The LHC, Black Holes, and the Law

"..."Now that the physicists have had their say over the safety of the Large Hadron Collider, a law professor has produced a comprehensive legal study addressing the legal issue that might arise were a court to deal with a request to halt a multi-billion-dollar particle-physics experiment (abstract). The legal issues make for startling reading. The analysis discusses the problem with expert witnesses, which is that any particle physicists would be afraid for their livelihoods and anybody else afraid for their lives. How can such evidence be relied upon? It examines the well established legal argument that death is not a redressable injury under American tort law, which could imply that the value in any cost-benefit analysis of the future of the Earth after it had been destroyed is zero (there would be nobody to compensate). It asks whether state-of-the-art theoretical physics is really able to say that the LHC is safe given that a scientific theory that seems unassailable in one era may seem naive in the next. But most worrying of all, it points out that the safety analyses so far have all been done by CERN itself. The question left open by the author is what verdict a court might reach."..."

Comments are worth a read. Pretty sure if a global collective of Scientists had the slightest clue it could destroy the earth I would think they would not do so. Even so its obvious the hype is overdone or just plain idiotic. Even a miniature black hole would evaporate with Hawking Radiation (theoretically) before it could somehow swell and eat the world. Or only if some other scientifically improbable thing would destroy us all... Fuck 2012, lets end it now!

Check my next post for an article on the amount of Data the LHC is producing already, and the even more it will produce on its next higher energy run.