LHC Safety and the Law

[(Q)]

Very sad, Walter. You waste the resources and monies of others to appease your delusions. I hope you'll be satisfied with your place in history as the raving lunatic of LHC. Good luck with that.

 

[prometheus]

The Mangano safety argument ("neutron star argument") relies A) upon an unproven assumption that the cross-section for interaction of near-relativistic micro-black-holes is not near-zero; whereas we 1) have no impirical evidence thereon, and 2) some theoreticians show the cross-section to be near-zero at relativisitic speeds (loosely analogous to diminishing cross-sections with speed for neutrons); and B) the safety argument equating proton-Lead collisions in nature as being the same as Lead-Lead collisions at the LHC for comparable COM energies is likewise unproven and appears contrary to established physics, and certainly also has no impirical evidence.

Wow. You can't even spell "empirical" and "relativistic." That doesn't bode well for the trial

 

[Walter L. Wagner]

relativistic, not relativisitic
empirical, not impirical

There, now corrected; loved your substantive comments. Shows how much thought you put into things.

 

[AlphaNumeric]

Hypocrite says what?

 

[Walter L. Wagner]

"loved your comments" was referring to the "Q" post. I don't mind corrections of spelling, but spelling errors would have nothing to do with the substantive comments regarding the "trial" that won't happen.

Nice to know some people are on the side of injustice.

 

[rpenner]

Without a viable physical theory all LHC disaster scenarios are bugaboos and the demand for mathematical proof of nonexistance is unscientific -- just like the sometimes heard creationist demand for a fronkey (some mosaic of features from frog and monkey clades) is a bugaboo in biology and the demand of a mathematical proof of evolution being exactly true for every event in biological history is unscientific.

But within a physical theory, one is certainly allowed to prove theorems. Likewise one is allowed to extend those theories with auxiliary hypotheses and see if theorems can be proven. If those theorems turn out to be unphysical by empirical observations, then that is evidence against the physical theory in the first case and against the auxiliary hypotheses in the latter. You do not get to whine about basic mechanics, until you demonstrate they are wrong from empirical data -- not just your unsupported wish that the LHC is dangerous.

 

[Walter L. Wagner]

So what you're saying is that unless we can prove that the LHC will destroy the planet, then we must test it, even if you can't prove it won't and many valid theorists have shown results that lead to that conclusion. What a science.

Isn't every other branch of science more worthy to proceed on first? Why is this so important an area that you are willing to jeopardize everyone else's work?

 

[(Q)]

Nice to know some people are on the side of injustice.

What is the real injustice here, Walter, is your pursuing of a three ring circus with you in the center ring.

The costs to the public? Pshaw! No need to worry about such things when ones reputation is on the line, eh Walter?

 

[(Q)]

So what you're saying is that unless we can prove that the LHC will destroy the planet...

Hilarious! When you can't even demonstrate a danger to the lawn outside the facility itself, you're prepared to toss in the whole world as your ante.

Again, hilarious!

 

[rpenner]

Yesterday the schedules for oral arguments for Dec 2-14 were published. Still nothing for Sancho vs. US (or whatever the abbreviated name for this case will be).

In other news, Orly Taitz, who, on the face of it, seems to have similar problems as Sancho and Wagner in establishing "Article III standing" (in regards to the section of the US Constitution which establishes the power and limits of powers of the Federal courts) had yet another of her lawsuits (alleging the purely unfounded and therefore racist claim that President Obama is not a US "natural citizen") thrown out of court.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/21808122/Judge-Carter-Ruling-on-MTD
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/29/orly-taitz-lawsuit-thrown_n_338870.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/10/29/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry5452727.shtml

For our Brit friends, Orly Taitz refers to herself at least sometimes as "Dr. Orly Taitz, Esquire" where the last bit just means in US usage that she is a lawyer, not a gentleman. I am not certain to what the Dr. signifies, but given that the Wikipedia pages says she is both dentist and lawyer, would I be wrong to assume a DDS ? In fact in court filings, Orly Taitz, DDS, Esquire is exactly how she is represented by the court reporter.

//Edit: Both Wagner and Taitz are products of different unaccredited Californian law schools. Wagner may have started at a more prestigious law school, while Taitz appears to be the only one who passed the bar. I'm told that the California bar exam is hard when compared to other state bar exams, so perhaps other legal bars depend more upon ABA certification of law schools than does California.

 

[rpenner]

The sliding scale of mootness looms its head. Even if Sancho and Wagner established standing, personal jurisdiction, legal jurisdiction, and had a non-speculative reason for actual damages, if the LHC is actually operating before a decision is made on whether to address a change or potentially halting startup, the Federal Courts will not rule on a subject where they cannot fix it by legal remedies constrained to a small fraction of the forward light-cone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mootness

First particle collisions at LHC predicted circa November 20.
http://blogs.physicstoday.org/newspicks/2009/11/lhc-tests-hint-that-collider-w.html
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/11/08/beam-seen-in-lhcs-cms-experiment/
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/bre...uette-attack-sends-beam-around-half-the-ring/
http://blogs.uslhc.us/?p=2878

 

[rpenner]

On Thursday morning, Mrs. Wagner's attorney filed for a continuance in the Hawaii criminal proceedings. Apparently having the trial start on Tuesday is inconvenient. Now last-minute actions in a criminal trial are the norm, including plea deals on the day of trial, but since the docket leaves no evidence of the prosecution chiming in on the motion, this smacks of procrastination to me.

 

[Xymox]

I have a nice site for watching the LHC run -LIVE-...

CERN has gotten a little unhappy with my links pointing directly to "sensitive" areas..

www .lhcportal. com

Also a correction to the above.. The first circulating beam will be around the 20th. Collisions at low power will be able a week after that and then 1 TeV collisions a week after that.

Read the 3 week planner in Excel format from this site - remove spaces

lhc-commissioning. web.cern.ch /lhc-commissioning /

From links on my portal site you can watch the LIVE collision data and beam status.

 

[Walter L. Wagner]

An interesting article that postulates that microblackholes could be formed at the LHC and grow larger inside the earth. They do, however, have a very large time for that growth some eight orders of magnitude larger than other estimates I've seen.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0911/0911.1884v1.pdf

And yes, the prosecuting attorney has been procrastinating at the dismissal. Thus, a motion to dismiss was filed (which automatically boots a trial, as the motion has to be heard first). As mentioned before, there won't be a trial because there is nothing to try. Mrs. Wagner acknowledges everything they say she did. Ditto here. It is no crime. The crime is the lying by certain individuals falsely claiming the public record would say other than it does.

 

[rpenner]

Most notably, we find that, under no circumstances, the black holes would reach the (hazardous) regime of Bondi accretion.
..
Also note that the evaporation rate grows with M faster than the accretion rate, which implies that the black hole cannot accrete indefinitely.
...
The first important result is that the black hole decays instantly (i.e., the decay time is shorter than 10^−10 sec) after being created for 0 < β < 1 and 1.25 ≲ β
...
First, we found that tidal black holes would evaporate (almost) instantly, except for 1 < β ≲ 1.25. (The particular case with β = 1 was studied in Ref. [14].) Two distinct regimes were then taken into consideration inside this range: large initial momentum, and small initial momentum. Numerical data for the regime with large initial momentum are presented in Tables II and III, and show that the black holes with a large value of the initial momentum would cross the Earth in a matter of seconds and come out with velocities much larger than the Earth’s escape velocity. Their mass, after crossing the Earth, is of the order of 10^−22 kg, after which accretion turns off, and the black holes just evaporate. If the black holes are created with a small initial momentum, it is possible that they are trapped inside the Earth. However, Table I shows that the maximum mass decreases for decreasing initial momentum. Therefore, the absolute maximum mass is reached for the maximum initial momentum which is still small enough to allow for trapping. Tables IV and V then show that, for black holes trapped inside the Earth, after a time comparable with the age of the present Universe, the mass is on the order of 10^−14 kg, which is still negligibly small.

R. Casadio, S. Fabi, B. Harms, and O. Micu "Theoretical survey of tidal-charged black holes at the LHC" http://arxiv.org/abs/0911.1884

The reason they have such large growth in the their tables, is they assume an infinite Earth, in which case higher momentum implies higher accretion rate for purely geometrical reasons:
"We stress that the maximum mass was calculated assuming that the black hole would travel through a medium with a density equal to the average density of the Earth all the distance from the point of creation to the point of maximum mass. For black holes created on Earth, the maximum value of the mass ME would indeed be much smaller, since after crossing the Earth, the density drops to zero and so does the accretion rate."

Ref 14 is R. Casadio, S. Fabi and B. Harms, "Possibility of Catastrophic Black Hole Growth in the Warped Brane-World Scenario at the LHC" Phys. Rev. D 80 (2009) 084036. http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.2948

But scaring yourself and other people with badly parsed unevidenced theoretical papers does not give rise to Article III standing against CERN, since they haven't been doing the bad parsing.

 

[Walter L. Wagner]

R. Casadio, S. Fabi, B. Harms, and O. Micu "Theoretical survey of tidal-charged black holes at the LHC" http://arxiv.org/abs/0911.1884

The "infinite size earth" is actually not a bad approximation, as a gravitationally trapped particle would repeatedly cycle through the earth, with the transit time approaching 100% of its cycle for very slow particles.

There are, of course, numerous other criticisms that can be made. For example, a particle gravitationally bound to the sun would potentially be far more serious, yet that is not treated at all.

The concept that the accretion is non-Bondi has been discussed by myself previously, with varying times to accrete the mass of the earth approaching the times suggested by the article. The truth is, we don't know. This article will be an interesting spring-board for future discussion, which I won't go into here, as others are already working on it, and I'll post their findings as they are made known.

 

[rpenner]

No. If you had correctly parsed the paper, a CFHM tidally charged black hole fails to grow out of the microgram weight class if it is below escape velocity. That's the content of the last lines of Table I and Table II. And it takes over 1 million billion years to grow to that maximum.

As for the Sun, these black holes can't even manage to maintain their maximum mass in a continuum of Earth density. The Sun is 10,000 Earth-diameters away in vacuum. And if you "worry" about the sun, then you admit to the validity of the cosmic ray argument.

Check and mate, counselor.

 

[Walter L. Wagner]

Yes. I am well aware of what the article says. Indeed, I have presented similar assertions in these threads that it might well take billions of years for a microblackhole to grow to significant size. Go back and read what I've written. That is because there is no Bondi growth initially, and the growth would be very nearly linear, one nucleon at a time, and that takes a long while to get anywhere near a gram. However, I've seen some estimates that place the time frame more on the order of millenia, rather than billions of years. And that is for a single microblackhole, not millions of them.

But that article is certainly not the last word on the subject. For one, it talks only about a single microblackhole. The time frame is reduced significantly if they are made by the millions. Likewise, the article assumes evaporation, albeit at a slower rate than Hawking's theory. And, it balances evaporation and accretion to come up with their figures. But all it takes is for a slightly slower evaporation rate (or no evaporation) to skew their figures significantly.

As to the sun, yes, if they evaporate at a fast enough rate, they'd never make it to the sun. That's the same argument I used as to why radioactive strangelets that are formed in deep space (from head-on cosmic ray impacts) are harmless (they 'evaporate', or disintegrate, before reaching stellar bodies) and can't be detected, but if created in an environment of copious amounts of low-Z material (such as liquid Helium) and their half-life is sufficiently long (microseconds or longer), they could slow, grow larger and more stable, and form a runaway fusion reaction.

 

[rpenner]

These are not "assertions" -- these are models based on the assumption that such modeled black holes are even possible. They (like reference 14) pass peer review when professionals in the field (which you are not) can identify the reasoning based on physics with the laid-out assumptions added. They get rebutted in peer-reviewed journals when someone correctly identifies a section of the paper's development of the assumptions as "hand-waving" or incorrect (which you have not done). When you claim "millenia", your estimates are not based on this CFH model of black holes -- indeed since you cite no paper and no calculations, we have no idea which model of black holes you are using or if the calculations are solid. It is a naked assertion in expert territory by a non-expert witness about unverifiable information. For example a massive GR black hole would accomplish that goal, but it would have to be orders of magnitude larger than LHC energies, and therefore is not of Earthly concern.

This article is the first word on CFHM tidally charged black holes with 1 < β ≲ 1.25. It incorporates various parametrized assumptions and then performs detailed calculations attempting to survey the phenomenon which would result from those assumptions. The fact that you want to add more assumptions (like quantum mechanics and/or relativity not holding true near the even horizon of (at least) a tiny black hole in such a way that Hawking radiation is greatly reduced) but don't tell us what that assumption is shows that you are doing anti-LHC apologetics -- working from a desired conclusion to the assumptions that would support that conclusion -- rather than science. If you would but tell us what this mystery model is, then we could abandon this sterile back-and-forth over your unscientific fears and made progress on determining on whether your idea is right or wrong.

For example the general claim that quantum mechanics and/or relativity are wrong might be true, but since they can be wrong in a truly infinite number of ways then at a minimum one needs to classify how they might be wrong, parametrize that model, and compare that parametrized model to evidence. I am aware of such papers on the subject of Lorentz invariance (SR) and CM Will's review of GR, with the upshot that relativity is indistinguishable from being correct. Somewhat less current is a paper by J. Ellis, J. S. Hagelin, D. V. Nanopoulos and M. Srednicki, which explores parametrization of models of quantum mechanics violation (once again, no evidence found).

So, once again, science begins with a model or parametrized model, the implications of that model are worked out, and then compared with experiment and observation. That's how Newton did it (didn't publish when astronomers claimed the moon was the wrong distance for his theory of Universal Gravitation to work -- did publish after astronomers revised their estimates), and that's how we do it today.

 

[rpenner]

Well, while we are waiting...
On the morning of the trial, Walter's lawyer moved to join with his wife's lawyer's motion for a continuance, which was granted -- trial now scheduled for Feb 8, 2010.

Prosecution is due to respond to the latest motion to dismiss (and possibly the request to supress evidence??) on Dec 29, 2009.

And in San Francisco Federal Appeals Court .... .... .... nothing happened.

And just outside Geneva, Switzerland, we are about two weeks from 0.45 TeV collisions.
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/large-hadron-collider-to-restart/