LHC Safety and the Law

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

  1. prometheus viva voce! Registered Senior Member

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    To produce black holes at the LHC I think they have to be of order mm.
     
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  3. Seeking Truth Registered Senior Member

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    Indeed the plan for the LHC in 2010/11 is to run @ 7 TeV at the centre of mass, further details about the workshop that took place is available below.

    The email confirmation:

    Last week, the Chamonix workshop once again proved its worth as a place where all the stakeholders in the LHC can come together, take difficult decisions and reach a consensus on important issues for the future of particle physics. The most important decision we reached last week is to run the LHC for 18 to 24 months at a collision energy of 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam). After that, we’ll go into a long shutdown in which we’ll do all the necessary work to allow us to reach the LHC’s design collision energy of 14 TeV for the next run. This means that when beams go back into the LHC later this month, we’ll be entering the longest phase of accelerator operation in CERN’s history, scheduled to take us into summer or autumn 2011.

    What led us to this conclusion? Firstly, the LHC is unlike any previous CERN machine. Because it is a cryogenic facility, each run is accompanied by lengthy cool-down and warm-up phases. For that reason, CERN’s traditional ‘run through summer and shutdown for winter’ operational model had already been brought into question. Furthermore, we’ve known for some time that work is needed to prepare the LHC for running at energies significantly higher than the 7 TeV collision energy we’ve chosen for the first physics run. The latest data show that while we can run the LHC at 7 TeV without risk to the machine, running it at higher energy would require more work in the tunnel. These facts led us to a simple choice: run for a few months now and programme successive short shutdowns to step up in energy, or run for a long time now and schedule a single long shutdown before allowing 14 TeV (7 TeV per beam).

    A long run now is the right decision for the LHC and for the experiments. It gives the machine people the time necessary to prepare carefully for the work that’s needed before allowing 14 TeV. And for the experiments, 18 to 24 months will bring enough data across all the potential discovery areas to firmly establish the LHC as the world’s foremost facility for high-energy particle physics.


    Steve Myers


    The first results *may* be published at ICHEP2010 in france.

    Sorry that i am unable to link the video or other links my post count is still too low.

    P.S

    Sorry to bug you on this prometheus, but other current colliders were also within the range of black hole creation from the same theories that Mr Wagner has gone to court over with the LHC?.
     
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  5. prometheus viva voce! Registered Senior Member

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    Possibly. You'll have to ask Walter why they have a bee in their bonnet about the LHC.
     
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  7. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    Possibly. According to G&M, a single extra-large dimension and no "warping" would have to be ruled out, but a conspiracy of large dimensions could not be ruled out by them.

    Assuming a 1 TeV scale, 2 extra dimensions would require R to be characterized by 0.5 mm, in the absence of warping. (eqn 3.8 of http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.3381 )

    But for just one extra large dimension and no warping, R is 7-8 AU (\(1.17 \times 10^{14} \textrm{cm}\)) which is obviously excluded.

    For people that find this paper indecipherable, here are the calculations for
    1 extra-large dimension: http://www.google.com/search?q=what is (h*c/(2 pi *1 TeV)) ((h*c)/(16 pi^2 *G) / (1 TeV / c^2)^2)
    2 extra-large dimensions: http://www.google.com/search?q=what... ((h*c)/(16 pi^2 *G) / (1 TeV / c^2)^2)^(1/2)
    3 extra-large dimensions: http://www.google.com/search?q=what... ((h*c)/(16 pi^2 *G) / (1 TeV / c^2)^2)^(1/3)
     
  8. Seeking Truth Registered Senior Member

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    thanks for the input guys
     
  9. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    Does anyone have word on what's happening in 3PC08-1-000097 in Hawaii today?
    A trial was scheduled and there was noise about a motion which would delay said trial.
    But neither the document list nor the minutes listy has been updated.
    So is the trial further postponed, or is the trial ongoing with the Wagners, or did the Wagners fail to appear? Maybe check back at close of business for the records to be updated.

    //Edit:
    Of course by March 19, the Federal Appeal will also not have gone to a hearing. In regards to earlier comment about paint drying, I think it's time for a new coat.
     
    Last edited: Feb 17, 2010
  10. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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  11. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    Hardly the first time New Scientist has published or promoted the viewpoint of a dunderhead. And it's the same self-promoting dunderhead, with the same stupid arguments as before.
     
  12. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    Aha -- Late appearing on the docket are two motions to disqualify a Judge, the same judge they wanted to disqualify on January 29-April 2, 2009. The web indicates they were filed on Feb 11, in between the two hearing minutes, but they were slower to appear on the web than the hearing minutes.
     
  13. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    The schedule for April 5-16 has been posted, with no news of Wagner's appeal, last updated on June 29, 2009.

    No idea how 3PC08-1-000097 would have been impacted by today's Chilean Earthquake. (Does a tsunami evacuation toll against Hawaii's "Speedy Trial" law?) But since we have a defendant-requested delay, that doesn't immediately matter. And fortunately, virtually no damage was reported in Hawaii, although bay sediments were certainly stirred vigorously with Hilo bay emptying and filling on about a 20-minute cycle, and the tiny island called Coconut Island going underwater.
     
  14. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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    Coconut Island is about 150 meters by 200 meters in size, relatively flat with a foot-ball sized level grass field in the center, about 2 meters above sea level, and is primarily a sand-bar added to a lava outcrop in Hilo bay, with its edges buttressed from wave actions by a series or rock-wall additions added over the past century. It is connected to the Big Island by a pedestrian bridge that is about 100 meters long. It is a favorite picnic place for children and their families, and is notable for its Rock Tower which was built more than a century ago (as a lighthouse?). The Rock Tower has served as a jumping/diving tower for children (and adults!) for generations, as it rises some 6 meters above the water, and overlooks water that is some 6-8 meters deep, allowing a safe jump into the warm ocean water below. Coconut Island also serves as a fishing area, and swimming area with a sandy beach.

    Tourists from all over the world visit Coconut Island due to its prominence adjacent to Hilo's Liliuokalani's Japanese-Themed gardens.

    3PC08-1-000097 is indefinitely delayed pending a dismissal motion to be heard by another judge. Dismissal is to be based on the fact that a known liar, one "Ken" Francik, appeared before the Hilo grand jury and perjured himself to obtain an indictment. At that time of his appearance, he had in his possession official government records showing Mrs. Wagner as a corporate officer when she signed a corporate document, official government records showing one "Annette" Emerson as a corporate official other than the position held by Mrs. Wagner and not until a time long after Mrs. Wagner signed that document, and a corporate record from the corporate attorney addressed to "Ken" and myself advising us that Mrs. Wagner, I, and a third person were corporate officers. Instead of revealing those facts, he lied and claimed that I "knew that Linda Wagner was no longer" that corporate officer and that it was "common knowledge" by myself that she "had absolutely no position with World Botanical Gardens" and that instead that position was held by "Annette" Emerson. That unadulterated lying by a person who had sworn to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" is known to appropriate government officials, and will likely result in his indictment, prosecution and conviction.
     
    Last edited: Mar 1, 2010
  15. David_Untel Registered Member

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    My view on LHC

    It may be obvious to you that Eric E. Johnson is a dunderhead
    and that his arguments are stupid. Nevertheless, it's not at
    all obvious to me.

    In fact, I've read half of his 90-page article published in
    the Tennessee Law Review. The reference is:
    Volume 76, Summer 2009, Number 4 , first article.

    There are 683 footnotes, which basically serve the
    same purpose as URLs or links in web-pages. So far
    as I can tell, it's a exemplary case of backing up
    claims of what others said or wrote through methodical
    references to primary sources.

    In my opinion, Eric Johnson has raised significant issues
    about the impartiality (or lack thereof) of the
    CERN-mandated LSAG safety review.

    There are other issues raised essentially about
    the meaning-fullness of these reviews, as they have been
    updated (re-written might be a better term) as
    new articles by physicists, often in peer-reviewed journals,
    reflect new developments in theoretical particle physics.
    When the theoretical thinking changes, the CERN safety
    reviews (the published papers) are "updated" to take
    into account the new facts in the theoretical literature.

    David Untel
     
  16. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    That's not the heart of the article. The key idea is an argument from personal incredulity plus a abuse of arithmetic.

    The key of any experiment is to find out what happens, which is to say every experiment has in principle an element of uncertainty. But since the same conflict between the incomplete human physics knowledge and actual workings of the universe applies not just to physics experiment but to every volitional and involutional human act, and even to natural events. Next time you enter a room you may be causing the death of a child, but unless you have knowledge of how that might be the case no blame can attach. Unless it can be explained how you particularly are prone to opening doors in a manner that slays children, no judge is going to order you to stay out-of-doors.

    So the safety papers to date have taken bugaboos, which are necessarily completely hypothetical creatures of imagination, and attempted to show that if such lab-created disasters were possible, then the fundamental nature of physical law is as capricious as ancient Greek cosmology. Japanese mythology includes goblins in the form of backpacks and umbrellas which seek to mislead, but if there is no test between a true backpack and a goblin, then you can't blame the backpack-wearer for his own demise. Likewise, unless the fundamental physical law is fair then you can't demonstrate negligence in any physics experiment and if nature is fair the safety papers are fair.

    Such fairness is not an untested assumption, but follows from Galileo's studies of motion, to Newton's Universal Gravitation, to Einstein's General Relativity -- all different theories, with progressively wider domains of applicability. Now while none of the objects formed at the collider (dangerous and hypothetical, or innocuous and long-known) are in the domains of validity of these theories, the objects do obey the conservation laws and all new objects are expected to as well. So we do not expect magic unicorns to form at the LHC.

    But (playing by Eric Johnson's rules) we cannot rule out that the LHC will produce magic unicorns which will save the future of humanity. Eric Johnson does not argue that unknown is unknown, but argues that unknown is unbounded risk -- yet it could also be unbounded benefit. Neither is expected.

    So EJ takes the whole of his ignorance of what will happen everywhere in the world, throws away hypothetical events that don't have a LHC tie-in, parameterizes this on the real number line, and throws away the positive numbers and then sloppily inserts (negative) infinity into the discussion. That's the abuse of math I was speaking about. What he would really want to do is integrate a probability distribution over the whole of the real line. Such a thing is done all the time in math and often with finite results, but when you start with only ignorance, of course your answer is going to be meaningless.

    The question of balancing risk versus reward is meaningless until you have numbers all-around.

    Without an assumption that physical law is regular in the unknown parts as it has always been in the discovered parts, then there is no physics of what might happen at the LHC. Without physics of what might happen at the LHC, then total ignorance remains, and thus the injunction-seeking plaintiff can never prevail. If the assumption that physical law is regular is assumed, then expert physicists become the best source of expert opinion of what will happen at the LHC. So it is required to prevail for the anti-LHC to present expert testimony on why the LHC is dangerous to (Geneva/Switzerland/Humanity/Planet Earth/Milky Way/Universe).

    So I established this thread because such expert testimony will always be needed if Walter L. Wagner is to prevail, and he has not in all these years brought it. It is Wagner, with his shifting hypothetical bugaboos who is adding confusion as to which object is being addressed by what safety report, because much like the magical unicorns listed above, when experts publicly rule out one hypothesis, the anti-LHC crowd invents perverse new features, like magical, invisible, pink unicorns, in-heat.
     
  17. Wallmott Registered Member

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    May i just ask one question to either Walter or some of you guys.

    Have not Walter L Wagner already been proven to be wrong? Not just in theory but also in experiments?

    I remember that he was against RHIC for the same reasons, and is that not nearly 9 years ago?

    So since then has :

    RHIC has been running around 500 GeV

    LHC has been running at first 900 GeV

    LHC has then been running at 2,36 TeV

    Thats about 4 times higher then the RHIC that you first tried to stop. Does that not prove you wrong?
     
  18. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    Many of the anti-LHC arguments from ignorance can never be demonstrated to be "wrong" because they use weasel words like "might" and "may" to distance the ignorant anti-LHC alarmists from the need to connect with experiment or calculation. Physics is hard, so they skip to discussion of the what-if world if there "may" be trouble.

    Some anti-LHC forces go so far as to say that "they are only asking questions" or "they only have concerns" when they are part of a fear-based, anti-science, pro-ignorance media campaign. Such tactics were mocked in a once-famous website devoted to "examining the question" of whether Glenn Beck, former CNN personality, was a rapist and murderer, as well as extensions to the "teach the controversy" meme advocated by the ID movement. When you manufacture a controversy out of whole cloth, and have no evidence on your side it is "wrong" to inflate your position based on personal ignorance as equal to that of someone less ignorant.

    In other places, like their spurious reasons given to dismiss published and well-read scientific papers, they are already very "wrong." Roessler was "wrong" in trotting out to the press claims of a calculation of a "50-month" timeline without any basis -- in science, you get authority based on your repeatable methodology, not who you are.

    Finally, the anti-LHC forces are wrong to assume that the unknown is to feared, since if the physics world is as topsy-turvy as they seem to think, there is no a priori reason to assume unbounded negative outcomes while dismissing unbounded positive outcomes. The more reasonable anti-LHC advocates must know that actual calculation has to be done to compare possible up- and down- sides, but have no methodology to do so.

    But on the whole, the main anti-LHC approach of trying to raise fears about dragons in terra incognita is tricky to formally disprove because ignorance about the physical world is not expected to vanish completely and the anti-LHC forces are adaptive, adding magical powers to their dragons to try and better fit them in as hidden in the shrinking areas of ignorance.
     
  19. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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    The simple answer to your question is no.

    Here's what leading theorists have said about my idea that colliders might be capable of making micro black holes if the energy is sufficiently high:

    "The Large Hadron Collider at CERN will have a center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV, i.e. more than an order of magnitude larger than the value of the fundamental Planck scale M∗ = 1 TeV, suggested by the most optimistic scenaria with extra dimensions. It becomes then a natural place to look for strong gravity effects, and possibly for the creation of black holes. Studies have shown that their production can be realised as long as the energy of the collision exceeds at least the value of 8 TeV. At the same time, the produced black holes are expected to have a mass of at least a few times the value of the fundamental Planck scale if we want the classical theory of General Relativity and its predictions to be still applicable. According to the above restrictions, the Large Hadron Collider is found to lie on the edge of both the classical regime and of the black hole creation threshold." Panagiota Kanti, "Black Holes at the LHC" http://arxiv.org/pdf/0802.2218v2 (2008)

    "We present results from numerical solution of the Einstein field equations describing the head-on collision of two solitons boosted to ultra relativistic energies. We show, for the first time, that at sufficiently high energies the collision leads to black hole formation, consistent with hoop conjecture arguments. This implies that the non-linear gravitational interaction between the kinetic energy of the solitons causes gravitational collapse, and that arguments for black hole formation in super- Planck scale particle collisions are robust."

    Matthew Choptuik and Frans Pretorius; "Ultra Relativistic Particle Collisions"; http://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1780v1 (2009)


    "The prediction that black holes radiate due to quantum effects is often considered one of the most secure in quantum field theory in curved space-time. Yet this prediction rests on two dubious assumptions: that ordinary physics may be applied to vacuum fluctuations at energy scales increasing exponentially without bound; and that quantum-gravitational effects may be neglected. Various suggestions have been put forward to address these issues: that they might be explained away by lessons from sonic black hole models; that the prediction is indeed successfully reproduced by quantum gravity; that the success of the link provided by the prediction between black holes and thermodynamics justifies the prediction. This paper explains the nature of the difficulties, and reviews the proposals that have been put forward to deal with them. None of the proposals put forward can so far be considered to be really successful, and simple dimensional arguments show that quantum-gravitational effects might well alter the evaporation process outlined by Hawking. Thus a definitive theoretical treatment will require an understanding of quantum gravity in at least some regimes. Until then, no compelling theoretical case for or against radiation by black holes is likely to be made. The possibility that non-radiating "mini" black holes exist should be taken seriously; such holes could be part of the dark matter in the Universe." Adam Helfer "Do Black Holes Radiate"; http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/0304042 (2003)

    According to Kanti, then, we won't even know if black holes form at the current proposed collisions at 7 TeV, as she believes they won't form under 8 TeV. Even then, we won't know what happens unless they evaporate and we can detect them. If they don't evaporate, then they are not detectable, and most theory suggests it would take creation of millions of them to become a problem in a millenia or so from now. And this does not even address the strangelet issue, which likely does not arise until Lead collisions at high energy are undertaken.
     
  20. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    For the first paper, Wagner only quotes from the Conclusions section.

    Panagiota Kanti, "Black Holes at the LHC" Lect.Notes Phys. 769: 387-423 (2009) http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.2218v2

    Table 1 argues against n=2 and n=3 LHC black holes at the LHC based on a review of the scientific literature. But if these quantum objects are produces, the paper explains what happens next:
    "For the same values of M∗ and MBH , the typical lifetime of the black hole comes out to be τ = (1.7−0.5)×10^−26 sec for n = 1−7. In other words, the produced black hole will evaporate instantly after its creation, and it will do so right in front of our detectors."

    The next two papers, Wagner only quotes the abstract.
    Matthew W. Choptuik and Frans Pretorius, "Ultrarelativistic Particle Collisions" Phys. Rev. Lett. 104: 111101 (March 17, 2010) http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1780v1 http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v104/i11/e111101 (I haven't had time to compare the draft with the final published article)
    (Paper by General Relativity (classical) specialists, accepted for Phys. Rev. Lett. (2010), but doesn't begin to address angular momentum or quantum physics and has no extra dimensions)

    Adam Helfer "Do Black Holes Radiate" Rept.Prog.Phys. 66 943-1008 (2003) http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0304042
    (Why did Wagner go back in time? Is this paper well-read and well-cited?)

    It was cited and critiqued as reference [31] by
    Steven Carlip, "Black Hole Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics", Lect.Notes Phys. 769:89-123, (2009) http://arxiv.org/abs/0807.4520
    who writes:
    "We have known for more than thirty years that black holes behave as thermodynamic systems, radiating as black bodies with characteristic temperatures and entropies."

    "In the absence of direct experimental evidence, how confident should we be about Hawking radiation and black hole thermodynamics? Although Hawking’s derivation involves only standard quantum field theory, we can see from the arguments of section 2.3 that the radiation involves modes with arbitrarily high energies: while the asymptotic energies (5) may be small, they come from red-shifted quanta with much higher energies near the horizon. This has led some to suggest that the derivations might involve an extrapolation of quantum field theory beyond the range it can be trusted [26, 30, 31].

    I will return this issue below, but for now let me suggest a partial answer. If only one derivation of Hawking radiation existed, we would clearly need to look very carefully for hidden assumptions and unjustified extrapolations. In fact, though, we have a rather large number of different derivations, which involve very different assumptions and extrapolations and nevertheless all agree."
    (And then he proceeds to review them.)

    None of these papers say LHC-formed black holes will happen, nor do they say that if they happen they will be more dangerous than standard collider products like gamma rays and muons.
     
  21. Wallmott Registered Member

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    What do you mean about that?

    Is not the chance if there ever were one that a strangelet would be created smaler the higher the energy gets?

    Or whats the theory that you are talking about here?

    When will the "High energy lead collisions" happend?
     
  22. Seeking Truth Registered Senior Member

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    Wait a second, your idea?????

    I'm pretty sure the only idea you had was to cash in on it (daily show, donate money on websites to "the cause" that have never been updated in two years) by turning said mbh particle creation into global destructive force, (without showing us all why or how) or can you substantiate these claims?, I know I can substantiate mine.

    I'll tell you this Mr Wagner you have a lot of layman's scared with this stuff right now, the least you could have done was your own work rather mashing up other peoples hard work, to prove your "idea", least that way real physicists could have slammed you in the public eye.

    No instead you hide by copy pasting google articles and such as if your just a little messenger for all these people, when here you are boldly claiming you alone created the idea.
     
  23. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    There's an email exchange between Wagner and someone who does physics in a July1999 letters column of Scientific American (vol. 281 no. 1), p. 8. (Wagner, upon information and belief, is an American.) Both Wagner and Wilczek were only considering classical black holes at the time, and then Wilczek gave Wagner a handle on stranglets, which Wagner has not developed since 1999.

    Pay-link: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=letters-1999-07

    Unpublished "follow-up" http://chess.captain.at/strangelets-rebuttal.html

    But the story was picked by Jonathan Leake, who may be anti-science. http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/global_warming/leakegate/
     
    Last edited: Mar 27, 2010

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