mad scientists and black holes

Deep below the earth beneath the border of Switzerland and France, construction is underway on a huge circular machine. This machine, called the Large Hadron Collider, will be the biggest, most powerful particle accelerator ever built, and will enable scientists to gain new insights into sub-atomic physics. The price tag for the enterprise is 8 billion US dollars.
One of the experiments that scientists want to conduct there is a re-creation of conditions of the big bang. Many physicists have speculated that experiments such as this could generate tiny black holes. Savas Dimopoulos from the Stanford physics department and Greg Landsberg from Brown University wrote an article in 2001 suggesting that stable black holes could be created at the LHC.
This in turn has prompted much discussion on several websites such as slashdot and physorg as to whether this will destroy the planet.
Activist James Blodgett has devoted a website to documenting the dangers posed by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC for short). While this has caused irritation and anger from some scientists, there are reports that Blodgett is conducting a survey of the physics community to determine whether there is, or is not, a subset of scientists that believe the dangers are real.
Several articles have come out debunking the notion that the LHC poses a risk to humanity.
Unfortunately, despite the mocking tone of many commentators on the growing paranoia and disaster scenarios about the LHC, many of the explanations that they put forward as to why it is safe are surprisingly shaky. I should note at this point that it is not my intention to whip up hysteria about the LHC. The non-event of the so called millenium bug, also known as the Y2k bug, demonstrated clearly how even the most convincing disaster scenarios can not eventuate. However, the physics community has done an appalling job of debunking these claims. Let me go through them, and explain why many of these arguments are less than convincing.

1. A risk assessment was done of the LHC which concluded that there was no danger. There are two problems with this. First, it is an appeal to authority (more of that coming up), in the vein of "Aristotle said that the sun goes around the earth, and Aristotle is smarter than you." Scientific knowledge, unlike religious knowledge, eschews appeals to authority. Second, the report was conducted by the LHC's own safety group, and therefore had a vested interest in the continuation of the project. For this to be more convincing, at least the logic of the report needs to be transparent. However, the report is unavailable online, which only adds to the intrigue.

2. The doomsayers said the same thing about the last big particle accelerator, the LHIC, and nothing happened then. This is probably the most appealing of the "we'll be fine" arguments that I have heard, relying on strong inductive logic. Other “we were fine in the past” arguments are not so convincing. These include, for example, the first atomic explosion. At the time, it was unclear whether a chain reaction would stop or whether it would expand until the earth was destroyed. They pushed the button anyway, and the earth was not destroyed. The problem with this example is that it reminds us of the awesome power of subatomic physics. Subatomic physics, as my mother might say, is not a toy.
I should also point out that the fact that doomsday predictions were not borne out in the past does not mean they were wrong. It may simply have been a case of "dodging the bullet." When I was in college, there was a student who had a reputation for risk-taking, especially reckless driving. I made the mistake of letting him drive me to a party once. On the way, he was driving through back streets and ran a stop sign, barely even slowing down as he approached.
"Hey, that was a stop sign," I said. "We could have been killed."
"Nah," he replied. "You never see any other cars at that intersection."
Needless to say, I was not a passenger with him again. But in his mind, he was proven right: all those people who said "don't run stop signs" obviously didn't know what they were talking about, because he did it all the time, and nothing ever happened to him. Similarly, simply pointing out the risk of a physics experiment going wrong is not the same as claiming that it will lead to certain catastrophe. The fact that a past experiment did not result in catastrophe is irrelevant.
Incidentally, a black hole may have been created in the LHIC accelerator. The implications of this are not clear.

3. If a black hole is created, it will disappear again quickly. This argument is based on a theory put forward by Stephen Hawking, that small black holes dissipate in a process called Hawking Radiation (abbreviated as HR). That’s a relief, because that means that even if a black hole is created, it won’t stick around long enough to do any damage. The one drawback to this is that Stephen Hawking’s wonderful theory about Hawking radiation has never been tested. We simply don’t know if it’s true. It should be true, given current knowledge about physics. However, all theories of nature are fundamentally limited, and as long as science proceeds, all theories have a finite shelf-life before they are falsified. Newton’s theory of gravity had a massive amount of evidence in its favor, yet it was superceded by Einstein’s theory of gravity. A theory with no experimental evidence at all to back it up is not worth banking the future of the planet on. Of course it would be wonderful if we found evidence that Stephen Hawking’s theories are not only beautiful, but are also true, but we don’t have it yet. Strike this argument out.

4. Tiny black holes are raining down on earth constantly anyway. With all those black holes passing through the atmosphere every day, one or two more in an underground Swiss tunnel won't make any difference. But we don't know for sure that tiny black holes are in such plentiful supply. This idea is a theoretical conjecture, again based on the theories of Stephen Hawking. While there is some evidence that it is true, that evidence has alternative interpretations. In short, physicists need to steer clear of theoretical arguments why black holes will be safe, or unstable, or fly away into space. These arguments are simply not convincing to the public, because they prompt the obvious response: what if your theories are wrong?

5. Similar processes involving high-energy collisions are occuring all the time in the atmosphere anyway. A related argument was presented on slashdot, that similar processes occur on the moon. This, to a layperson, is and reassuring. The question it raises, though, is what is so special about the LHC then? Are they really spending five billion dollars to re-create processes that occur every day in the upper atmosphere? And if so, then isn’t all the talk about re-creating conditions at the big bang rather overblown nonsense? You can’t have it both ways. It’s either banal, or it’s unknown territory. Take your pick.

In short, the weight of opinion in the physics community is that there is nothing to worry about. Since I don’t have either the time or the expertise to investigate the issues myself, ultimately I have to take them at their word. On the other hand, if a sizeable minority of physicists believe that there is an appreciable risk, then the LHC should not be operated. I would regard 0.1% risk or greater as an appreciable risk, maybe even less (when we’re talking about global annihilation, you want your risk to be very, very low). But how can such a risk be calculated? It is impossible to attach a probability to the correctness of a theory in the absence of any experimental data, and the scientists who have recently done so in the media have done the LHC a disservice.
There are some voices warning of disaster scenarios. This is discomforting, although the fact that the majority of physicists are certain that no disaster will befall us is enough reassurance for me to get to sleep at night. Unless the dissent becomes a crescendo, I am not going to panic. As the turn of the millenium showed us, the end of the world doesn't happen every day.
The last word on this must go to brundlefly, a contributor on slashdot:

Every black hole... in the universe is the result of some fairly advanced civilization reaching a point where it says “Hey, let’s build a Large Hadron Collider and see what happens.”
The rest, as they say, is astronomical history...

the fundamental life form

Several years ago, when I was a graduate student at Macquarie University, Daniel Dennett came and spoke. For months I had heard philosophers talk at length about the flaws in Dennett's reasoning and the problems with his epistemolgical stance. "Rampant externalist" was a phrase I heard applied to him, with a tone that suggested it was intended as an insult. But when they had the chance to actually raise their concerns, they sat up the back and said nothing. The questions to Dennett at the end of his talk were either from curious students or Dennett fans.
Much of what Dennett said was stuff covered in his books. He also talked about change-blindness and gave a demo. Change-blindness is always a sure-hit crowd pleaser if you are talking about consciousness or the mind, although for someone who has done the circuit of consciousness seminars, it was less than enthralling.
For me, the most interesting point he made was a comment in response to a question, and it has stayed with me to this day. I forget the question, which at any rate was only marginally connected to Dennett's answer.
He suggested that the fundamental, unchanging form of life throughout the universe is bacteria. Bacteria, he pointed out, was here at the beginning. Bacteria will be here when we are long gone. Bacteria live deep in the ocean and in the highest reaches of the atmosphere. Furthermore, bacteria are known to be able to survive in space, and have probably travelled between the planets of the solar system. In fact, it is not implausible to think that bacteria are spread throughout the universe.
Dennett believes that multi-cellular life forms, like trees, fish, and humans, arise from single-cell bacteria. This evolutionary step could occur anywhere. However, at some level of complexity, the edifice falls apart. For example, humans may develop the ability to destroy life on earth. So, Dennett suggested, perhaps complex life is a chance event, that pops up around the universe like sparks in a fire, surviving briefly - in universal terms - before dying down again into the eternally smouldering embers of bacteria.
I have since learned that this idea did not originate with Dennett, but is a theory dating back centuries. The theory is referred to as panspermia.
As Greg Clark of space.com says, they thrive in the arctic, so why not on Mars? There could be life there despite the findings of the Viking space expedition.

you are a cyborg

Andy Clark wrote a very clever book, Natural Born Cyborgs. It's non-fiction; the central thesis of the book is that humans are cyborgs by their very nature. A cyborg is a synthesis of man-machine. Therefore someone with a pacemaker, or a hearing aid, or an artificial limb, is technically a cyborg. But Clark takes it further- it's not just people with medical assistance who are cyborgs, it's all of us. Our diaries and calendars help us plan in a way that the original brains in our head could not, at least, not without assistance. Our vehicles, our shoes. They're all extensions of us- we collect and add to our bodies, building ourselves, discarding old shells like last year's fur.
Clark said that once he had this insight, it became obvious that when he lost his laptop, it was like experiencing a special kind of brain damage. The reason? It was brain damage. Clark says that his laptop is an extension of his brain.

technology... magic... what's the difference?

Arthur C Clark famously said that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Hence, planes, telephones, guns, watches, and so forth could all be passed off as magic if introduced to a primitive tribe. The problem is that when you're using magic every day it becomes banal. But some of the most wondrous dreams of our ancestors have come to be. One of my favorites is telepathy - communicating directly from mind to mind.
There are lots of variants of 'telepathy', but the one that seems to be closest to being true is the telepathy in John Wyndham's The Chrysalids. Some children are born into a village with a mutation that allows them to communicate in secret, wherever they are. Well, if they had cellphones with text messaging, I don't know that they would have bothered with all those thought waves, because text messages can achieve the same thing. I can be anywhere at all, even in close proximity to other people, such as in a meeting, for example, and compose a secret text message to my wife. She will be the only one who can access it, and she can privately reply. I don't know what the kids in that book could do that we can't.