Atomic Nerds

Little hissy fits?

If you have difficulty compellingly refuting the science, attack the credibility of the opponents.

“JTankers” in the comments on my last CERN/LHC post. (I swear, these anti-cern guys spend more time googling for the latest whiffs of support for modern science than they do doing anything productive to impede our understanding of the universe. How else do they crop up so quickly when folks mention the LHC?) He then went on to offer a whole bunch of citations about how we’re gonna die the hell out our lives when the LHC fires up the second beam. I guess having 99% or so of the established scientific community shred a load of ill-researched, badly reasoned, barely plausible pseudo-science that amounts much more to rabble rousing and fear mongering ludditery than research isn’t good enough, and it all now falls to the shoulders of an interested amateur on the internet. Never let it be said I avoid a challenge.

Let’s take a look at the first citation, a paper at http://wissensnavigator.com/ which you can tell from the site design is a true bastion of knowledge for the physical sciences. And stock trading. Very closely linked are quantum physics and stock trading. It’s a little known fact, but true.

So the first reference is this paper which isn’t really there. Someone must have already observed how fast the paper was going, so now we have no idea where it is.

Ok, moving on we get another paper from the investors. Did you know that Dr. Stephen Hawking once ran over no fewer than seven of those shouting sweaty guys in suits on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in order to get a good price on the shares he was trying to pick up? True story. Dr. Hawking makes Chuck Norris look like a pansy. Our next steaming pile of evidence that the LHC will make rainbows turn upside down and cause the heartbreak of psoriasis is entitled A Rational and Moral and Spiritual Dilemma. I’ve heard some refer to the Higgs Boson as the God-particle, but I’m not quite sure they meant that literally, which makes me question where spirituality entered into physics. Let’s wade in, shall we?

Abstract. A nightmarish situation that can still be hoped to be averted by communication-intime
in the scientific community is drawn attention to. Only a few weeks remain to find out
whether the danger is for real or nothing but a mirage. After this time window is closed, it
will take years until we know whether or not we are doomed. The story line has all the
features of a best-selling novel. The reader is asked to contribute constructively; May 20 ‘08.

And I thought this was going to be a boring pile of research and math to prove a point! Will there be dancing girls as well? Or a gorilla in a tutu on a unicycle? Skimming a bit…

Most likely, of course, the silent scientific establishment is well-advised to ignore the
danger.

Uh-huh. Isn’t the idea to bring us around to your side, Dr? Skipping a bit further ahead,

This is very little to ask, but exactly this bit is being refused. Why? It looks as if my scientific proposals are so far-off that anyone who ever had a physics course grasps this immediately while everyone else is deeply impressed by the arguments.

This is what is technically known as “a hint.”

Both “Trinity“ and “Eniwetak“ – the two previous Russian-roulette feats of our
species – would be dwarfed by this third instance, without the protagonists‘ noticing.

Russian… you… um, you know they didn’t really believe the atmosphere would ignite? Some of the scientists got their kids out of Dodge in case of a Castle Bravo miscalculation, but it was a bit more soundly investigated that the world would not end at either detonation than “Well, what the hell. Who cares, fire that sumbitch off anyhoo.”

You will have realized by now that I do not have a 100-percent proof to offer – just
probabilities.

Yes. I agree with your assessment that you do not have proof.

The experiment
in question is called the LHC (“Large Hadron Collider“) and is the most expensive and
prestigious non-military scientific endeavor ever.

Remember this. We’ll be coming back to it later.

This difference to its predecessors makes the current experiment a guaranteed success: at
causing an unprecedented amount of human suffering. For there will be no way to explain to
anyone that he or she is safe or to apologize for the suffering to expect. The rational fear
unavoidably caused can only be made go away by convening a post-facto scientific world
conference that proclaims absolute safety. Unfortunately, every scientist who would not
agree with this preassigned verdict would act irresponsibly. Since this will be obvious, no one
would ever again believe a single word from a scientist. Antiscientific fundamentalism would
have won – even if the experiment proves innocuous in hindsight.”

And yet by the authors own admission earlier in the paper, science would do well to ignore his hissy fit, and that anyone who looks at the physics with an eye to the field more advanced than “f = ma” or Ke = .5*m*v*v “grasps immediately” that the author is full of shit. Thank you, Doctor. You’ve done wonders at destroying the credibility of real scientists with your efforts. If you would like to step into the alley behind the LHC, I susupect there will be a large committee there to award you suitable recognition. Probably with bricks and crowbars.

The spiritual dimension goes still farther. Everyone knows to date that for the first time in
history we possess the tools to do away with the cruelest inequalities on the planet (those that
inevitably cause cursing). The computer and the Internet have made this miracle possible:
Work done once can be multiplied and transported free of charge. Information has become
cost-free. Nevertheless project Lampsacus remains unknown for 14 years (Google and
Wikipedia which implement elements of it notwithstanding). In a historical parallel, the
computer-facilitated medical revolution is increasingly withheld from the less well-to-do
public even in privileged countries while student fees are re-imposed in defiance of a UNO
decision without protest. No one seems to feel his own human rights any more and hence also
not those of his neighbor. The notion of cruelty – something that must never happen in the
universe – has slipped from public consciousness.

Science? Yoo hoo… science? I can has equation?

But it is the young child – the toddler –
who invents benevolence out of nothing because no one in the cosmos is wiser or greater.
Possessing benevolence and being a person are one and the same thing.

That’s it, I’m out of here. It’ll take weeks to get the smell of patchouli off my hard drive. Sorry I haven’t been attacking the science yet instead of the self-admitted inadequacies of the paper’s author. I promise if I find any science I’ll attack that instead. Let’s see what’s next up on deck.

On the potential catastrophic risk from metastable quantum-black holes produced at particle colliders. This one at least sounds like a science paper, and the main site is curiously free of stock tips. We may finally see an actual equation!

A plausible scenario in which
these black holes accrete ambient matter at the Eddington limit shortly after their
production, thereby emitting Hawking radiation that would be harmful to Earth
and/or CERN and its surroundings, is described.

Though again the issue of scale is not addressed (though to be fair, this was taken from the abstract). And if they are emitting Hawking radiation, then that means they are evaporating. And again, when the source is small enough to make an electron look literally more immense then our minds can easily grasp…

I try to assume reasonably
mild worst case assumptions, similar to the strategy of G & M3 . However, I
strived to introduce no “ad hoc” or finely tuned assumption, that would deem
highly implausible to specialists in the field.

Hmm…

It is easy to verify that the five-dimensional
Eddington limit (eq.(B.25) of G & M)
dM/dt =2.44 × 8mpRBc^2s/…

(That last term is the important one, and it’s supposed to be cs squared) I snipped here because honestly I’m just flat too lazy to find the stuff to add the Greek characters and formatting properly. The upshot is that this is basically the “doom counter” equation, and it appears in full on page six. If my rusty math is worth a damn, the steps to get here are valid. There is, however, a twist to look at.

Here mp is the mass of the
proton, RB the Bondi radius (4.1 mm for our parameters), cs the velocity of
sound in the interior of Earth (5200 m/sec)

Right. Small problem here, Doc. The micro-black holes (Mbh in the paper) that everyone is so worried about would be produced in as near to a vacuum as we can manage. If the test wasn’t in a vacuum, the proton stream would bounce hither and yon off all those nice fat nitrogen molecule nuclei floating around in the racetrack. That changes cs to effectively 0, and even if the test was being done in the open air, cs should be 343m/s. I was really hoping we’d wind up with a zero in the denominator, but one in the numerator is just as handy for turning the whole “amount of doom produced” to nil. This is a finely tuned assumption, that would I deem highly implausible, even though I’m not a specialist in the field.

The rest of that paper is mostly just how badly that flawed equation will kill the hell out of us.

The next paper comes from a local boy, Dr. Adam Helfer, Do Black Holes Radiate? At 80 pages long, I’m afraid that for this being a hobby, that’s a tad more than I’m willing to wade through at the moment. And I’ll admit good chunks of it are over my head. When you combine that with the fact that this post is already over 1600 words, I think I can do an end run around running through the rest of the citations, even skipping the one from LHCConcerns.com because those assholes still owe me money.

Let’s go back to a line from that moral/spiritual/funny-smoke paper.

The experiment
in question is called the LHC (“Large Hadron Collider“) and is the most expensive and
prestigious non-military scientific endeavor ever.

Bingo. Follow the money. Ringing in at over six billion dollars (and with undoubtedly more to come) this is not a project that anyone will just cover with discretionary funds. Some PhD had to take his life’s work and dumb it down far enough that your average French bureaucrat could understand it. And then on top of that, he had to prove to this same entrenched deny-monkey that it wouldn’t just blow up everything nearby. And this proof had to go through more vetting and explanation than your story when Suzie Jenkins turned up pregnant after you took her to the prom. As little respect as I have for the political machinations that often restrain and chain science, it is not in anybody’s best interests to let the guys with the lab coats blow up a crapload of your citizens (even if most of us wouldn’t miss the French people), and to get funding for science projects, the levels of “We’re sure about this” required are truly astounding.

So chalk this one up whichever way makes you feel more comfortable. Either the scientists who have been studying this field so exclusively for so many years that they probably can’t remember their home phone numbers know what they’re doing and weren’t going to blow us up in the first place, or the wondrous French and Swiss governments are on the ball with this one and have put the leash to those maverick test-tube twirlers and will give a sharp yank if they smell something that might hurt their approval ratings. Whatever gets you through the night. Besides, we spent six billion dollars on it, what are we going to not turn it on?

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