloppy with their description of which collider we’re talking about. There are two colliders operated by CERN, one called ‘CERN’ and the new one called the “Large Hadron Collider.” It took me almost to the end to realize it was the LHC they were talking about because they kept referring to it as the “CERN collider.” For most people, the distinction is irrelevant. But for us Physics geeks, it’s not. We’ve been eagerly awaiting the startup of the LHC because it will provide us some great new data in energy ranges never before tested. More significantly, the energy range happens to coincide with that which could prove Lisa Randall’s theories correct (and String Theory wrong). About two years from now, we’ll know for sure. And we may be able to answer the all-important question of how many dimensions the universe has. If you find this stuff interesting, I’d strongly recommend reading Lisa Randall’s “Warped Passages: The Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions.” It’s written at a level that does not require a physics degree but still explains the theory pretty well. That’s hard to pull off in modern physics. And you get an early look at what may the most significant scientific theory ever. The search for an explanation of gravity has long been science’s Holy Grail quest. And we may get there soon. Of course, Randall could be wrong. That’s always the danger of proposing a scientific theory. But fortunately, we learn as much from being wrong as from being right. Oh, and the people filing the lawsuit are just plain silly. Scientists, not judges, should decide how safe an experiment is.