Apparently, scientists are getting death threats. Does anyone really believe the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the planet in a few hours’ time? Surely they don’t. It’s not like anyone stopped working on stuff that was due on Thursday. Nor have end-of-the-world cults come into being, focussed on September 10th. Although, isn’t that curiously close to September 11th? Oooh….
Human beings are hopeless at some things, and thinking rationally about disaster scenarios is right up there. Spotting when a coincidence is just a coincidence (and realising all the times the coincidence didn’t occur) is another problem for us. And NOT seeing patterns where there are none is a particular problem. These oh-so-human traits are probably behind 99 per cent of conspiracy theorising. I did a Canadian radio interview for Maritime Morning about 13 Things this afternoon, during which the host, Andrew Krystal ventured that most UFO sightings seemed to be in the same vein as medieval claims of miracles: to the people who were “there” they’re undeniable, but to those who weren’t, they’re astonishingly unconvincing. And there’s no way to make the two camps move any closer together.
In fact, it’s been scientifically proven that, given two extreme camps, a new piece of independent evidence divides them further. In the 1930s, two mathematicians, Frank Ramsey and Bruno de Finetti, independently derived results that showed scientific reasoning is mostly an exercise in reinforcing your prejudices.
You could interpret that to mean that we shouldn’t trust physicists’ assurances that the world isn’t about to end. But I’ve met Michelangelo Mangano, the man who worked on CERN’s security report on the black hole scenario and, honestly, there’s nothing suspicious about him at all. His time has, essentially, been wasted by a few people determined to deny all reason.
Somewhere common sense has to prevail. There’s nothing going on in the collisions at the LHC that isn’t going on just above our heads as cosmic rays (particles from the sun) pummel Earth's atmosphere, and there's plenty more violent stuff going on elsewhere in the galaxy. Despite millennia of this, no one and nothing has been eaten by collision-created black holes yet (or is that something else they’re not telling us?). New Scientist’s Valerie Jamieson put it well in a blog on the NS site (I got this via Cosmic Variance, another bastion of reason):
“Scale the cosmic ray sums up to cover the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way and the 100 billion galaxies in the visible Universe and you find that nature has already made the equivalent of 10 to the power of 31 LHCs. Or if you like, 10 trillion LHCs are running every second. And we’re still here.”
Valerie’s in Geneva at the moment, so if she’s wrong, she’ll be the first to go, of course...
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