The psychologist Erich Fromm warned of the danger of the Technological Imperative, aptly described by Truthseeker: “if it is built, it must run.” As Fromm put it, “Technological civilization is programmed by the principle that something ought to be done because it is technologically possible. If it is possible to build nuclear weapons, they must be built, even if they might destroy us all. Once this principle is accepted, humanist values…are dethroned and technological development becomes the foundation of ethics.”

It’s obvious that potentially dangerous technology needs to be held in check by regulation and oversight, yet this is what is so sorely lacking in the LHC. Instead, a self-interest group of particle physicists is allowed to threaten the future of the planet for the sake of the their extremely selfish pursuits of career opportunities, awards and recognition, and curiosity-seeking.

I appreciate the collection of my comments which was included on this thread, but they must be rather confusing to the reader as they’re out of context. My frequent mention of Plaga’s paper and inclusion of the link to its 3rd version Abstract was to call it to the attention of readers, scientists, and editors, for – except for one mention in Science in Sept. 2008 – this major challenge by Plaga to CERN’s safety review has been ignored by the scientific press and by virtually the entire print media (except for a Canadian newspaper last year). I do not know that it is not being read – the problem is that it is being ignored, despite that fact that it makes a plausible case that the LHC is potentially threatening very much on the order of the movie 2012, even if it does not produce a black hole that consumes the Earth.

Plaga, however, did not discuss the strangelet scenario, except to mention a paper that does so. Other scientists suggested that the production of stranglets by the LHC could “turn the earth into a smoking asteroid the size of a football pitch,” as Truthseeker stated.

Thanks again for this a great article, Truthseeker – truly the most important article that ever appeared at this website, and one of the most important ever to appear on the worldwide web.

Meanwhile, where is Robert Houston? Here are some more posted Comments earlier elsewhere by our colleague in arms for scientific sanity, calling attention to the fact that the thoughtless claims of physicists that all is well and the objections of the alarmists are all dealt with in the CERN safety report are quite misleading, particularly as they ignore Rainer Plaga’s third version which not only puts down the CERN rebuttal to his version 1, noting once again that they chose the wrong equation in supposedly refuting his theoretical analysis, and refining his reply, but also deals with two more rather dubious papers from other sources, as we will show in our next post:

===============================================
On TierneyLab at the NYTimes Sep 29,02008:

What is the sophisticated view here? Is it to dismiss critics of CERN’s Collider project as fools and accept without question the safety assurances of CERN and its supporters? Or is it to consider seriously the concern of a number of scientists who believe that the project poses a potential threat to pubic safety and even to the viability of the planet? In his eloquent post, John Tierney provided links to three interesting articles to help reassure us all is well. On examination, however, they fail to do so.

* Ronald Bailey’s article in Reason actually dwelled on an analyst’s specification of a number of ways in which a safety assessment such as CERN’s could be flawed.

* Dennis Overbye’s article in the Times on Sept. 8th mentions that there have been several safety reports and that the director of CERN has said, “The LHC is safe.” Mr. Overbye notes that “There are many theories about what will happen..” and adds, “But nobody knows for sure…”

In a previous Times article (3/29/08), reporter Overbye astutely harpooned CERN’s major safety argument: that the Collider beams are comparable to cosmic rays.

“What is different, physicists admit, is that the fragments from cosmic rays will go shooting harmlessly through the Earth at nearly the speed of light, but anything created when the beams meet head-on in the collider will be born at rest relative to the laboratory and so will stick around and thus could create havoc.” (Dennis Overbye, “Asking a Judge to Save the World… ” NY Times, 3/29/08.)

* Mr. Tierney’s third citation, the 2005 paper by Tegmark and Bostrom, depended heavily on the the same false comparison with cosmic rays. In addition, their calculations presupposed that there had been no major disaster in the solar system. This is questionable, however, for some scientists have theorized that the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter constitutes remnants of a small planet that met with an unknown cataclysm.

Thus, the three Tierney citations are far from reassuring. Other scientitsts have brought suit in the European Court of Human Rights to try to block CERN from procceding with its reckless “Big Bang” experiments.

–Robert Houston

On Science Insider at Science:

By Robert Houston on October 20, 2009 1:50 AM:
To start collisions at half the LHC’s design maximum is not being “on the safe side,” for it’s nearly four times Fermilab’s world record. Safety is now being considered only in relation to the physical instrument and not the environment or planet. Yet in the past year the safety rationales set up by CERN’s in-house theorists have been put in serious doubt by some outside physicists. In particular, a recent revised paper by physicist Rainer Plaga, Ph.D. – at ArXiv.org Version 3 – disputes CERN’s “cosmic ray” safety arguments and argues that these do not rule out the LHC’s production of “metastable quantum-black holes” that could release enormous thermonuclear energy potentially devastating CERN and parts of France and Switzerland.
Robert Houston

By Robert Houston on November 3, 2009 9:27 PM:
Most reporters covering the LHC have behaved like handmaidens to CERN’s PR office. Dan Clery has been one of the few to take objective note of scientific opposition to the collider.

The idea that “the black holes would quickly decay” is based on a theory of Hawking radiation, which lacks evidence and is disputed by respected physicists such as Helfer (2008) and Belinski (2006). Others calculate that an LHC-produced micro black hole could survive for extended periods and become “metastable” (Casadio and Harms, 2002). These analyses were excluded from CERN’s safety review. So was the “3rd Scenario” from physicist Rainer Plaga involving the limited growth of metastable black holes that “emit Hawking radiation that might be dangerous to Earth as a whole or the inhabitants of CERN and its surroundings” (at: ArXiv.org Version 3 ).

Mr. Clery provided a link to an LHC safety review and wrote, “the main argument…has been that collisions of similar energies happen daily…as cosmic rays slam into atoms in the air…” But regarding neutral “microsopic black holes,” CERN’s safety report now admits (7th par.), “Those produced by cosmic rays would pass harmlessly through the Earth into space, whereas those produced by the LHC could remain on Earth.” (As in a car crash, the LHC’s head-on collisions result in a slowdown.) The cosmic ray argument thus has been relocated to dense neutron stars which, as Plaga notes, are protected by powerful magnetic fields.

With the its safety rationales in serious doubt, this dangerous project, which threatens the very future of the world, should be halted at once.
Robert Houston

By Robert Houston on November 20, 2009 11:57 PM:
The 70-page complaint by ConCERNed International against CERN’s LHC project was filed today, Nov. 20, 2009, at the Human Rights Committee of the U.N. in Geneva, Switzerland. See the press release: http://www.concerned-international.com/

The previous two-page comment from readers in India exemplifies common types of defense by LHC supporters. The Indians write that the formation of a “micro blackhole” by the collider “would be rather a thrilling” occurrence, and that “it would also be perfectly safe.” Thus, thrill-seeking is posited as an adequate reason for risking the planet, and blanket reassurance is the simple answer to serious scientific concerns. Such an attitude may be well-meaning and widespread but amounts to reckless negligence.

Ironically, the only study they cited for such reassurance is one by Casadio et al. early this year, which raised alarm in the scientific community by concluding that micro black holes from the LHC could survive for minutes or more (see: ArXivblog ). This contradicted CERN’s usual claim, echoed by Science Insider, that they’d evaporate in a trillionth of a second from Hawking radiation, even though it has been disputed by some prominent physicists.

On the other hand, if real, Hawking radiation from semi-stable micro black holes could itself pose a serious danger, a 3rd scenario ignored by CERN but developed in a brilliant paper from a former group leader of the Max Planck Institute for Physics. In a new appendix to his recently revised paper – at http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.1415v3 – Rainer Plaga critiques the 2009 Casadio study, noting that it excluded without reason plausible parameter values that could result in catastrophic growth of a micro black hole produced by the LHC.

By Robert Houston on November 22, 2009 12:01 AM
The international complaint against CERN’s LHC doomsday machine was filed on Nov. 20, 2009, at the Human Rights Committee of the U.N. in Geneva, Switzerland. The press release and 73 page document are available at the first link in Daniel Clery’s article.

The preceding two-page comment from readers in India suggests that the formation of a “micro blackhole” by the collider “would be rather a thrilling” occurrence, and that “it would also be perfectly safe.” Thus, thrill-seeking is posited as an adequate reason for risking the planet, and blanket reassurance is the simple answer to serious scientific concerns. Such an attitude may be well-meaning and widespread – especially at CERN – but amounts to reckless overconfidence.

Every safety assumption for the LHC, such as those that Clery relays, have been put in serious doubt by recent studies, as is well-documented in the human rights complaint just filed. Ironically, the only study cited by the Indian commentators for their reassurance is one by Casadio et al. early this year, which raised alarm in the scientific community by concluding that micro black holes from the LHC could survive for minutes or more. This contradicted CERN’s usual claim, echoed by Science Insider, that they’d evaporate in a trillionth of a second from Hawking radiation, even though such radiation has never detected in the black holes in space and has been disputed by some prominent physicists, including Belinski (2006), Helfer (2003), and Unruh and Schutzhold (2004).

On the other hand, if real, Hawking radiation from micro black holes could pose a serious danger of global warming and widespread destruction, a 3rd scenario ignored by CERN but developed in an important paper from a former group leader of the Max Planck Institute for Physics. In a new appendix to his revised paper at the physics website Arxiv.org, Rainer Plaga critiques the 2009 Casadio study, noting that it excluded without reason plausible parameter values that could result in “catastrophic growth” of some micro black holes produced by the LHC.

By Robert Houston on November 23, 2009 12:54 AM
Contrary to the statement by CERN’s publicist Mr. Gillies, two of the arguments by collider critics in recent years were conceded as essentially valid – not “baseless” – by CERN’s June 2008 safety report. First of all, it deviated from their previous safety report in 2003 by acknowledging that new theories made the production of microscopic black holes by the LHC a plausible possibility.

Secondly, CERN has conceded that there is a crucial difference of velocity between possible black holes created by cosmic rays versus those at the LHC. As stated in CERN’s own public report on “The Safety of the LHC” (linked at the end of Mr. Cho’s article), under “Microscopic black holes” (3rd paragraph): “Those produced by cosmic rays would pass harmlessly through the Earth into space, whereas those produced by the LHC could remain on Earth.”

Consequently, CERN’s theorists had to relocate the cosmic ray argument to dense neutron stars and white dwarf stars, but critics have pointed out various holes in such examples. Several are specified in the 73-page complaint just filed, which presents a powerful and well-documented indictment of CERN’s safety review.

The 90 page text-dump on this thread by the rude poster called “Global Alliance” is way off topic and never even mentions the LHC or CERN. It is an egregious abuse of the posting privilege at Science. Readers are advised to scroll to the end to read the trenchant and probing comments by philosopher of science Luis Sancho and a foremost risk assessment expert, Prof. Mark Leggett.

On the Huffington Post:

e-Creating Creation, Take 2: The Large Hadron Collider Fires Up Again
Commented Nov 27, 2009 at 03:14:14 in World
“Ali Rizvi has provided a better-than-average version of the standard journalistic approach to those who warn of public or planetary dangers: the LOL technique. The worse the described danger, the more light-hearted is the air of gaiety. The implication, of course, is that sophisticated readers should take none of the possible dangers seriously.
To reassure us, the writer quotes the preamble to CERN’s public safety report equating the LHC beams with cosmic rays. This is undermined, however, later in the CERN document, where it states under Microscopic Black Holes that, “Those produced by cosmic rays would pass harmlessly through the Earth into space, whereas those produced by the LHC could remain on Earth.”
The 73-page complaint filed against CERN at the UN is well-documented and developed by international scientific and legal experts, It makes a devastating case that the LHC is the most dangerous project in human history and that CERN – without regulation or oversight – is betting the planet on the basis of flimsy and misleading safety assumptions.”

Also, on natureblogs at The Great Beyond:

Actually, the name of the international group that filed the human rights complaint regarding CERN’s LHC project is even more clever than your 3rd paragraph suggests. “ConCERNed” stands for the Committee on CERN Experimental Dangers. Their 73-page complaint presents a well-documented indictment of the inadequacies of CERN’s safety review.

Posted by: Robert Houston | November 23, 2009 04:30 AM

At the Times of London Times OnLine:

Mark Henderson wrote that physicist Michio Kaku put the “chance that the LHC could produce a black hole” as comparable to the “chance that it could produce a fire-breathing dragon.”

But Prof. Kaku used the dragon joke only to illustrate the idea that “there is a tiny chance that anything will occur.” What he also wrote in his June 2008 Guardian article was that “the LHC is expected, at best, to create mini black holes at the rate of one per second…”

Some scientists are appalled by this prospect, including those who developed the well-documented 73-page complaint to the UN against CERN. Moreover, a recently expanded paper by physicist Rainer Plaga, PhD – at http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.1415v3 – rebuts CERN’s safety theorists and shows how Hawking radiation emitted by semi-stable micro black holes produced at the LHC could imperil France and Switzerland and even the entire planet.

POSTED BY: ROBERT HOUSTON | 28 NOV 2009 10:42:22
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Certainly the dragon analogy is a patronizing putdown which doesn’t hold up logically, but the key issue which Houston is emphasizing time and again is that Rainer Plaga’s paper Version 3 is going unread when it contains what seems to be a perfectly valid theoretical analysis which tells us we should be concerned, and one that should be addressed successfully by CERN apologists in a serious manner, and not dismissed lightly by the horde of hacks celebrating the greatest machine ever built in the history of the world, which is going to recreate the moment the universe was created a trillionth of a second after the Big bang, a prospect which surely should give pause to anyone who contemplates it.

As Michio Kaku himself has put it,

“God. By whatever signs or symbols you ascribe to the deity. This machine, the supercollider, will take us as close as humanly possible to his or her greatest creation, genesis. This is a genesis machine, designed to study the greatest event in all history: the birth of the universe.”

A vast machine, in all its beauty, which is going to mimic the Godlike power of Nature herself as she created the universe, Yes, Sir, but let’s be aware that there may well be some risk involved.

Of course, our own attitude is entirely parallel to the seven thousand or so irresponsible schoolboys who are driving this exciting prospect of tearing the very fabric of space and time, in that we cannot imagine not going ahead to whatever extreme this fantastic construction can take us. If it is built, it must run.

But we also are prepared for those more responsible in their attitude to the future of 6 billion men women and children who point out that perhaps they should have a say in the matter.

We will post shortly a full account of where things stand, and how irresponsible and childish is the performance of the media once again in a matter of some consequence in science.

Hepatitis C scare

Thanks for the Hepatitis C item. Apparently they are going to use an “antisense” drug, which seems suitable. After all, the drugs used in HIV/AIDS make no sense at all, so this is a familiar type of treatment. But whether hepatitis C makes sense or not is not something we have studied yet. If you die within a year from liver cancer, presumably the virus does not often cause liver cancer if three or four million have it in the US, since deaths are not that high, presumably. Does it in fact cause the cancer? Anyhow Hepatitis C is worth checking into certainly although you mistook the claim, it seems, since it was for liver cancer not Hep-C.

The new agent is a so-called antisense drug that binds to RNA required by the virus for replication, preventing the virus from proliferating in the liver. Preliminary tests suggest that the drug, called SPC3649, has no toxic side effects, does not allow development of resistance — which plagues other hepatitis drugs — and has lasting effects after treatment has stopped…

An estimated 170 million people worldwide, and 3 million to 4 million Americans, have chronic hepatitis C infections. The persistent infections produce scarring of the liver, or cirrhosis, and frequently lead to liver cancer, which is the most rapidly increasing cause of cancer death in the United States, according to virologist Robert E. Lanford of the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio, Texas. Life expectancy is a year after diagnosis, he said.

Back to the Big Bang 2.0

Unfortunately, we still have to assess the correct risk of the CERN machine to 6 billion lives before turning to this forbidding topic. “Recreating” the beginning of the universe seems rash, to say the least, but this is what one scientist there is now insisting is the right way to characterize the adventure.

That gives even us pause, gung ho though we are to switch on anything this big to see what happens. Another post is called for even though the response of this normally skeptical community seems largely inert. Where is Robert Houston, for instance, whose posted Comments at Science, Nature and now the London Times seem very well informed and unimpressed with CERN’s safety reassurances?

eg at Nature News:

The theme of a scientist at the LHC being connected to a terrorist group was portrayed last Spring in the movie “Angels and Demons.” The single scientist as terrorist story may be misleading, however, for it implies that CERN’s leaders are blameless, i.e., “Angels.”

But in terms of potential threats to the planet, CERN’s management may itself function as a terrorist group far more dangerous than Al Quaeda, for they are subjecting France, Switzerland and the world to the risk of damage on a Holocaust scale through the potential generation of black holes and strangelets by the LHC. Some scientists, such as physicist Rainer Plaga, PhD (at arXiv.org) and Prof. Otto Rossler (see pdf at wissennavigator) have warned against the reckless game of Russian roulette that CERN is playing with our lives.
Robert Houston

21 Oct, 2009 Posted by: Robert Houston

“But in terms of potential threats to the planet, CERN’s management may itself function as a terrorist group far more dangerous than Al Quaeda, for they are subjecting France, Switzerland and the world to the risk of damage on a Holocaust scale through the potential generation of black holes and strangelets by the LHC.”

Seriously? No one with any credibility takes these supposed “threats” seriously. The earth is bombarded constantly by particles orders of magnitude more powerful than anything the LHC can create. Every second of everyday. To compare the scientists at CERN to Al Quida is disingenuous, dishonest and downright rude!

23 Oct, 2009 Posted by: Ian Brooks

My earlier comment quoted by Ian Brooks should have been better qualified. I would like to note that the leaders of CERN are no doubt well-motivated by good intentions to further scientific progress. They are in no sense conspiratorial or malicious. My comment was only concerned with the possibility of unintended adverse consequences from potential phenomena produced at the LHC.

Are cosmic ray particles striking the Earth’s atmosphere the same as protons collided at the LHC? Some scientists note a crucial differerence: if micro black holes were formed in direct collisions in the collider, some would be slowed to below the Earth’s escape velocity and linger, whereas the products of cosmic rays would speed off harmlessly at nearly light-speed. The cosmic ray argument has thus been shifted to dense neutron stars and white dwarf stars, but critics (such as Plaga) point to holes in each example. A safety conference including all sides should be called.

29 Oct, 2009

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-hepatitis-c4-2009dec04,0,1848983.story

We were shocked to read in this article that a prominent virologist says that, currently, life expectancy after a Hep-C diagnosis is only one year!!!

My God! The Hep-C virus is deadlier than HIV!!!

Why aren’t we having “World Hep-C day” instead of World Aids day? Why aren’t our health authorities warning us about Hep-C with outdoor boards, public service announcements and the like?

Why have no celebrities joined the fight against Hep-C?

Someone’s not doing their job.