LHC Safety and the Law

Discussion in 'Physics & Math' started by rpenner, Sep 23, 2008.

  1. Green Destiny Banned Banned

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    It's quite simple and obvious why threads like this had certain members popping in for a dig at Walter. It's easy to say you did this in the hope of an intelligent discussion, but for some reason following Pauls thread, I doubt that wholeheartedly.

    No not you. Walter.

    So you believe something good is coming out of this? Forgive me, but it seems like this thread is no more illuminating than reading some of those lawsuits. And why does Walter not communicate as much in this thread... seems very one-sided half the time.

    Listen, I assume you are an adult? And I also assume you very intelligent - so answer me how someone intelligent like you can rightfully hold Walter to blame for a suicide?

    There are many questions, and usually looking for someone to blame is easy, but what about mental health problems resulting in an already unstable girl to take her life? In fact, the person to blame for the girls death, is the girl. No amount of passing the buck will ever make anyones statements on the facts of the girls death as being subsequently Walters fault.

    It's just ridiculous, and sad anyone is still mentioning that - and in your case, just to strengthen a post.

    Oh, you're good.
     
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  3. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    I always blame demagoguery for the actions of unthinking and misinformed people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demagogy
    I blame clergy for the witch trials (still going on today). http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/SALEM.HTM http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26422359/ http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_petraitis/witch_killers.shtml
    I blame Hitler and Goebbels for the Holocaust.
    I blame Joseph McCarthy for blotting out rationality in the American political mindset and ruining thousands of lives. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
    I blame Fox News for the persecution of brown people near Ground Zero. http://mediamatters.org/research/201008230041
    I blame the 2006-2008 meritless, fact-free anti-LHC PR campaign and the media for the alleged 2008 suicide. http://www.amateurscientist.org/2008/09/lhc-suicide.html

    It is ironic that you would defend Wagner of the unanticipated consequences of his PR campaign, when demagoguery has a long sordid history of inflaming just these sorts of negative results, and while Wagner himself advocates a legal theory of risk that all conceivable negative outcomes must be tallied even if there is no such history or no such calculus of probabilities and damages.
     
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  5. Green Destiny Banned Banned

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    So, you state he played on the emotions of the young girl?

    That is just a more loose way of saying he was responsible for her death.
     
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  7. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    Not over yet?

    In a telephone message or conversation with Alan Boyle of MSNBC's Cosmic Log, Walter Wagner appears to claim that he will file another appeal to the Full Ninth Circuit.

    District Court: 1 judge
    Circuit Appeal: 3 judge panel
    En Banc Circuit Rehearing: Usually the whole circuit en banc, but the Ninth Circuit is large and local rule 35-3 provides for a panel of just 11 judges.

    But the hurdles are high, and a majority of the judges on the Circuit have to agree with Wagner (and Sancho?) that the issues raised are of judicial merit or are important. Since Wagner has no scientific case, this will be to the judges another question of legal points, not physics.

    So now we are on an up-to-45 day (Rule 40) wait for Wagner to file, and up to 21-day wait to see if even one judge thinks this case raises an important issue. Alternately the orignal panel of 3 judges could rehear the appeal themselves, preempting the vote of all circuit judges.

    News and Blog Coverage:

    Aug 26:
    *** http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2010/08/26/lhc-lawsuit-dismissed-by-us-court/ ( 5 commenters, 9 comments, rpenner, slow moderation)
    http://www.theatlantic.com/science/...tried-to-stop-the-lhc-loses-court-case/62138/ (3 comments, Luis Sancho)
    http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/08/honolulu-lawsuit-lhc-beats-wagner.html (Luboš Motl, 4 comments, rpenner)

    Aug 27:
    *** http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2010/08/lawsuit-against-particle-colli.html (Kate McAlpine!, 5 comments)
    *** http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/27/wagner_appeal_fail/ (Lewis Page, 28 comments, Luis Sancho, rpenner)
    http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d...over-lhcs-potential-destruction-of-the-earth/ (Joseph Calamia, 22 comments, James Tankersley, Otto Roessler)
    http://pascophronesis.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/suit-to-stop-the-lhc-tossed-out-of-court-again/ (David Bruggeman)
    http://www.hotchicksdigsmartmen.com/2010/08/suck-it-wagner.html (5 comments)

    Aug 28:
    http://news.softpedia.com/news/Lawsuit-Against-the-LHC-Overthrown-154098.shtml (4 comments, Luis Sancho)
    http://physics4thecool.blogspot.com/2010/08/more-posts-on-particle-physics-and.html (short)
    http://www.cerntruth.com/?p=130 (Luis Sancho)

    Aug 29:
    http://topnews.co.uk/211869-hawaii-court-dismisses-lawsuit-against-lhc

    Aug 30:
    http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com...t/2010/08/lawsuit-against-lhc-dropped-on.html (Victoria Jaggard)
    http://www.cryogenicsociety.org/us_court_dismisses_lhc_lawsuit/
    http://hardocp.com/news/2010/08/30/lhc_wins_lawsuit_okay_to_blow_us_up/ (short, 48 comments)
    http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblo...f-earth-courts-dismiss-mad-scientistcase.html (Luke McKinney/Casey Kazan, 6 comments)
    http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/b...ews-alert-lhc-lawsuit-collides-with-pavement/ (Phil Plait, 52 comments)

    Aug 31:
    http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/103153-End-of-the-World-LHC-Lawsuit-Tossed-Out (Andy Chalk, 53 comments)
    *** http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/08/31/5014771-collider-court-case-finally-closed (Alan Boyle, 42 comments, update from Walter Wagner)
    http://www.maximumpc.com/article/ne...has_legal_go-ahead_destroy_earth_accidentally (Paul Lilly, 23 comments)

    Sep 1:
    http://technology.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978487361 (Kay Moeller)
    http://www.thedailymaverick.co.za/a...on-collider-shakes-off-latest-court-challenge
    http://www.onenewspage.com/news/Technology/20100901/14592831/Collider-court-case-finally-closed.htm (very short)
    http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2010/09/doomsday-crying-man-tries-suing-the-large-hadron-collider/ (Kat Hannaford)

    Sep 2:
    ** http://blogs.acu.edu/physics/2010/09/02/the-edge-of-science-part-1-the-system-works/ (Michael Daugherity)
     
    Last edited: Sep 3, 2010
  8. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    At what stage does Wagner get labelled a vexatious litigant?
     
  9. Parmenides Registered Senior Member

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    To be honest I would be surprised if the courts did not throw this case out at the first hearing because it is a waste of the court's time and of public money.
     
  10. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    I'm not 100% sure, but I think at each stage it has been tossed out at the first hearing.
    Filed March 2008, Dismissed September 2008. Dismissal affirmed August 2010.
    Because this case does not involve one of the categories of cases to be expedited, the appeal got the lowest priority and the court took almost a year between the filing of the last brief in June 18, 2009 and the scheduled hearing in Hawaii on June 17, 2010.

    // Update:

    Aug 27
    http://homelandsecuritynewswire.com/end-world-anti-hadron-collider-case-thrown-out-appeal
    Aug 30
    http://tecnoscience.squarespace.com...e-a-black-hole-that-destroys-earth-court.html (Sérgio Sacani Sancevero)
    Aug 31
    http://www.lawbriefupdate.com/2010/...e-to-draft-an-environmental-impact-statement/
    Sep 1
    http://physicsandphysicists.blogspot.com/2010/09/silly-lhc-court-case-thrown-out.html (ZapperZ, 1 comment)
    Sep 2
    Nature Vol 467, Page 10 (short) http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100901/full/467010a.html
    Sep 3
    http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=59754

    One of the most quote-mined sentences is "... destruction of the earth, is in no way attributable to the U.S. government’s failure to draft an environmental impact statement." But the context makes it clear that even if the allegations are true, the fault lies not with US Government paperwork, or the routing of finances, but the operation of the LHC.

    But I have often said the anti-LHC forces aren't capable of parsing whole paragraphs at a time.
     
    Last edited: Sep 5, 2010
  11. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    The time to do that was probably back in 2008, but no cross-claim was filed by the US DOE, etc under 28 U.S.C. § 1651(a) (which provides "all courts established by Act of Congress may issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law") to restrict Wagner's ability to impose burdens on other parties without demonstrating merits.

    Complicating things, is that Wagner moves around a lot more than contemplated when the federal district court system was set up and his history of litigation is scattered and takes time to compile.

    Also, neither Hawaii's nor Utah's federal courts have a clear-cut local rule for identifying and restricting vexatious litigants. (A search of case law might turn up something, but I don't have a relevant tool to do so.) It also might be technically challenging to demonstrate that Wagner's two anti-RHIC cases and this anti-LHC are part of the same pattern, since the actual intended defendant is the fictitious version of collider physics which resides in Wagner's head.

    http://www.dailyjournal.com/cle.cfm?show=CLEDisplayArticle&qVersionID=290&eid=903322&evid=1

    (The Ninth Circuit includes Hawaii and California, but Utah is in the tenth circuit and has a different history of case law.)

    http://www.uscourts.gov/court_locator.aspx

    Finally, while Wagner's and Sancho's 2008 filings verge upon the crazypants variety (One exhibit was Wagner's red-penned copy of a filing by Nobel laureates) most of the applicable sanctions are geared at lawyers, not the litigants.
     
  12. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Is Paul's latest post coherent? - It is an impressive display of his extensive reading of complex theory, far beyond my ability to know if he has any point or even understands what he has read.

    Perhaps some one reading here will look at:
    http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2614863&postcount=1899
    and comment.
     
  13. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    It's just stolen from sections 5 and 6 of this: http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0107091v1

    No attempt was made to fix the cut-and-paste from the PDF. Nor was an attempt made to discuss it. So the post is incoherent even where the source material was fine.
     
  14. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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  15. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    As we count down to October 8 (45 days from the August 24th ruling) for the appearance of Wagner's (and Sancho's ?) petition for rehearing of the appeal which affirmed the September 26, 2008 dismissal of the Sancho and Wagner case, I thought I would make a report on where we are. Almost certainly Luis Sancho, a stranger to our lands, is left confused by the 2008 and 2010 rulings, and that is part of the reason he lashes out in his blog.

    For legal reference, you might see wikipedia: Federal Rules of Civil Procedure which outlines the procedures followed in the case filed on March 21, 2008.

    // New: RECAP and the Internet Archive have a site for free copies of the 2008 case documents to accumulate in. The HTML is the partial Docket Sheet.

    Is this complaint antiscientific and Luddite?
    * Yes, because all of the anti-LHC arguments are based on speculation on what bad things might happen without the slightest basis in fact for those bad things being possible in this physical universe. The "dangerous black hole woo" and "dangerous strangelet woo" are every bit as baseless as Deepak Chopra's "quantum woo" or homeopathy's repackaging of "sympathetic magic woo." Moreover, we have seen time and time again the plaintiffs misrepresent their credentials and misrepresent the current state of knowledge. Finally, their pseudoscientific attempts at mastering risk analysis fail when they fail to use numbers and inconsistently ignore equally baseless imagined positive outcomes of the LHC experimentation.

    Is the US Constitution antiscientific and Luddite?
    * Not on the face of it. Indeed, Article I, Section 8 provides in part: "The Congress shall have power to … promote the progress of science and useful arts …"
    * And any reasonable read of Amendment V, which provides in part "No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" means that if you want to deprive CERN of the use of their equipment, you need to build a positive case that the collider itself is illegal. But instead the plaintiffs went a different route.
    * Finally, by Article III, Section 2, US Courts are courts of limited jurisdiction, and it is vital that Plaintiffs carefully build a case for the relief they seek and not just try to bluster and boss people around.

    Did Plaintiffs establish Subject-matter jurisdiction of the Federal Courts over the complaint?
    * Only if they raised a Federal Question.

    Did Plaintiffs raise a Federal Question?
    * Almost, in that they alleged bureaucratic steps required by 42 U.S.C. §§ 4321-4347 (NEPA) were not taken by the US Government.
    ** But, not only is NEPA long and complicated, the bureaucratic regulations 40 C.F.R §§ 1502.1 - 1502.25 are also long and complicated, so it is not trivially obvious to an outsider what is required in every case. Note that § 1502.3 indicates that most of the key phrases of the regulation that indicates when an E.I.S. is required are terms of art defined in 40 C.F.R §§ 1508.1 - 1508.28. Particularly relevant is a definition of Major Federal action as something "potentially subject to Federal control and responsibility" § 1508.18 where the issue of who owns the LHC is a factor.
    ** Further, US statues and regulations are to be interpreted in the light of their history of case law, and where the Supreme Court has not spoken, such case law varies from Federal Court District to District. In the 9th circuit, the Federal defendants gave many examples of projects which were 90% or more funded by non-Federal funds being declared not to be Major Federal actions in light of NEPA and relevant regulations.
    * No, in that they waved European policy documents without standing in US Court, and were shot down for it in 2008.
    * No, in that they made noises in their appellate hearing about the unspecific provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act and 18 U.S.C § 831, but the Due Process clause of Amendment V would seem to require them have briefed that law formally back in March 2008.

    Did Plaintiffs establish Personal jurisdiction of the Federal Courts over the correct party?
    * No, if the relief they sought was to prevent operation of the LHC.
    ** Federal Defendants offered evidence that the construction, operation, and management of the LHC is the sole responsibility of CERN, an intergovernmental European agency headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. The United States was not given any role in making financial, policy, or management decisions within CERN, or given any authority or decision-making power with regard to the construction or operation of the LHC.
    ** Plaintiffs have not provided the Court with any substantive written evidence in support of their position.
    ** Thus the LHC is obviously under the complete control of CERN.
    ** And, as $531 million was spent by the US on LHC construction, it is not clear how, barring the invention of a time machine, how CERN is supposed to unbuild the LHC and unspend the money, as Plaintiffs repeatedly demand.
    ** Further, as it is not CERN's responsibility to fill out E.I.S.s under NEPA, it is hard to see where the justice is in depriving CERN of the use of it's property for a failure of another party.

    Did Plaintiffs establish standing to sue under Article III?
    * No, they did not demonstrate an actual injury.
    * No, they did not demonstrate a foreseeable actual injury, although they speak of "conceivable" injuries, just as fairies and witches are "conceivable."
    * No, they did not speak of a threatened injury, since no one who works at CERN thinks their LHC will be dangerous to humanity. Also, no one who works at CERN exhibits knowledge of a detailed mechanism by which a hypothetical CERN-created object, allowed by physical observation of the universe, could be dangerous.
    * No, since without a fact-supported chain of reasoning even Plaintiffs' imagined hypothetical future injury could not be fairly traced to any action of CERN, including operation of the LHC.
    * No, since instead of suing CERN for attempted injury (see below), they sued the US Government for not filing paperwork, and filing that paperwork would not seem to impede CERN from their actions.

    Is Hawaii's Federal court the proper venue?
    * It isn't today since neither Wagner nor Sancho lives there, but
    * It might have been in 2008, if you believe Sancho is a resident of Hawaii, and
    * It's pretty much undisputed that up until recently Wagner was a resident of Hawaii.

    Was CERN properly served notice of the complaint?
    * Signs point to no.
    ** The Hague Convention is a signed and ratified treaty (and therefore binding US Law) which governs the notification process required when suing foreign entities.
    ** On August 14, 2008, a letter was received from Alexander Wittwer, the Charge d’Affaires at the Embassy of Switzerland in the United States of America, disputing jurisdiction based on the method of delivery of Plaintiffs’ Complaint.
    ** The Appellate Court unanimously held that CERN was not properly served.

    Does NEPA apply when at least 90% of a project is funded from non-US Government sources?
    * Probably not, at least in the Ninth District. Issues of ownership and control may yet remain.

    Can Plaintiffs bring the same lawsuit in a different district.
    * Nope. Wagner tried this once before with RHIC.

    Does NEPA have a expired statute of limitations?
    * Almost certainly, since the allegedly required paperwork would have had to been filed when funding was being planned back in 1996 or 1997, over ten years before the LHC was completed or the case was filed. 28 U.S.C. § 2401 (a) almost certainly murders this case by 2003.

    But, wait, James Tankersley says Wagner's the smartest guy he knows!
    * The evidence given for this is a CBEST Math test, which tests only rudiments of estimation, reasoning and calculation at the level of a bright 12-year-old. So as far as math credentials go: CBEST < GED < PSAT MATH < SAT MATH < Bachelors in Engineering < Bachelors in Physics < Bachelors in Math < Graduate Degrees in Physics and Math
    ** The implication about the other people Tankersley chooses to associate with is damning.

    So, neither the law, nor the mathematics of risk management, nor the observed physics of the universe, nor the very flow of time are on Plaintiff's side. Indeed, based on facts, the appellate court had no choice but to unanimously side with the Government's brief. But what if, instead of trying the case in law, that they tried theoretical physics?

    Well, theoretical physics is applied mathematics. You model a piece of the hypothetical world with axioms and givens, and you work out the consequences, and then ask the observations people if such consequences are consistent with what was observed. Some time has passed, so I think I need to update my posts of
    * Bugaboos September 23, 2008
    * Bugaboos September 30, 2008
    * Bugaboos, January 29, 2009
    * Demonstrating Wagner could not parse a scientific paper he presents as supporting his case, November 15, 2009
    * Correcting the reading of Choptuik and Pretorius, February 5, 2010
    * More papers misread by Wagner, March 26, 2010
    * More papers misread by Wagner, March 30, 2010
    Perhaps an interested reader will see something I missed.

    But wait! Otto Rössler says something different!
    * Making claims is easy, getting your math in a journal is hard.
    * No one has seen Rössler's "50 month" calculation. It is, in Silicon Valley speak, "vaporware"

    But wait! Rainer Plaga says something different!
    * Making claims is easy, getting your physics in Phys. Rev. D is hard.
    * Plaga is working is a field with experts, and those experts make forceful arguments against his view. Plaga relies on their expertise to make his points and then makes mewling noises when he is corrected.
    * Plaga is treating his pre-print like a blog http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.1415
    * Steven B. Giddings, Michelangelo L. Mangano, "Comments on claimed risk from metastable black holes" (preprint response to v1)
    * Roberto Casadio, Piero Nicolini "The decay-time of non-commutative micro-black holes" Journal of High Energy Physics, 2008 JHEP11 (2008)
    * Roberto Casadio, Sergio Fabi, Benjamin Harms "Possibility of Catastrophic Black Hole Growth in the Warped Brane-World Scenario at the LHC" Phys. Rev. D 80, 084036 (2009)
    * Roberto Casadio, Sergio Fabi, Benjamin Harms, Octavian Micu "Theoretical survey of tidal-charged black holes at the LHC" Journal of High Energy Physics, 2010: 2, 1-23 (2010)
    * Roberto Casadio, Benjamin Harms, Octavian Micu "Affect of brane thickness on microscopic tidal-charged black holes" (preprint)

    Kirk to Khan, revised: "You've managed to [assert you are better at physics and law than] just about everyone else, but like a bad marksman you keep missing the target!"
     
    Last edited: Sep 9, 2010
  16. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    Where is Luis Sancho, Part III
    September 16, 2010. The appellate court once again takes note of Luis Sancho moving without leaving a forwarding address. Perhaps Wagner is now stuck with the whole US xerography bill.
     
  17. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    If so then that proves the LHC was dangerous (to Wagner)
     
  18. domesticated om Stickler for details Valued Senior Member

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    LOL @ the fact that the project is still running and pumping out data..... and in the meantime, off in some courtroom somewhere is this guy.

    Speaking of which, I wonder if its possible to get the raw data whenever they run experiments........ or are we only limited to stuff they decide to release during press conferences?
    I think it would be fun to watch people (like SciForumers and amateurs) debate over the "brand spanking new stuff" before its legitimately figured out .

    Of course, this is assuming the "raw" data was in a meaningful format, and not a bunch of proprietary in-lab material that only the people directly involved in the project could work with.
     
  19. Green Destiny Banned Banned

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    Totally off-topic, but I thought this a strange coincidence. I had a look to see if there was a wiki page on Walter Wagner. Two Walter Wagners showed up - one a footballer, the other was this man:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Wagner_(notary)

    ironic I thought, considering this man was also a lawyer ;p

    By no means Walter, am I calling you a Nazi

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  20. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    You confuse the BBS Software less if you write:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Wagner_(notary)

    Walter L. Wagner graduated from an unaccrediated law school and told Judge Helen Gillmor in September of 2008 that he was not a member of the bar anywhere.

    http://www.lhcdefense.org/pdf/080136 9-2-08.pdf

    Judge Richard R. Clifton in June 2010 addressed Wagner at 04:27 into the hearing "I understand that you don't practice law, but you went to law school."

    So the term "lawyer" I object to, since it brings to mind an attorney who is licensed to practice law.
     
  21. Green Destiny Banned Banned

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    Objection sustained.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  22. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    I Just checked the docket, and nothing has been filed yet. Since Wagner files paper documents via email and not electronically, there may be an additional week of uncertainty as the paper winds its way through the clerk's office.
     
  23. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    Received on Thursday, and held up over the long weekend (Monday was a U.S. Federal holiday), the somewhat deficient document (no service date, no case number, Walter signed Luis Sancho's name) has appeared of the appeal court's PACER website.

    There is no evidence that the questions on which the case was thrown out are deep legal waters or that the court is divided on the definition of "Major Federal Action" in NEPA, or that CERN is in a Foreign Land. Nor is it divided on the point that hypothetical bugaboos do not give rise to an injury in fact. "At most, Wagner has alleged that experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (the “Collider”) have “potential adverse consequences.” Speculative fear of future harm does not constitute an injury in fact sufficient to confer standing." http://sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2609237&postcount=295

    (For "appeal", read Hawaiian District Court dismissal.)

    • DOE and NSF are part of this case. CERN is not. Service to CERN under the Hague Convention was insufficient even if CERN was a 10-year-old Swiss child sitting on his front porch.
    • CERN is the "European Organization for Nuclear Research" and was formerly the "European Council for Nuclear Research" not whatever name Wagner chooses to make up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN
    • Operation of the LHC is not quite the same thing as operation of the ATLAS, CMS, and other detectors. Funding the US scientists who look at data from the detectors is entirely different from directing the operation of the LHC.
    • The LHC is designed to collide nuclei, not atoms. "Atom smasher" is a dated popular term back when electrons and nucleons were mysterious, but the events of 1945 and years since have ensured that the atomic hypothesis of Democritus has been largely replaced in the popular mind by general awareness of the importance of particular isotopes and of spontaneous and directed transmutation.
    • Cosmic ray data indicate that in Nature, center-of-mass energies collision do exceed that of the proton-proton collisions of the LHC, and hypothetical energies achieved by heavy nuclei.
    • Wagner misstates by omission the many goals of LHC research and shifts the emphasis peculiarly.
    • Strangelets are not a synonym for strange matter. Hyperons are strange matter, but not strangelets. Many experiments exist where hyperons are introduced to nuclei, but these so-called hypernuclei are not generally referred to as strangelets. Quark-gluon plasma has a large strange and anti-strange quark component, and this is not referred to as strangelets.
    • With regard to construction costs, the summary of costs (exclusive of labor) was about $5.84 billion. Obviously if you include labor costs, which is not done in Swiss accounting, you can find a figure north of $8 billion. But the September 2008 ruling lists only $0.531 billion from the DOE and NSF. That's not 9.9% but more like a hair less than 9.1% of just the Swiss-tabulated construction costs so "less than 10%" would be far more accurate than "about 10%." http://sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2029021&postcount=35
    • By claiming (without basis on the record) that strangelets once existed naturally and now (equally naturally) do not, Wagner implies strangelets are not the stable ground state of Baryonic matter. This tends to refute the claim that such items could be dangerous.
    Conclusion: Wagner's pants are on fire.

    • Scientists are people who do science. Sancho and Wagner do nothing of the kind and have never supported with claims with evidence. Notably, they have no CVs on record. Sancho and Wagner are people who prefer to pontificate, require some claim to authority to do so effectively, and are merely soi-disant scientists.
    • After the previous paragraph, it seems a little late to complain about the claimed duplicity of others, especially when your evidence of such is obtained by contextomy. The unknown paper sampled in exhibit B from which the quote is taken is nearly completely blacked out by Wagner and is no true copy. Indeed, it tries to equate unspecified "exotic phenomena" with strangelets -- which is a forced and peculiar reading.
    • It is untrue that cosmic ray collisions occur only in Earth's upper atmosphere. To the best of human knowledge, they happen everywhere in astronomical numbers, but at an inconvenient density in space-time. Wagner has not shown that "exotic phenomena" doesn't merely mean "rare events which do occur Naturally in astronomical numbers but not at a density whereby construction of a cosmic-ray-based experiment would be economically feasible to return results in a funded period."
    • It is definitely late to claim that Plaintiffs filed suit in March 2008 because they had then a cognizant problem with Exhibit B.
    • Wagner does not talk about the strange quark component of the parton distribution functions of ordinary protons and neutrons, and why these nucleons are not also considered "strange matter." Nor does he discuss the concept of "net strangeness," having gone the route of using scare quotes around unfamiliar and undefined terms of art.
    Taking a break for now. I will respect the order of posts as I type up further sections of this travesty. (End note 11 trails off without completing the thought.)

    //Edit: Added 10:56 PM

    • In Exhibit D to Declaration of Stanley F. Miller filed as part of Federal Defendants' Response in Opposition to Motion for a Default Judgment and Permanent Injunction Against CERN (Docket 73) we have an expert translation of a letter written by process server Mr. Breitenmoser where he advised Mr. Wagner that the action was illegal.
      Mr. Breitenmoser sent a copy to the Swiss mission, and through the Swiss embassy to the US, we got a letter (docket 39 or 58). In addition, the served papers being in untranslated English, the service was not legal even if CERN was in Mr. Breitenmoser's jurisdiction.
    • The requirement to follow the Hague Convention and Swiss law and to serve papers in the language of the local Canton is agreed to by the US Government. And as a service of the US Government may have been cheaper that the $500 paid by Wagner: http://bern.usembassy.gov/hague_convention.html
    • The requirement go through diplomatic channels is established in the 1955 Headquarters Agreement which is part of Swiss law. http://www.admin.ch/ch/f/rs/i1/0.192.122.42.fr.pdf http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/22996/files/CM-P00074866-e.pdf
    • FRCP 4(f)(1) applies. http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/Rule4.htm
    • On the basis of the court record, and without further oral brief, Judge Pregerson said of CERN: "They weren't properly served." http://sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2571435&postcount=283 And that was the unanimous decision of the panel: "CERN has never been properly served, and is not a party to this case. Even if this court were to render a decision in Wagner’s favor, such a decision would have no impact on CERN or Collider operations, and would not afford Wagner the relief he seeks." http://sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2609237&postcount=295
    • Wagner cites no facts, statues or case law to support the claim that the service was proper or that by-hand delivery in an alien language is the best possible service. On what basis, then, does he want the Court to rule the service as proper?

    // Added 5:07 PM the next day.

    • Yes, the roman numeral II is reused in this section. Yes, there are three types of quotes. Yes, the same footnote number (2) is referred to twice in the same paragraph but only makes sense once. Yes, it looks like Luis Sancho contributed large parts of this section. Yes, there are no docket numbers for those articles. Yes, that footnote is far too long. Yes, once again the non-experts are trying to present unsworn opinion testimony.
    • Actually the August 2010 ruling said that Wagner and Sancho must show "“a causal connection between the injury and the conduct complained of” that is not attributable to “the independent action of some third party not before the court,”" where the quotes came from the Supreme Court case Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555 where they quoted the 1976 opinion of the Supreme Court in Simon v. Eastern Ky. Welfare Rights Organization, 426 U. S. 26, 41-42 (1976). which has its roots in earlier decisions and Article III "case or controversy" doctrine. As a reminder, the sole complaint to survive to the dismissal, is the lack of NEPA paperwork by the US Government for funding something that the US Government contents is not a "Major Federal Action" as meant in NEPA case law and injury asserted is a conspiracy between the operators of the LHC (still CERN, not the US Government) and highly speculative physics from non-experts who quote mine scientific sources like creationists. That's not a causal connection. You can't sue Glenn Beck for saying stupid things that insane people act on, and you can't sue the US Government for not filling out paperwork for alleged harms arising from someone who is not the US Government.
    • Speaking of stupid things, Sancho's and Wagner's fears do not constitute "Injury in Fact." The Court wrote in August 2010: "Injury in fact requires some “credible threat of harm.” Cent. Delta Water Agency v. United States, 306 F.3d 938, 950 (9th Cir. 2002). At most, Wagner has alleged that experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (the “Collider”) have “potential adverse consequences.” Speculative fear of future harm does not constitute an injury in fact sufficient to confer standing. Mayfield, 599 F.3d at 970." The case law is about actual calculations of risk, not opinion testimony from non-experts. Even if CERN was part of this case, Plaintiffs have never offered evidence that there is a non-zero probability calculation of risk. It's not possible when plaintiffs (mere soi-disant scientists) assert science is helpless to determine if the danger is real or not without dooming us all. Peer reviewed papers say otherwise.
    • 'standard science' doesn't have a definition, and the only source seems to be the ravings of Luis Sancho.
    • Not being able to distinguish between strangelets, strange matter, and quark-gluon plasma is why the high energy physics of the authors is immediately discounted by experience readers. There is no discussion on how strange quarks and hyperons (fermions) are subject to the Bose-Einstein statistics nor how this results in an explosive liquid. Why is 'standard science' qualified with 'strangelet' in the next usage? Must be a non-compatible 'standard.'
    • "Dr. Rujula's" paper excerpt does not appear to be underlined for emphasis. There is no basis established for a Dr. Rujula being at CERN. The actual authors are: Arnon Dar, A. De Rújula, and Ulrich Heinz http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9910471 and were at CERN during the writing of this paper, over 10 years ago. Plaintiffs lack foundation to quote mine the questions asked in the paper and ignore the answers. Under Wagner's own methodology, the "may" and "if" turn the quoted excerpt into sheer speculation.
    • Further demonstration of the plaintiff's inability to read the paper is in the scrambled scientific notation cut and pasted without corrections. The lack of effort that went into assembling this section amounts to contempt of court.
    • Also, the radius of the 'rock' is sourced at 100 m but argued without source at 7500 m.
    • Further demonstration of the plaintiff's inability to read even arXiv's website is that the Peng, Wen and Chen paper did appear in peer-reviewed literature in 2006. http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0512112 Figure 4 indicates that it is a matter of speculation what the parameters of the universe are (even if the MIT Bag model is reliable in this domain) and that this paper does not constitute evidence for stable strangelets.
    • Earlier paragraphs already dismissed the possibility of stable strangelets
    • Neither the Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek nor Kurt Vonnegut is credited properly for the "ice-9" quote, which is another speculative scenario not shown to be physical.
    • Einstein didn't believe in black holes. How shall we interpret that in light of Luis Sanchovian pontifications about 'standard science' ?
    • There is no calculation that shows it takes mere "years" for 'standard science' black holes of even 14 TeV mass to consume the Earth. If 'standard science' means pop science application of GR Schwarzschild black holes and neglecting quantum mechanics and intrinsic angular momentum, then such items can't be formed at the LHC and even if you assume millions of them formed, can't eat the Earth in billions of years.
    • Since the scenario is predicated on upgrading the LHC to higher energies, the present case does not apply, since all $531 million in construction funds were already spent.

    // Added 12:37 am on yet another day.

    • This paragraph also feels Sanchovian to me, since much of it is cobbled together (but with additional errors) from paragraph 19 and others of the March 2008 Luis Sancho affidavit.
    • Contrasting to "standard science is not speculative" we may turn to an actual scientist, Albert Einstein (1879-1955, winner of the 1921 Nobel Physics Prize "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect" and not specifically the Special Theory of Relativity or the General Theory of Relativity and certainly not for predicting or describing properties of black hole or of quarks, or strange quarks, or hyperons, or strange matter, or strangelets) who wrote a warning to those who resist paradigm shifts in science:
      Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (1954, 1962 edition) pp. 349-350. So Sancho has misunderstood and misquoted Einstein from the beginning of this case.
    • Contrasting to "standard science is not ... probabilistic" we have the entire fields of statistics, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, etc.
    • Famously Einstein was of the opinion that black holes were not real.
    • Less famously, Einstein was completely ignorant of quarks for good reasons.
    • James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879, unified electromagnetism in one set of equations) is no longer top-drawer science since in 1905, Einstein observed that photons are quantized and thus light and electricity don't behave precisely like Maxwell thought. Instead, current experimentation strongly supports the probabilistic theory of Quantum Electrodynamics which describes the behavior of electrons and light for many phenomena where Maxwell fails, including the discovery of photon anti-bunching. The 1965 Nobel prize was awarded to Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, and Richard P. Feynman "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles." If "standard science" is to have a meaning outside of Plaintiffs' baseless assertions, Maxwell's electromagnetism has been replaced by Quantum Electrodynamics.
    • Murray Gell-Mann (1929-, winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions") was instrumental in developing the concepts of strangeness in the 1950's and the quark model (along with Kazuhiko Nishijima, Yuval Ne'eman and George Zweig) in the 1960's after Einstein had died. While he formulated the pithy Totalitarian Principle "Everything not forbidden is compulsory," this is generally seen as a restatement of the path-integral formalism in quantum mechanics and most importantly, not everything that is "compulsory" has measurably non-zero probability.

    • It's inconsistent to claim CERN is using "speculative" science to compare astrophysical observations with the predictions of highly speculative models that include dangerous collider by-products. All the disaster scenarios are outright speculative hypothesis dependent on finely tuned behaviors just outside the obvious reach of empiricism. Only clever applications of empiricism can touch such flights of fancy. Indeed, if Plaintiffs want to freeze scientific knowledge circa 1920 in his abolishment of what he considers "speculative", then neither aggregations of strange quarks (identified in the 1960s) nor dangerous micro black holes pose a problem (predicated on the assumption of extra dimensions and finely tuned model parameters).
    • While Hawking evaporation has never been observed (due largely in part to the complete absence of observations of tiny black holes massing less than one billion tons), it is a mathematical theorem based on the math of Quantum Electrodynamics and Einstein's 1916 math of curved space-time (General Relativity). But the 2008 safety documents speculatively assume that it doesn't exist to demonstrate that collider safety does not depend on it.
    • Plaintiffs' understanding of Hawking's pop-physics books and articles has gotten worse since the 2008 affidavit. Needless to say, Hawking never wrote that Hawking evaporation happens because "black holes travel to the past." And if he wrote about particles traveling into the past, he is using a common pop-physics mental picture of anti-particles and the quantum vacuum.
    • I think the correct references are: S.W. Hawking Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays (1993); and S.W. Hawking
      "The quantum mechanics of black holes" Scientific American, 236 (Jan. 1977) p. 34-40. -- neither one is a peer-reviewed journal of good reputation -- they are pop science articles.
    • Einstein was very likely wrong about there being no black holes, as super massive, extremely black-hole-like objects have been found at the center of nearly every galaxy we looked at, including our own. There are also good candidate for stellar-sized black holes. Einstein was also very likely wrong about the fundamentally quantum nature of the universe, where events happen probabilistically.
    • Since 2008, Sancho has been misquoting Einstein, and cutting off the important parts at the end of the sentence.
    • The Nobel Prize is not the authority which decides what science is "proved" and Einstein's more famous theories (including the theory of general relativity which predicts black holes that Einstein did not personally accept as valid) were not called out as even reasons why he received the award. Sancho has badly misunderstood the sentences he misquotes from Einstein.
    • Einstein did no work on "Quark Fermion condensates" or "strangelets" -- that claim is wholly fictional. Sancho's direction to the Court, if taken literally, is to discard any part of the case that mentions quarks or strangelets, and to discount all theories which say a black hole of less than 14 TeV poses a risk to mankind. Indeed, Einstein's prescription in the correctly quoted paragraph is to consider no pronouncement of what will happen as "certain." Since they have been over their heads for the whole case, Plaintiffs do not recognize that.
    • Plaintiffs are in no position to form a reliable opinion on why Nobel Prizes are awarded to some people and not others, on what CERN knows to be true, on what CERN only hopes to be true, or what CERN's motives are. Their claims are laughable. A case in point: Destroying the Earth cuts off funding to CERN, and by the motives claimed by Plaintiffs they should not want to do that.
    • Plaintiffs time and time again treat every work by persons affiliated with CERN as consensus statements of the organizations plans and beliefs. That's balderdash.
    • Plaintiffs fail to distinguish between many closely related ideas, importantly between any hypernucleus with net strangeness and particular hypothetical models of dangerous strangelets. Since they perform deliberately and through incompetence a contextomy on their quotes and glosses, they are not in a position to convey what the CASTOR experimenters have experimental basis to find or what the terms mean when they use them.
     
    Last edited: Oct 14, 2010

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