You can always count on the Daily Show. As John presaged earlier this month, correspondent John Oliver visited CERN to do a report on the LHC, which has finally appeared. Watch as John Ellis lays the science smackdown!
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M – Th 11p / 10c | |||
| Large Hadron Collider | ||||
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The best thing about it is that, once again, Jon Stewart and company have taken an issue that completely flummoxed most major news media — in this case, the purported danger that the LHC will destroy the world — and actually get it right. In addition to visiting CERN itself, Oliver scored an interview with Walter Wagner (“graduated UC Berkeley with a Minor in Physics”), originator of much of the hysteria and lawsuits. You’ll get to hear Wagner explain that the probability the LHC will destroy the world is — wait for it — fifty percent. You know, because when you have two things that can possibly happen, obviously each has half the probability, right? I don’t want to say too much about Walter Wagner, because, if nothing else, the guy is really fond of a good lawsuit. So I have no comment whatsoever on Walter Wagner’s competence or sanity. But I do know people who are utterly incompetent and completely insane, who resemble Walter Wagner in certain ways. I’ll stop there.
See, major news media? It’s not that hard!
That was irony, student. A form of humor, you know. Anyway, I should have said childish scribbles. And Feynman would have laughed his head off at that joke.
since no one knows what physics we will see at the LHC, how can one be sure of anything? There could be physics that we don’t understand that could create black holes and destroy Earth. Since we don’t know what this new physics is, the 50-50 odds could be reasonable. Just because know one yet has come up with a theory of black holes at the LHC, doesn’t mean that it can’t happen. Just sayin’
I have to say my favorite part of that was the dialog very near the beginning:
Oliver: “Evilgeniussayswhat?”
Ellis: “You’re getting incomprehensible.”
I absolutely love the precise language that he uses there to completely circumvent the joke. One of these days, I hope to be well-practiced enough to use language that precisely.
There is nothing good about Wagner’s side of the lawsuit. For one, it was dismissed. In the appeal of the dismissal, Wagner advanced the theory that US Dollars are the only form of money that matters in the world. I mocked this with LOLcat speech and suggested in February that The Daily Show was the proper venue.
There are definetly four documents in the media, which shows, that CERN-representatives
uses a perfect-Zero-Risk-language when refering to the LHC. There are other documents in the media, that shows, there exists scientists, who say, the risc is not Zero, although small. This is an important scientific contradiction, which may not stand before beginning the LHC-experiment over the limit of 2 TeV.
If I were completely clueless about the physics community, one would get the impression from the daily show report that all physicists at the LHC were white males.
z Says: You wouldn’t get that impression after 15min walk through the halls at CERN…I guess the probability is 50%.
@ maddox: Um, no.
@ NotJohnStewart: Um, yes. at the very least we don’t know what the probability is.
@ NotJohnStewart: ps: If you asked scientists in the 1800s what is the probability for theories like quantum physics, special relativity, and general relativity to be true, they would unanimously
said 0% ! And they would all have been dead wrong.
Nobody knows how to calculate this probability since we don’t what new revolution lies ahead. May be we see quantum gravity at the TeV scale against common expectations and no one really understands this theory. Everyone is quoting probabilities out of their ass but the truth is that nobody really knows.
A bit off-topic: Have you been noticing what sort of stuff Discover is publishing lately?
@maddox: Um, no. It’s not that these collisions haven’t happened before – it’s that we haven’t been able to do it in an environment that’s controlled and directly observable. Far more energetic collisions happen in the atmosphere all the time, and though I haven’t looked at the sky in the last hour, no black holes. That’s why the probability is so low. Because it’s already been tested. If we were colliding at energies beyond what the earth has experienced or what we’ve observed in the range of our telescopes, then we might be able to say we don’t know the probability.
Did you know …. that Walter Wagner is the evil twin of Harvey Newman at Caltech?
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The probability of 1 in 50 million of a destructive incident was calculated for RHIC in 1994. At those odds the estimate was half a chance of destruction by 2100. Since no time frame was given a half a chance of destruction is still 50/50. The LHC will create a quark/gluon plasma 25 to 30 times greater with the lead cycle. Presumably the 50/50 option will arrive a whole lot sooner.