Tonight marks the debut of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight on HBO. JenLuc Piquant reminds us of one of the former Daily Show correspondent’s finest moments: confronting Walter Wagner on why he thought black holes from the LHC were a threat to the existence of the Earth.
5 thoughts on “I’m Not Sure That’s How Probability Works, Walter”
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John Oliver: We may as well try breeding, Walter. There’s a 50/50 chance it’ll work.
Beautiful and brilliant bit. I adore John Oliver (though I only get to see him via computer). And I truly enjoy this blog. Keep going!
I think it is fortunate that the LHC hasn’t created microscopic black holes at all. If it did, I don’t think Hawking Radiation would save us. All the equipment in the LHC would have a lot more matter than what would be provided from random particle pair production. Then the density of particle pair production would be so sparse that a microscopic black hole could fly between two sets of random particle pairs without even having an interaction… I don’t think that Hawking Radiation would account for that on that size scale.
Someone’s not moderating the spam in their comment stream. If I were Jon Oliver I would do a satirical parody about that, but as I’m not, I’ll just say that in my opinion, JO is the closet thing to Monty Python since Monty Python.
finally! thank you – great blog