The Large Hadron Collider at CERN had its first run last night. According to Professor Stephen Hawking http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4715761.ece there is a less than 1% chance that it will produce a black hole.

But that is still a chance and millions of people have been worrying that the collider will cause a rift in space time that will swallow the earth.

All of which makes me wonder where it leaves the "precautionary principle". This principle is pretty vague, but it generally seems to mean that if, in the opinion of the person advancing it, and if this opinion can be supported by some facts, or the opinion of some experts, there is a significant risk from pursuing a particular action, then that particular action should not be taken.

I call it the "don't get out of bed" in the morning principle, not least for the reason that staying in bed has its own risks, and the precautionary principle appears to me to start from the erroneous position that what currently exists is better, and safer, than what might exist, so there is only one-sided weighing of risk.

It is normally invoked by environmentalists arguing against a new project, or the roll-out of some new technology. GM, for example, is often on the wrong end of this argument, as is burning fossil fuel for energy.

So why was not there not more public angst over the LHC?

What benefits were gained from splitting the atom?. Would we have been better off if they didn't push the button?.

Perhaps there was some public angst but it did not reach the public domain.

The scientist who spoke about the LHC on Denton the other night stated that the risk of a black hole was small and even if a black hole occurred it would be of molecular size and not pose a threat to mankind. I don't think there was a great deal of media attention on this until just prior to the commencement of the experiment. See more information towards the end of the 'Catalyst' article in the link below:

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/09/10/2361062.htm?site=catalyst&topic=latest

GM food on the other hand might be perceived as more of a threat if it was felt that profit motive took precedence over safety and prudent research. It does happen. Any issues with GM has implications for the whole food chain and the health of populations. It is still relatively new science.

Are you sure you aren't talking about the Hicks Photon?

The end of the world?
Don't tell that to the Parliament of Victoria. They have just knocked back a reasonable euthanasia bill and have approved a bill to decriminalise abortion.

I think its strange that the media haven't picked up on the end of the world but they blithely accept the spin about Global Warming that is put out by the IPCC.

I don't think we have any journalists left, just media release readers.

GrahamY
I agreed with you until you started with the 'political labelling diatribe'.
I think you'll find it is the "conservative" right and the progressive "left" is the current politically expedient labelling practice fantasy.

Personally Labels are an intellectual and moral cop out as they don't really describe real people. See my comment to Craig Emerson’s last offering.

With regard to the precautionary principle one might point out that the “risk?” should be taken in a scientific “context”. Science at this level is more about scientific probabilities than actual hard provable facts. The 1% (low number) is more of an interesting possibility than a real risk. The good professor Hawking is a Theorist.

If we examine most of the great Scientific theories of this ilk they are at best stepping stones not the destination
i.e. Newton’s laws fail in the sub atomic and the planetary sense,
Even some of Einstein’s have indicated as being incremental and not absolute.

By the way which voyage of sailing discovery did Higgs command? and why is his boson so important? another famous mutiny perhaps?:-)

You've lost me examinator - what political labelling diatribe? And apparently the Higgs Boson is the particle that can explain why the rest of the atom is as massive as it is. I don't remember covering it in High School physics, although it was discovered in 1960 something, so I'm afraid I can't do much better than that, but Wikipedia has a stab at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson.

The Higgs Boson is a hypothetical short lived elementary particle propounded by Peter Higgs in the 1960s to help explain why atoms hang together. No-one has seen one, perhaps because it doesn't exist and there is another explanation for the phenomenon, or perhaps because enough have never been separated long enough from other particles to be viewed.

Had you been in Europe, you would know that there has been intense concern about the LHC causing a massive black hole that would swallow the Earth. The Precautionary Principle has been invoked in attempt to stop the experiment and there have been death threats made to some of the scientists involved.

Perhaps the reason that these efforts have been unsucessful in Europe in comparison to banning GM produce might be because the Europeans are on the right side of the financial gain on this one. Banning the LHC would lead to a loss of funds rather than protection of their own inefficient industries.

Doesn't ANYONE find the LHC intriguing?.

Yeah, ok, we might end up down the bottom of a black hole. The non-hysterical generally agree we won't.

With this thing we're talking about anti-gravity, inertialess matter and force shields (just as fore-thoughts).

One of the most intriguing things I read today was:

"Gravity acts on mass, but so far science is unable to explain the mechanism that generates mass. Experiments at the LHC will provide the answer. LHC experiments will also try to probe the mysterious dark matter of the universe – visible matter seems to account for just 5% of what must exist, while about a quarter is believed to be dark matter. They will investigate the reason for nature's preference for matter over antimatter, and they will probe matter as it existed at the very beginning of time."

That's from a CERN press release.

StG, I'd consider it one of those longshots of research science which has a fair chance of paying off in ways we can't even imagine.

There is a risk that they will learn little (we learnt that this approach does not work) and a much greater chance that we will unlock the keys to understanding what makes matter and energy tick or at least make significant steps towards that understanding.

R0bert

Gentle men I guess my little joke (hence the”:-)“) failed. I do know what a boson is and why it's name. Thanks I’m sure others might have benefited .

GrahamT you said “ ………It is normally invoked by environmentalists arguing against a new project, or the roll-out of some new technology.”

Given that most technological advancement are usually opposed by the conservative end of the spectrum … e.g. the Fear of ‘spinning Jenny’ by the Luddites. I assumed you were therefore making a political point one that made no sense unless it was viewed from the “Left = Environmentalist = anti-technology; right= technology=development “ stance. This is both historically and factually untrue.

I resist categorizing individual’s in political pigeon holes (right or left, environmentalist or developer) as they are based on differentiating people for political (party ) purposes. i.e. A matter of marketing expedience ( a fabrication of convenience rather than reality).

Sorry If I annoyed you . I don’t mean to be a smartie or critical to commenters, my intentions are to discuss flaws in arguments mine or theirs… discussion is the name of the game.

In this environment we are talking to the room as well as the commenter. I do agree with your original point though. I was trying to put the 1% in context for every one

Dear Graham,

I think Tejinder Virdee, the Head of one of the
LHC's experiments summed it up:

"You can make conjectures, but unless you
verify the conjectures, they are metaphysics.
That's why many of us haven't minded spending our
entire working lives building this experiment..."

To the average person however, as examinator
("Laba Diena," examinator), pointed out, its all
merely "scientific conjecture," thus no angst.

I hope that Higgs will live long enough
to open that bottle
of bubbly that he claims he will,
(once the data from the accelerator
is analyzed, and they find something).

Examinator, it's generally not regarded as legitimate to put words into someone's mouth and then rebut them as though the person had actually said them. They are your assumptions about left and write and conservative and whatever your opposite was to conservative. Environmentalist is generally a behaviour-based, rather than ideologically-based, description.

Theoretical chemist Otto Rossler, from Germany's Tubingen University, lodged an emergency injunction with the European Court of Human Rights to prevent the LHC being turned on.

It failed.

Read about this here: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=627666

However, I agree with many posts here. Here is a science project that cost 12 billion and I can only assume this also means huge political weight too.

At what cost if it goes awry?

Should there be a world ethics committee to give the ok on these 'possibly dangerous' experiments?

This reminds me of the first tests with the A Bomb.

Rainer, this experiment was never seriously going awry. The worst thing that could happen would be that the beams of particles couldn't be focussed and the whole thing would be a colossal dud.

The concern about black holes doing anything very much is entirely misplaced. Given the size of the particles involved in the collisions, any black hole that appeared would be infinitely small. Black holes absorb light and other particles because their gravitational pull is greater than the speed of light. Gravitational pull is entirely dependent on mass and distance. Only the very largest stars in the Universe collapse into black holes. Miniscule black holes have no mass, so would not attract anything to them very quickly. More likely, they would themselves be swallowed up by larger more massive particles around them.

The silliness involved in Otto Rossler's lawsuit is beyond belief.

Agronomist, I agree that the risk was most likely overstated, but I can't resist picking a couple of arguments. A black hole that was infinitely small couldn't exist, and one that had no mass wouldn't be a black hole either. Unless my understanding of black holes is completely astray they have infinite mass, which is why light can't escape from them, although apparently Hawking radiation can!

Maybe Stephen Hawking, or another physicist, could come along and explain the last.

For those who are as fascinated by the science as I am, please check out the following pictorial at ABC website.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/photos/?site=science&tab=latest&gallery=/science/photos/xml/08particlephysics.xml

The Hawking Radiation principle stated very simply: the tiny black holes produced by the LHC have too little mass to create the gravitational forces necessary for our planet to implode: Earth's gravity is far greater than any black holes produced in this experiment. Therefore, the 'precautionary principle' is not applicable to this experiment.

GrahamY,
Fair point,
Sometimes it's difficult to work out where some commenters are coming from the problem is that many on this site do tend to grind their political axes making someone like me a little sensitive

Obviously the problem it interpretational.
Environmentalist Someone who works to protect the environment from destruction or pollution.

I believe that term refers to more than behaviour I try to differentiate between the relatively small number of extremists, the majority of reasoned amateurs and the reasonably small number of working Environmentalists. i.e. My 2nd daughter is in year 2 of a 5year double degree course to be an Environmentalist (broad description). My eldest daughter is a back to basics complete with alternative medicine, spiritual enlightenment, raw food etc but she doesn’t describe herself as an environmentalist yet she would fit your definition of (technophobic) knee jerk Environmentalist. (As you can imagine family reunions are …well interesting.) :-(
I Hope that explains my pedantism here.

Still no excuse for my assuming. Point taken and noted for next time.
Thanks for your patience

Foxy
As Gomez from the Adam’s family says “Carleta, you drive me crazy when you talk French.”…. G’day to you too.
You are definitely better at explaining than me. You have it exactly right. I do tend to try and give reasoning for my views….Ok over explain, verbose….Sigh!

GrahamY, as I understand it (and it is a long time since I did quantum mechanics) you can theoretically create a black hole out of any material larger than about 20 ng (the Planck Mass). These are not quite infinitely small, but go close enough for ordinary uses, particularly in relation to their gravitational attraction. It is density that is important in creating black holes, not mass. However, some quantum theories suggest that even smaller black holes are possible. Theories of evaporation of black holes with Hawking radiation would posit a position where black holes are temporarily smaller than this, before they disappear.

Scaremonger.

http://cern.ch/lsag/LSAG-Report.pdf

"The safety of collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was studied
in 2003 by the LHC Safety Study Group, who concluded that they
presented no danger. Here we review their 2003 analysis in light of
additional experimental results and theoretical understanding, which
enable us to confirm, update and extend the conclusions of the LHC
Safety Study Group. The LHC reproduces in the laboratory, under
controlled conditions, collisions at centre-of-mass energies less than those
reached in the atmosphere by some of the cosmic rays that have been
bombarding the Earth for billions of years. We recall the rates for the
collisions of cosmic rays with the Earth, Sun, neutron stars, white dwarfs
and other astronomical bodies at energies higher than the LHC. The
stability of astronomical bodies indicates that such collisions cannot be
dangerous. Specifically, we study the possible production at the LHC of
hypothetical objects such as vacuum bubbles, magnetic monopoles,
microscopic black holes and strangelets, and find no associated risks. Any
microscopic black holes produced at the LHC are expected to decay by
Hawking radiation before they reach the detector walls. If some
microscopic black holes were stable, those produced by cosmic rays would
be stopped inside the Earth or other astronomical bodies. The stability of
astronomical bodies constrains strongly the possible rate of accretion by
any such microscopic black holes, so that they present no conceivable
danger. In the case of strangelets, the good agreement of measurements of
particle production at RHIC with simple thermodynamic models
constrains severely the production of strangelets in heavy-ion collisions
at the LHC, which also present no danger."

So cheer up GrahamY

Fester, Agronomist and yours truly have explained that the black holes created in the LHC are too small to be self-sustaining and therefore no threat to life on earth.

Interesting that you are so frightened by the science of qantum physics, yet remain so skeptical of climatatology.

Hi Graham

That Precautionary Principle you mention with some disdain has created a history of gratuitous carnage when ignored:

1. Agent Orange: Vietnamese children continue to be born with hideous deformities. Monsanto, aware of the dioxin health impacts in the 60s, knowingly continued selling AO to the US for the spraying of Vietnam.

2. Maralinga: Shallow pit burial of plutonium. Heaps of plutonium-contaminated soil was buried at Maralinga. Almost 400,000 tonnes of it. It was buried in three massive holes.

The largest at Taranaki was bigger than four football fields, and as deep as a five-storey building. Alan Parkinson nuclear engineer was removed from the project when he began questioning the unsafe and life-threatening clean-up practices that were occurring at Maralinga.

His book: “Australia’s Nuclear Waste Cover-up” is required reading for those who scoff at the Precautionary Principle.

3. Bellevue Chemical Fire WA 2001: Largest in Australia - a real “cracker” night with 500,000 litres of hazardous waste exploding over communities. Waste containing perchloroethylene, PCBs, mercury, pesticides, cadmium etc. Department of Environment had no inventory of chemicals. Did not enforce regulations on operator but gave him a loan to clean the place up. Firefighters unaware of chemicals, lacked protective gear – exposed to God knows what!

4. Yummy red mud for farmers crops WA: WA Department of Agriculture sold red mud from Alcoa’s aluminium, hazardous waste stream to farmers for 50 cents a tonne. Sprinkled over each hectare were up to 30 kilograms of radioactive thorium, six kilograms of chromium, more than two kilograms of barium and up to one kilogram of uranium.

On top of that there were 24 kilograms of fluoride, more than half a kilogram each of the toxic heavy metals arsenic, copper, zinc, and cobalt, as well as smaller amounts of lead, cadmium and beryllium.

“I mean bin Laden is not going to go stealing this stuff to make atomic bombs out of it,” said an Agriculture Department research officer, Rob Summers.

And heaps more by request only!

"So why was not there not more public angst over the LHC?"

So what's new pussy cat?

Fractelle et al, if you read my original post properly you'll see I was never concerned about the LHC. The point of the post was the selectivity with which the "precautionary principle" is used. All the expert opinion says there is no unacceptable risk to the population from nuclear reactors, yet that doesn't stop large numbers of people in Sydney invoking the precautionary principle against the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor, which is used to produce materials for use in nuclear medicine.

Why don't I have a problem with global warming? Well, all that CO2 has been up in the atmosphere before and life survived, so I think we will cope. And a slightly warmer world should be a benefit rather than a disbenefit. Anyway, unless you can think of a way of restraining the Chinese and the Indians, then CO2 emissions are going to continue to climb, so whatever happens, we're going to have to live with it. For that matter, it's not so easy to restrain emissions anywhere, as populations have been voting against increased energy prices.

And I think that peak oil will probably solve the problem, such as it is, anyway.

Graham

You state: "Well, all that CO2 has been up in the atmosphere before and life survived, so I think we will cope."

Earlier this year, scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii reported that their research suggested that CO2 levels are the highest for at least the last 650,000 years.

Ice core samples of hundreds of thousands of years revealed that CO2, any period before the Industrial Era, grew no more than 3.6 ppm per century. The current CO2 growth rate is close to 100 ppm per century, which is more than 20 times as fast.

When you pump 16 billion tons of C02 into the atmosphere yearly, you're not talking about an occasional major volcano eruption, or peaks after an ice age, where the earth has thousands of years to adjust, and where it has all its natural C02 absorbing mechanisms in place.

It's a sustained deliberate increase in global warming gases - human caused, which has a snowballing effect, along with humans destroying natural C02 absorption systems.

Now the southern oceans are saturated with CO2 and can no longer absorb.

Currently, humans are emitting 150 times more CO2 than volcanoes.

Forget about India and China for the moment. The big Australian polluters continue to operate with impunity. As a result Australia's eco-systems are in bad shape.

The Precautionary Principle:

1. "Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to prevent environmental degradation."

2. "The present generation should ensure that the health, diversity and productivity of the environment is maintained or enhanced for the benefit of future generations."

The sixth extinction is already underway, according to scientists not tied up with the politics of climate change.

Time to adhere to the Precautionary Principle I would say - pronto!