Mockery, I hardly knew ya

[Sethomas]

So a doctor tells his patient, "I have good news and bad news for you. I will give you the bad news first: you're going to die very slowly over the next two months before you meet a miserable and painful end." Totally aghast, the patient weakly mumbles out in a flicker of hope, "what GOOD news could there possibly be?" To that, the doctor pointed you a voluptuous young woman and said, "see that intern over there? We fuck twice a week."

Anyways, I've been talking A LOT about this subject with people in recent months because the LHC is something I've been excited about (in non-eschatalogical lights, honestly) since 2001 or so. I used to read Brian Greene-type lay introductions to HIGH PHYSICS, but I readily admit that I don't have the requisite PhD(s) to have a legitimate voice except in certain areas where I can take an aesthetic preference to something. For instance, I concede that most people with a better understanding of the material opt for the Copenhagen or Many-Worlds interpretations, but I still prefer to go more along the lines of any of the hidden variable theories.

To be honest, coming to a CLASSROOM understanding of Relativity Theory and brief academic forays into particle physics gives me a way to easily imagine a black hole being formed in a particle accelerator... but it's not really the same way that I tend to hear others talk about it. In short, I take the subject to reduce to the fact that any object accelerated to ultra-high speeds would eventually acquire such a density that its gravitational escape velocity would equal c, and technically from there it could be manipulated to act as a conventional black hole. What i see in the news talks more about black holes being formed from anomaly events resulting from specific collisions between separate particles.

In any case, the physics community at large is of the opinion that Hawking Radiation would thoroughly absolve any man-made black hole from the possibility of destroying the earth. I've honestly never liked the actual approach with which Hawking Radiation takes its foundation, but people more educated than I am are very convinced that it happens. Hence, the hilarious thing is that this puts the physics community in the awkward position of telling the world, "According to these equations, the odds of a black hole created in an accelerator destroying the Earth are on the scale of one in a billion trillion. Right now we're fairly sure that these equations are accurate."

[Colonel Flagg]

Originally Posted by Sethomas

[...] this puts the physics community in the awkward position of telling the world, "According to these equations, the odds of a black hole created in an accelerator destroying the Earth are on the scale of one in a billion trillion. Right now we're fairly sure that these equations are accurate."

In my junior year of college, I attended a lecture given by Velojia Tokarevsky (sp?), who later went on to become the head of Nuclear Power Oversight in the (then) Soviet Union. This lecture, incidentally, occurred about 6 months after the accident at Three Mile Island. In it, he presented some factual data and some questionable assumptions (estimating the chance of a catastrophic nuclear accident to be equivalent to the earth being struck by a meteorite causing similar catastrophic damage), culminating in his final pronouncement that nuclear power was safe.

Of course, on his watch in the USSR, a little thing called Chernobyl happened.

The problem in making ridiculous estimates like "one in a billion trillion" is that no one thinks about what happens if that "one" actually hits - Poof. The gun goes off, and the cat is dead. Or in this case, the earth.

[MetalMilitia]

Originally Posted by Colonel Flagg

Of course, on his watch in the USSR, a little thing called Chernobyl happened.

The problem in making ridiculous estimates like "one in a billion trillion" is that no one thinks about what happens if that "one" actually hits - Poof. The gun goes off, and the cat is dead. Or in this case, the earth.

Its' not really the same thing though as Chernobyl was a poorly built first generation nuclear power plant maintained by Ukrainian farm workers with no training.
His predictions may wall have been based on second generation power plants which were being built at the time of the Chernobyl disaster. These reactors are unable to sustain a reaction if problems occur and as such do have an extremely low possibility of failure.
The predictions being made about the LHC are being made by real scientists about a specific installation, and there is every reason to believe they're right.