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Sep 30, 2008 01:15 PM | 15
A federal judge has tossed out a case challenging the operation of the world's biggest particle accelerator—not that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is running, anyway.
Judge Helen Gillmor of the U.S. District Court in Hawaii dismissed the lawsuit Friday, saying the American judicial system has no jurisdiction over the $8-billion LHC, which is housed in a circular tunnel straddling the Swiss-French border. The New York Times is reporting on the dismissal today.
The suit was filed by a retired radiation safety officer, Walter Wagner, and Spanish science writer Luis Sancho, MSNBC's Cosmic Log has previously noted. The two claimed that the operator of the LHC, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and its backers failed to show that smashing protons at nearly the speed of light wouldn't produce mini black holes that could obliterate Earth.
Sancho, for his part, isn't entirely disappointed in the ruling. "The lawsuit was an unbelievable success in that it put the collider issue on the intellectual agenda," he told the Times, adding that it pressured CERN to conduct a safety study it wouldn’t have done otherwise. "The study was not perfect, but at least the safety factors on which CERN is relying are not quite as bad," Sancho said.
A spokesman for CERN, James Gillies, says Sancho's characterization of its safety research is "absolute nonsense." The agency conducted two formal reviews in 2003 and 2007, before the suit was filed in March.
"We were not pressured into doing that," Gillies says. "Safety review is part of our routine activities and predates the court case by some way. We said all along there was no scientific basis for the case and we're glad the court in Hawaii sees it that way."
Physicists and engineers plan to use the LHC to learn more about conditions that preceded the formation of the universe. But the machine had been running for only two weeks after its September 10 launch when CERN announced it would be shut down for repairs and a scheduled winter maintenance that will put it out of commission until at least spring.
To learn more about the LHC, take a look at our in-depth report.
(Image of LHC Atlas beampipe/CERN)
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15 Comments
Add CommentIn an idle moment I flicked through the affadavit of Luis Sancho to the court (google it if you're bored). Of many fascinating and novel interpretions of statistics, physics and logic I was particularly drawn to:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Black Holes would be produced at CERN if String Theory, or any of the multiple theories that consider gravity to grow in force at small scales, is certain (super gravity, super-symmetry, etc.). According to Scientific Americans polls, 9 out of 10 physicists believe that String Theory is certain. Thus, we can assign a 90% chance to the possible creation of black holes by the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at a rate of 1 per second."
[...] "In any case, if we are fair and concede in this issue the benefit of the doubt to Dr. Hawking, we shall give him a 50% chance of being right and Dr. Einstein also a 50% chance. This would define the probability of the Earth to be destroyed by a black hole at 50% x 90% = 45% chance."
Hands up if you can spot any flaws in that statement. Anyone?
The court did not agree with CERN scientifically, it only determined the issue of juristiction noting that scientists differ on the issue of safety and issue is for more than just physicists.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisContrary to the information attributed to a CERN spokesman, the agency did not release a formal safety review in 2007. According to the submission history, their safety review was released on June 20, 2008 and an updated version was released on Sept. 18, 2008. long after the lawsuit was filed in March 2008. All authors were CERN employeess except for a Russian scientist, who for unexplained reasons did not endorse the report. It can be found at http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.3414
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe CERN safety report was critiqued by astrophysicist Rainer Plaga, Ph.D. ,formerly of the Max Planck Institute, in a paper "On the potential catastrophic risk from metastable quantum-black holes produced at particle colliders." It's at the same physics website: http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.1415, and now contains an appendix refuting a brief rebuttal from CERN's safety theorists.
CERN itself published the conclusion of two affiliated physicists in the CERN Courier, Nov. 12, 2004: "the 14 TeV centre-of-mass energy of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could allow it to become a black-hole factory with a prouction rate as high as about one per second."
Physicist Rainer Plaga's updated paper, which was released on Sept. 26, 2008, is a major challenge to CERN and its official line on Large Hadron Collider. Dr. Plaga refutes the attempted whitewash by CERN's safety theorists and concludes: "I stand to my general conclusion that there is a residual catastrophic risk from metastable microscopic black holes produced at particle colliders." See: http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.1415
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOther scientists in Europe have filed a lawsuit in the European Court of Human Rights to block the collider from operating. This lawsuit is proceeding in spite of the dismissal of the case before the U.S. court in Hawaii.
@Robert Houston: Let me start off by mentioning that "endorse" in the specific context of arXiv does not mean what you think it means. If you're a prolific enough author you get the right to "endorse" other papers (mark them as worth keeping). Its a way of filtering out the crap. Read about it here:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://arxiv.org/help/endorsement.html
I note that link from Plaga's paper says he is "Not currently an endorser"
And yes indeed, several of the authors of the CERN commisioned review are from the CERN theory department. You can tell by the way it says "CERN theory" next to their name on the paper. Do you feel this somehow renders them incompetent to speak on this issue? As Ad Hominem attacks go its a particularly bizzare one.
If you are willing to disreguard Plaga's lack of credentials then it seems only polite not to hold the CERN authors' impecable credentials against them.
Anyway, I'm off to read Plaga's new version of his paper.
Well that was quick. Just a few paragraphs added at the end.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIncidentally, @Robert Houston, calm down with the "attempted whitewash" stuff. Plaga original paper was a response to one by Giddings and Mangano and followed their methodology closely. Giddings and Mangano replied to Plaga, stating that he'd used the equations wrongly and ended up 23 orders of magnitude out. Plaga has now responded with an appendix to his paper. If the authors in question can converse calmly and politely I suggest you should too.
So I've read Plaga's response. He goes back over his work, and states that G&M have misunderstood what he was doing, and that its entirely appropriate.
Call me crazy, but from Plaga's response it sounds like he was doing exactly what G&M thought he was doing - wasn't the normalization the issue all along?
Ah well, I guess G&M will be along with a response shortly.
If you can't get by without a mBH fix, try this:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0809/0809.2471v1.pdf
Commenter SkiveHard (SH) is correct that "endorse" has a specialized meaning at the arxiv.org website. Those who, like Dr. Rainer Plaga, have had papers accepted there in recent years do not need new endorsement.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDr. Plaga has no "lack of credentials." He is a Ph.D. physicist who has worked at Europe's premier center for physics research, the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Germany. His Sept. 26 paper disputing the safety of CERN's Large Hadron Collider applied to CERN's safety report as well as to the study by Giddings and Mangano on which CERN based its conclusions (see footnote 1 of his paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.1415).
Four of the five members of CERN's LHC Safety Assessment Group are employed by CERN. On such an important public safety issue as the fate of the planet, it is not sufficient to have the in-house conclusions of CERN's employees (or CERN-selected consultants). However well-credentialed and well-motivated they may be, they have a severe conflict of interest obliging them to justify the project for which they work. Thus their safety report reads like a P.R. puff piece rather than a serious scientific examination of the issues.
Interviewed in the New Yorker, CERN's chief scientific officer Jos Engelen has said that CERN employees are now instructed regarding planetary risk from the LHC to say "that the probability is zero." (E. Kolbert, "Crash Course," New Yorker, May 14 2007.) Working under such an edict, can they be trusted in their blanket assurances?
In their haste to rebut Plaga's paper, which indicates that he LCH may cause a nuclear explosion near Geneva, CERN's safety theorists apparently confused which equation he was applying. According to Plaga, their "objection criticizes something I did not do... Therefore, it does not apply to my paper."
Hi Robert. My point was that you were rejecting the CERN safety assesment out of hand because of who the authors were, while many would reject Plaga's paper for the same reason (wrongly, in my view). Since you bring up his credentials - when he was employed as a research scientist he looks to have done some solid work on cosmic ray origins, but nothing remotely related to mBHs. In addition, he seems to have a history of making "controversial" claims about subjects outside his area of expertise, arguing about them for years then finally withdrawing them:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9610545
None of this, of course, means that he is wrong. It may be that he is right about his work and that G&M's objections are not valid. If he wants his work to be taken seriously there is a simple answer - submit it to a journal and peer review. While referees are not infallible arbiters of truth, they should resolve the issue of whether theres a mistake in the calcuations rather quickly.
To return to my original point - to regard the paper as necesarily untrue because it was written by those biased CERN people is as flawed as thinking it is necesarily true because it was written by those clever CERN people.
In a scientific paper the only thing of significance is whether the conclusions reached are justified. If you or I had submitted that paper it would still be exactly as true or not true. Plaga thinks the work of G&M is flawed - but because he believes the authors have overlooked something, not because of who they are.
@Robert Houston: Just read that New Yorker article, and I think you need to reread it too. The point is this: if you ask a scientist, they will say "the possibility of x happening is incredibly small". A Journalist hearing that will come away with "theres a possibility x could happen!" when what the scientist meant was "its not going to happen". What Englen is saying there is that when talking to journalists talk like a human being not a geek.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome good points, SkiveHard. Thanks for your comments.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's fair to ask whether CERN's safety theorists are engaged more in public relations than in science. By starting with a zero-risk conclusion such as their scientific chief Jos Engelen ordained, do they seek mainly to reassure journalists and the public? Are their various safety arguments, then, merely sophistries spun to support a foregone conclusion? A true risk assessment provides a quantified estimate of possible disasters, something CERN has failed to provide.
It is because they are well-credentialed, well-informed and smart that the motives of CERN's theorists and supporters must be questioned when they promote clearly shaky or fallacious safety arguments. Here's one example: the repeated assertion that the collider beams are the same as cosmic rays and thus must be safe since we've survived the latter. Even the NY Times could see through that deception:
"What is different, physicists admit, is that the fragments from cosmic rays will go shooting harmlessly though the Earth at nearly the speed of light, but anything created when the beams meet head-on in the collider will be born at rest relative to the laboratory and so will stick around and thus could create havoc" (D. Overbye, "Asking a Judge to Save the World..."
NY Times, March 29, 2008).
Note how coyly CERN's safety report (p. 2) hints at this important difference while hiding it: "the particles produced in cosmic ray collisions typically have different velocities from those produced by accelerators..."
A scientist who admits that an earlier paper was incorrect and rewrites it to reflect better knowledge or understanding, as Dr. Plaga has done, shows commendable honesty and character, greater than what's discernable at CERN. Contrary to SkiveHard's claim, his recent paper on the risk from the Large Hadron Collider was submitted to one of the peer-reviewed journals at Elsevier, as indicated on the preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.1415
Ah, he has indeed submitted it for review! I'd missed that. Well the question of whether theres a mistake will get resolved. Hooray for peer review.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAdmitting your mistakes and correcting them is certainly admirable, but it seems to have taken him a long time to admit that mistake, and he appears to have argued against it strenuously. As such, I would be cautious about simply accepting Plaga's counter-rebutal. And since hes clearly not afraid to publish work that might be flawed I would be cautious about drawing any conclusions from it at all till its passed peer review.
By the way, have you read the full CERN report? Because you seem to be quoting the summary (which is a summary of a summary). The full report has rather a long section on how they deal with the differences between cosmic rays and LHC collisions.
I get the feeling you want the LSAG report to be something its not - its a review and summary of literature concerning LHC safety. As far as I know it references all the relevent papers and the conclusions it comes to accurately reflect those of its sources. Do you feel that that is not the case?
You seem not to like the cosmic ray argument - specifically the cosmic rays hitting the earth argument. Well, I've got to say, its fine as far as it goes. Black holes take on the charge of whatevers in them, so cosmic rays would create both charged and neutral black holes. The neutral ones would indeed just fly straight through the planet. The charged ones, however, would stop rather quickly. So if you have no objection to any of that, we have just proved that dangerous back holes cannot be created at the LHC.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut, you should be saying at this point, what if charged black holes aren't produced, only neutral ones? (I don't know how that could happen, but for the sake of argument, lets say it could.) If a black hole is to grow and devour the earth before the earth get fried as the sun dies (I'm assuming noone minds if a black hole eats it afterwards) then theres a certain minimum "grabbiness" that the black hole has to have. And given that "grabbiness", of the many, many black holes that have flown through the sun (if black holes are created by proton proton collisions) some will have snacked on a charged particle, become charged, and therefore stopped.
But, you should be saying at this point, what if black holes don't pick up a charge, no matter what they eat? (That would be a violation of charge conservation, and if that was seen at the LHC it would be far more radical than the appearance of black holes. But lets assume it could happen). In that case you can pull a similar trick with the strong force. But if that doesn't work either?
In that case we have to go to white dwarfs (about 6% of the stars in our neighbourhood). If you make the assumption that a mBH does nothing but eat at the rate necesary to be a danger to the earth, what you find is that by the time its munched its way across the white dwarf it has dropped below escape velocity (through nothing but its eating). So its stuck, continues to eat and devours the white dwarf.
White dwarfs exist. That leads us to two conclusions. Either proton proton collisions don't produce black holes, or the black holes are not dangerous (because they either eat too slowly or decay too quicly to be a problem).
These calculations are straightforward and don't rely on complex theoretical assumptions. If the arguments relied on expert interpretation of theory, I wouldn't find them the least bit reasuring. But they rely on the existance of white dwarfs. Their existance is something I can check, and... Yup, still there, so no dangerous black holes.
On Oct. 2, 2008, the New York Times published a correction to their Sept. 30th article on which the Scientific American story is based. The correction, which can be found at the NY Times link in the Sciam story, is that the quotation attributed to the plaintiff Prof. Luis Sancho was not his but another writer's. Prof. Sancho never said "at least the safety factors on which CERN is relying are not quite as bad." According to the correction, he "believes that the most recent safety study of the collider was inadequate."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's understood that the case will be appealed. The valuable affidavits and information pertaining to the lawsuit and LHC risks can be found at LHCdefense.org.
On Oct. 2nd the NY Times published a correction to their Sept. 30 article on which the Scientific American story is based. The correction can be found at the Times link in the story. It states: "The plaintiff, Luis Sancho, who is a science writer and professor in Barcelona, believes that the most recent safety study of the collider was inadequate. He did not say, 'The study was not perfect, but at least the safety factors on which CERN is relying are not quite as bad.'" The quote was from someone else.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInformation on the lawsuit to stop CERN can be found at LHCdefense.org. Of special interest there is the affidavit from Prof. Mark Leggett, a risk assessment expert, regarding the dozens of established safety procedures that CERN has flouted in rushing its dangerous LHC project into operation.
The prior comment by Skivehard was a thoughtful statement of some key safety arguments for CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Although often presented by supporters as established principles, each of the points is actually equivocal, for some scientists on both sides find them questionable. Therefore, the logical conclusion must be 100% uncertainty, rather than zero risk. With the planet at stake, the project thus amounts to a reckless gamble.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAccording to the NY Times (9/10/08), "The only thing physicists agree on is that they don't know what will happen - what laws will prevail - when collisions reach the energies just after the Big Bang. 'That there are many theories means we don't have a clue,' said Oddone." (Dr. Oddone is the director of Fermilab, the largest accelerator in the U.S.)
To take an example, the safety argument that micro black holes arising from cosmic rays would be electrically charged and thus greatly slowed by electromagnetic encounters in the Earth is disputed by some scientists on both sides. Prof. Otto Rossler in Germany argues on theoretical grounds that "Black holes are effectively uncharged." Likewise, London University physicist, Dr. Shahn Magid, has concluded regarding black holes:
"...if such objects were going to be produced with electric charge we'd surely have seen indirect signs of them produced from cosmic rays... Hence, being neutral in charge, I suppose they would drift down into the Earth interacting occasionally but harmlessly with other matter. I do agree that if such objects were produced in the LHC we would be entering 'unknown territory'...." (S. Majid, "Particle Accelerators, CERN, and Doomsday," Cambridgeblog.org).
According to Dr. Magid, CERN's basic safety argument - the cosmic ray comparison - is flawed. His recent article states, "A further part of the official line is reference to the fact that collisions at the kinds of energies produced in the LHC occur often in the upper atmosphere due to cosmic rays arriving from outer space. This is not a good comparison because the LHC black holes if they were to be produced could be sitting around at rest in the laboratory (in a collision of hadrons travelling in equal and opposite directions) and hence might accumulate instead of continuing at high velocity in a spread of directions. In other words the conditions are very different."
Similarly, physicist Michael Peskin, Ph,D. of Stanford writes that "a stuctureless, neutral black hole...might be produced at the LHC and subsequently stop and lodge in the earth, However, such a black hole produced by cosmic rays would zoom through the earth at the speed of light... In this picture, the cosmic ray argument seems to lose its force" (Peskin, "The End of the World at the LHC?" Physics 1, 14, 2008).
Furthermore, unlike the LHC, cosmic rays do not recreate the conditions a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang nor temperatures 100,000 times the sun's core, for they do not involve magnetically focused head-on collisions of billions of parrticles per second as in the LHC. The LHC Big Bang experiments amount to opening a Pandora's Box of potential planet destroyers that theoretically could be produced at its energies, including black holes, strangelets, magnetic monopoles, antimatter, vacuum bubbles, and thermonuclear chain reactions.
To reassure us, this year CERN's safety theorists Giddings and Mangano (G & M) unveiled a far-feteched new safety argument: the existence of white dwarfs and neutron stars, asserting that their density would stop cosmic ray products. However, as physicist Dr. Rainer Plaga commented in his recent paper: "G & M point out that such arguments remain not completely definite for neutron stars because it remains unclear if cosmic rays with sufficient energy reach their surface." (G & M had conceded in their paper that the powerful magnetic fields of neutron stars and most white dwarfs may dispel or weaken cosmic rays.) Furthermore, since neutron stars are believed to contain strangelet matter and central black holes, they are hardly examples of safe outcomes.
In producing its doomsday machine CERN functions as the world's foremost terrorist organization, The UN, the European Union, and the governments of France and Switzerland must act to constrain and block it's dangerous Big Bang experiments.