Collider May End World! (Or Spit out Man Eating Dragons)

If you didn't pay your taxes yesterday, don't worry, there's an infinitesimally small chance that there could be a tear in the space-time continuum sucking Earth, David Hasselhoff, and even the IRS, into an alternate universe. And then won't all those diligent taxpayers feel silly?

Life is about chance, and there's a chance that anything could happen, no matter how unlikely. What's at issue right now, in that respect, are concerns being raised that the Large Hadron Collider could create a black hole, ending life as we know it. As the New York Times reports on this unlikely doomsday scenario:

That question has been raised by the impending startup of the Large Hadron Collider. It starts smashing protons together this summer at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or Cern, outside Geneva, in hopes of grabbing a piece of the primordial fire, forces and particles that may have existed a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

Critics have contended* that the machine could produce a black hole that could eat the Earth or something equally catastrophic.*

To most physicists, this fear is more science fiction than science fact. At a recent open house weekend, 73,000 visitors, without pitchforks or torches, toured the collider without incident.

Nevertheless, some experts say too much hype and not enough candor on the part of scientists about the promises and perils of what they do could boomerang into a public relations disaster for science, opening the door for charlatans and demagogues.

In a paper published in 2000 with the title “Might a Laboratory Experiment Destroy Planet Earth?” Francesco Calogero, a nuclear physicist at the University of Rome and co-winner of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the Pugwash conferences on arms control, deplored a tendency among his colleagues to promulgate a “leave it to the experts” attitude.

One problem is that society has never agreed on a standard of what is safe in these surreal realms when the odds of disaster might be tiny but the stakes are cosmically high. In such situations, probability estimates are often no more than “informed betting odds,” said Martin Rees, a Cambridge University cosmologist, the astronomer royal and the author of “Our Final Hour.” Adrian Kent, also of Cambridge, said in a paper in 2003 reviewing scientists’ failure to calculate adequately and characterize accurately risks to the public, that even the most basic question, “ ‘How improbable does a catastrophe have to be to justify proceeding with an experiment?’ seems never to have been seriously examined.”

The question about how scientists communicate with the public has been a popular subject of discussion of late. I'm inclined to agree that if scientists don't make an effort to communicate to the public, they'll merely encourage distrust.

But it doesn't necessarily take a scientist to communicate how risk works. As the *Times *notes: "[T]he random nature of quantum physics means that there is always a minuscule, but nonzero, chance of anything occurring, including that the new collider could spit out man-eating dragons."