Large Hadron Collider: The End Of The World As We Know It?

If someone asked you in 2007 to estimate the likelihood that Morgan Stanley, WaMu, Countrywide, Merrill Lynch, Wachovia and other titans of financial services would fall to their knees within a year … what odds would you have made?  Might the experts have said “impossible?”

In 2007 I asked a physicist and executive associated with the Large Hadron Collider what the odds were this little black hole they hope to create actually gets out of control (hungry and eats Earth).  The answer: “very unlikely.”

So here is a thought for the day: What if our Earth math and assumptions used to determine “frequency of rare events” in financial markets happens to be the same kind Earth math and assumptions used to determine the risk of playing with black holes?

Wouldn't it be funny if us earthlings never have time to realize all the existing black holes in the universe are really just the residual evidence of other civilizations which had advanced enough to build their own colliders.

D’oh.

On a more serious note … they are looking for yet undiscovered particles that come from the near-light speed collision.  What intrigues me is this: what kind of sensor strategy does one use when one doesn’t know exactly what one is looking for?  That is cool!

RELATED LINKS:

YouTube: end of the world?, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

RELATED POSTS:

The World is Not a More Dangerous Place

Comments

[Patrick Mueller]

Have you seen the LHC live webcam? Kinda boring, but it's cool that they have them on the web ...

http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

[evgen]

I know you are being a bit glib, but remember that part of the reason no one would have given you good odds on the current financial mess was because most of the players involved did not make the information necessary to deduce the problem available to outsiders. If physicists kept their work secret and did not share their results then fears regarding LHC would be more justifiable, but this is not the case; the facts from past experiments and current theories (both mainstream and fringe) are available to all to examine and noodle with on their own. Most of us don't have the toolkit necessary to do this work, but I feel a lot better knowing that those who do are able to work with a large body of knowledge that is open and available for peer review.

Imagine how much better the financial situation would have worked out if the same processes could be applied in that case...