Manfred comments on Horrible LHC Inconsistency - Less Wrong

17 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 September 2008 03:12AM

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Comment author: steven0461 12 December 2010 09:26:50PM 2 points [-]

The issue is that as the paper's authors explain but don't particularly emphasize, the argument you gave, which is the argument usually given, is flawed -- if these black holes from cosmic rays don't Hawking-radiate but do lose their electric charge, then they have enough momentum to pass harmlessly through the Earth and Sun, which is not the case for some of the black holes that would be created by LHC. Giddings and Mangano are some of the people assigned by CERN to study LHC safety, so this isn't something a crackpot made up. It turns out in the paper that there's an argument for safety that isn't (as far as I know) flawed, involving cosmic rays hitting neutron stars and white dwarfs, but this is a different (and far more involved-looking) argument than the one you based your extreme confidence on.

Comment author: Manfred 12 December 2010 10:04:30PM *  1 point [-]

I'm not sure the probability they arrive at is any higher than the standard, more ignorant one - it depends on how complicated our model of the universe gets when you can (basically) selectively ignore quantum mechanics, and odd things happen to general relativity too, and then you throw in the probability of the LHC producing a black hole moving slower than escape velocity (tiny already).

Comment author: steven0461 12 December 2010 10:41:45PM *  2 points [-]

the probability of the LHC producing a black hole moving slower than escape velocity (tiny already)

The calculation is in appendix F of the paper. Apparently the probability is tiny for some values of the black hole mass and large for others, so if those others are at all plausible the total probability isn't tiny (all this being conditional on black holes being created in the first place).

Anyway, I've said my bit and since we all agree this scenario is too improbable to be a concrete worry, I'm going to bow out of the discussion.