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!