Look forward to the thoughts of our contributing physicists on this. I'm glad the judicial system of Hawaii has got my back, I can tell you that. Pay particular note to the end -- if we can be consumed by quantum dragons, why not some horsemen leaping eagerly into our dimension?
JEK
Really doesn't want all his scoffing at the End Times to be something he regrets.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Something we should really worry about...
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Serious people (a category into which the two plaintiffs in the article do not alas fall) really do think about this stuff. Before they turned on the heavy ion collider on Long Island, several extremely eminent physicists (a category into which your correspondent does not alas fall) examined the possibility that it could destroy the earth or the universe. The interesting paper discussing their conclusions is here. To save you some time, it turns out that all the "disaster scenarios" are pretty unlikely. "Pretty unlikely" here means an estimated probability less than one in ten to the thirty-fifth. For a tangible example of this magnitude of probability, think "President Spears."
Kind of awesomely, one of the major pieces of evidence in favor of the safety of new accelerators is the continued existence of the moon. The atmospherically unshielded lunar surface has been continuously bombarded for several billion years by cosmic rays with energies far above those we can produce at any foreseeable accelerator, yet the moon has not as of this writing been transformed into a strangelet, black hole, or new vacuum state. This observational fact produces some pretty powerful experimental bounds on the likelihood of such catastrophes.
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