First 100 Days<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n The crank in question is Walter Wagner, the moron who tried to use a lawsuit
\nto stop the LHC from being activated. (Just that much, already, is amazingly silly;
\nhe sued in Hawaii, but the LHC is in Geneva, Switzerland. How does a Hawaiian court
\nhave any jurisdiction?)<\/p>\n
Anyway… Wagner claims that the LHC could destroy the earth. See, there’s a tiny theoretical chance that the right collision in the LHC could create a microscopic black hole. According to Wagner, if that happens, the black hole will swallow the entire earth.<\/p>\n
That claim is, itself, based on some pretty bad math. The only<\/em> theory that predicts
\nthat it’s possible to create a microscopic black hole also<\/em> predicts that such a black
\nhole would evaporate – that is, would completely disappear in a burst of energy – immediately. The
\nexact same math that predicts that you could create a black hole in a high-energy collision also
\npredicts that the hole would be destroyed before it had time to do any damage. If you tweak it so that the black hole lasts longer, the energy requirements change so that it’s no longer possible to create it in the LHC. To make the black hole last a microsecond is absolutely beyond the
\nenergy of any collider that we could ever build on the earth.<\/p>\n But let’s skip that – demonstrating that is pretty complicated. To get an idea of
\nthe level of understanding of the guy who claims that there’s a real danger, let’s just
\ntake a look at what he says.<\/p>\n
When asked what the probability of the LHC destroying the earth is, he says 50%. Why?
\nBecause either it could happen, or it couldn’t – therefore, there’s a 50% chance of it happening.<\/p>\n
You could argue that that’s naive Bayesian reasoning – but if you did, you’d be an idiot. Classic Bayesian arguments about stuff like this would say that you use 50\/50 as an initial prior in the absence of any other information<\/em>; then you adjust that based on whatever
\nother information you have available. For Mr. Wagner’s stupid argument, it’s based on
\na complex physical theory – a complex physical theory which provides lots of information
\nwhich you can use to update your probability estimate.<\/em><\/p>\n Mr. Wagner’s 50\/50 claim is based on the fact that he’s absolutely clueless about how any of
\nthis stuff works. He clearly doesn’t understand probability, and he clearly doesn’t understand
\nphysics.<\/p>\n
But he’s awfully funny.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Via the Bad Astronomer comes one of the most pathetic abuses of probability that I’ve ever seen. I’m simply amazed that this idiot was willing to go on television and say this. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart M – Th 11p \/ 10c Large Hadron Collider thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis First […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bad-physics","category-bad-probability"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-cp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}