Why I feel Sir David King is wrong.

Maybe he's simply being pragmatic Jude. Not much good reading a book on physics while your house burns down around you. You fail to see that it's also our quest for knowledge that's got us into the mess we're in at the moment. It strikes me that if you stopped eating for a few weeks you might realise your priorities are somewhat confused and that starving is not something that millions of people should be forced to suffer so that scientist can have bigger toys to play with. Get a pet you might realise that blundering animals aren't that bad after all.

I don't know - figuring out you didn't need to sacrifice people to keep the Sun God happy was a step forward, I reckon. ~ www.fabulousmother.co.uk

How many hundreds of thousands do you reckon are dying every year due to flooding and related tradgedies like mud slides and homelessness, Lou? I reckon a few sacrifices to the Sun god might have been a drop in the ocean in comparison. Of course you could argue that the severe weather is nothing to do with mankind or his technology but then again it's these bright scientific brains that tell us that it is! If these bright scientific brains had not invented weapons of war how different would the world be? Without their rifles and cannon would the Americans have defeated the red indians and replaced an essentially ecologically balanced system with one based on greed? Would the world live in fear of terrorism and the people in fear of their masters? We treat the planet as though it were just a resource to be exploited and the animals, in the main, as either food stock or competition for resources that should be reduced to a minimum so that we have a few left to populate our zoos. We pollute the whole planet and fill the sea with plastic and now it seems we will slowly cover it with nuclear power stations so we can dump the radio-active waste into the sea to kill off the remaining fish... perhaps we should have sacrificed the scientists to the Sun god and then maybe we actually get some sunshine :O) Notice that the LHC people are saying that they don't expect any adverse reactions - that any mini black holes will PROBABLY break back down into their constituent parts - what if they are WRONG? The arguement that such high-energy collisions regularly happen in space without causing disasters are missing the point... space is essentially empty but here on Earth, were the magnetic containment fields to collapse, there would be food aplenty for the ravenous little beasties to grow exponetially! Oh brave new world whose new high-priests risk all in their quest for a God particle.

Okay. What gets me is lumping everything in together. It’s the, all science is bad, all technology is bad, no-one should ever have picked up a Bunsen burner, attitude... ‘God preserve us from meddling scientists’ is what I was replying to. Not all the suffering in the world can be blamed on man’s development of science and technology. And there are plenty of examples where the human endeavour to discover the scientific reasons behind how our planet works instead of succumbing to superstition has been used to the good. For example – earthquakes. You can’t blame them on humans, they will always happen – but the effort to understand them and the science and technology behind the Tsunami Warning System could prevent the horrendous loss of life suffered in 2004. ~ www.fabulousmother.co.uk

P.s. on the other point, the speed and potential scale of destruction in modern warfare is down to the availability of modern technology, I grant you. But the world before scientific discovery was a pretty brutish place to live in too. It seems to me that humans can’t resist trying to find out the answers to the big questions. If it’s not science, then it’s left purely to religion. The belief that the Red Indians were heathens enabled the settlers to do what they did with a clear conscience. ~ www.fabulousmother.co.uk

I agree Lou. Everything has its pros and cons. The question is whether on balance science has been a blessing or a curse. In my opinion had we been more careful it would be a lot easier question to answer. As has been said many times before - just because we can do something does not mean we should... at least until we understand as well as possible all the drawbacks as well as the potential benefits. Does anyone really know whether a mini black hole will be contained by a magnetic field? How much power does this new machine need to run and why couldn't it wait until we have solved some of the problems associated with Global Warming and Climate Change. Jude seems to assume that all knowledge is good and that our only saving grace is that we are pursuing the quest for it... so that ultimately we can stop eating, craping and reproducing like animals it seems. I think this aspect of science - the conversion of people into machines - is the one that is most repugnant to many people and engenders statements like "God preserve us from meddling scientists". As for 1/2 a billion being dwarfed by 4.4 billion well it's roughly a ninth and it's for one single project - what's the cost of all such projects Jude? Posted this before I noticed your last post Jude. Following the link I entirely disagree with this " "I think the faint chance of annihilation is a small price to pay for the knowledge of the nature of our Universe that this will engender!" So far as I'm concerned any chance we will annihilate the planet is too big a chance to take - they should build it on the moon! You only have to watch the childish joy these people gain from playing with their toy to know that, just like excited children, they will tell us absolutely anything to make sure they can continue to play with it.

Yes, but a little knowledge is a dangerous thing! The crazy way we rush into thing with the ''well it probably won't explode'' mentality is hardly scientific is it? Life is beautiful in all its forms and doesn't need to be knowledgeable just fit for purpose. You've been seduced by the dreams and delusions of what science is capable off... like so many others you don't seem to realise that you never get something for nothing and we've lost too much already in our search for a technological paradise. Wisdom is what is most important not simply gaining knowledge. The wisdom to know how and when to use the knowledge you have is far more important that constantly constructing new theories which are eventually replaced with new fads as the evidence against them mounts. Personally, I think we are far better at breaking things than we are at fixing them and I feel that to have any real chance everyone who can help with saving the planet should be helping not making things worse!

After due consideration I've decided that eating, excreting and reproducing are amoungst my most favourite pastimes and that I'm not really that interested in the Higgs Bosun. As you know Jude I am very interested in the generation of energy from our excretions which although a very new technology it already looks like it could be a viable source of power in the home. To my mind, finding and developing such new souces of energy could supplement traditional green technologies to such an extent that we would not be forced down the road of more nuclear power stations with all its attendant problems. Power generation from the sea needs a lot more research so that we can not only get more power but also hopefully reduce the effects of storms and Tsunamis. If we can actually actually swap cars onto hydrogen while finding a simple yet energy efficient way of getting hydrogen from water then everyone will benefit from the cleaner air and reduction in carbon emissions. Never mind building new atom smashers etc. which will use tremendous amounts of power just at a time when we should be using less... what's the rush? Are the Higg's Bosun's going to sail away on some pirate ship with Johnny Dep? Let's sort the planet's problems out and then we can think about where we should go from there. Never argue with a King :O)

I don't believe a word of it! If you fire kids up with the belief that through science they can help save the planet then you will get more scientists not less. My guess is that Wark has an axe to grind... King is absolutely right - we need more funding and extra brainpower to work on the projects that aren't about pie in the sky, wouldn't it be nice if we could all live forever dream schemes but pragmatic ways to deal with the huge problems that face us NOW! Surely you can't have missed the latest results of Climate Change Jude. Do you think it will go away and wait until the kids have finished playing with their big bangers? We need some solution to what to do with all our garbage since tips around the world are becomming full and all we can think of is to start charging for plastic bags. There is so much plastic in the sea that many of the creatures that live on and in it are dying or commiting suicide. As you know the bees are disappearing and crops are failing all over the place thanks to Climate Change. Millions are set to become homeless thanks to Global warming and some 40 per cent of the world's water supplies are under threat. What shall we do - I know let's play with our new doomsday machine it'll take our minds off all the world's problems.

£500M *is* a drop in the ocean. The ill-fated new NHS computer system is costing over £12Bn, the NHS itself costs over £80Bn a year, perhaps those who think science has generally been a bad thing would like to cut that first. The egg-heads will follow the funding to a certain extent (they have bills to pay just like the rest of us) and more money into climate research would attract more brains, but the idea that someone (David King? Mykle?) should pick who works on what is patently ridiculous. Besides, climate research is a 'sexy' science and already gets more money than it probably deserves. LHC, by the way, has required big developments in grid computing which feeds back into 'good' sciences like protein folding simulations and, indeed, climate modelling. It also requires lots of superconductivity, superconductivity is one of those technologies that may actually yield carbon neutral power and transportation systems. The Higgs Boson (like most science) is just a small step on the way to a fuller understanding the universe. Knowledge is important. It was a bunch of beardy egg-heads that studied the climate thirty years ago (when it wasn't sexy and nobody cared), and without them squandering tax-payers money on shiny supercomputers and pointless weather balloons we wouldn't even know today that carbon is a problem. And it *is* safe. High energy collisions don't just happen in the vacuum of space, they happen in the moon where there is plenty to feed a growing black hole. They also happen in our outer atmosphere but fortunately the earth has a magnetic field to stop the cosmic rays frying our brains.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that people should be picked for certain jobs - well, anymore than they already are - just that more resources of both money and brains should be made available to help solve the pressing problems facing the planet rather than allowing the best brains to do research that could just as well be done later. In a perfect world we should all be free to do what we want but in the real world those who can help should - whether or not they would prefer to be playing computer games or colliding protons. It's about time some scientists and various other people started to realise just how serious the problems are... We are talking about a collection of threats which together threaten life as we know it not a game, a scientific simulation or a plot for second rate sci-fi story. If, as you say Maddan, "High energy collisions don't just happen in the vacuum of space, they happen in (sic) the moon" then why waste so much time and money building such a complex, expensive and dangerous machine here on Earth when all you need to do is build a detector on the moon and connect it to a specially designed high bandwidth communication system? Better still, wait a few years until Virgin Translunar has established itself and then the scientist can all go and do their experiments on the moon :O) Seriously Maddan, please post a link I'd like to look into the similarity between the collisions on the moon and those in the collider.

What link would you like me to post? My physics knowledge is shaky at best, but I thought it was pretty much common knowledge that protons and other similar tiny thingys go wizzing about space all the time, occasionally they bang into each other, and occasionally they bang into each other in (really, "in") the moon. As for looking for higgs bosons on the moon, I'm going to be charitable and assume you were joking.

I presumed you were talking about ultra high energy cosmic rays Maddan which are very, very rare even on a planetary scale (which is why scientists claim such collisions happen in space - which is very, very BIG). How many such collisions do you estimate have been in the moon recently and how many such collisions will there be over the lifetime of the LHC? The LHC protons will each have an energy of 7 TeV, giving a total collision energy of 14 TeV (2.2 μJ). At this energy the protons have a Lorentz factor of about 7,500 and move at about 99.999999% of light speed. The LHC will also be used to collide lead (Pb) heavy ions with a collision energy of 1,150 TeV.

the highest-energy cosmic rays observed attain energies of around 10^20 eV, and the total flux of cosmic rays with energies of 10^17 eV or more that hit each square centimeter of the Earth’s surface is measured to be about 5x10^–14 per second. The area of the Earth’s surface is about 5x10^18 square centimeters, and the age of the Earth is about 4.5 billion years. Therefore, over 3x10^22 cosmic rays with energies of 10^17 eV or more, equal to or greater than the LHC energy, have struck the Earth’s surface since its formation. This means that Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth already – and the planet still exists. - Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions, LHC Safety Assessment Group(*) http://lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/LSAG-Report.pdf (I hate you for making me go read that) If it destroys the world I will personally help smash up Stephen Hawking's wheelchair.

Well done Maddan! The problem is that the collisions on the earth and the moon are not in vacuum and hence are not realy a similar kind of collision to the LHC - since there will be a lot of other, extranious particles involved. it could easily be that the surround material on the Planetary collisions would add many different possibilities and of course may actually have a limiting effect on the types of particles produced.

Worth mentioning that the Cosmic Ray background is not known to be consistent and we have only been able to measure the very powerful ones for a short time. It seems pretty unscientific to assume that the rate has been fairly constant for 4.5 billion years on such little data.'Especially since last time I checked all the really energetic rays (including the Oh My God)were comming from roughly the same place in the Cosmos.

Those of you who have been following the great adventure at CERN will know that they haven't got around to colliding anything much yet due to a transformer failure and now it seems they've had to shut the whole thing down due to a coolant leak. So no need to worry for a few more days if you think the whole thing might go bang when they do actually start colliding. Inspires confidence in the technology doesn't it :O) Makes you wonder what happens if a transformer fails in the midst of an experiment... Still, it might save a few quid off this years expected 14,000,000 pound electricity bill. Don't forget you should switch off your TV's and other electrical equipment (don't use "stand by") to save the planet... and make sure there is plenty of power for the LHC ;o)