While the Institute decided not to initiate discussions about the unfortunate events at CERN near Geneva last week, in the interests of scientific objectivity we would like to set out some important observations for public consideration.
First, science isn’t an intellectual pursuit that proves theories — it was well established by Professor Karl R. Popper in the 1960s that science is only in the business of disproving theories. Surely all you non-scientists out there understand the difference. Science advances by a continual process of theoretical speculation followed by rigorous experimentation designed to destroy the new theory. It was essential that the new CERN particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, should have been built and operated in order to disprove the theories of Hawking Radiation and Strangelets that had begun to concern the scientific community and the general public.
The advancement of physical science requires its proponents to initiate experiments to test scientific theories in the real world, in the same way the science of economics requires experiments into the stability of actual financial systems. How else could the exploitation of ever more obscure derivative creations be realized without the free markets in which to test them? That no economists understand the entire mechanisms (complex systems) behind these ABS and CLO operations in no way suggests to us that the experiments should not be conducted, even if our pension plans are doomed.
It might be facile to point out that the scientific community’s medical, economic, chemical, and particle studies have no other venue but this Earthly one in which to conduct their experiments. Today it seems likely we never will have another. One must have faith in the principle that the universe is comprehensible in strictly human terms, and that mathematics is the language through which this comprehension is gained. It was very important that CERN attempted to prove that a black hole could not be produced within the energy regime of the large Hadron Collider. While this experiment appears not to have produced the intended result, we can assure the public that we will be engaged in revising our theories for the entire known future.
Article comments
1 - JTankers
Clever article.
A number of PHD level theoretical scientists have questions about LHC Safety and are concern about more than just a few "theories" being destroyed.
The most notable is Professor Dr. Otto E. Rossler, founder of Endophysics and most famous for his contributions to Chaos theory.
Dr. Rossler refutes CERN's safety arguments and proposes that if micro black holes are created (some say the odds are 1 in 1000, others say the odds are closer to 1 in 2) they would grow large enough to threaten Earth in 50 months to 50 years.
Got LHCFacts.org?
2 - c hoare
Thanks for your contribution to this JTankers. I followed to your blog and you have certainly amassed more argument that the whitewash on CERN's site.
Afraid I'm not likely to go deeper into the discussion -- I'm a novelist who's main concern is the increasing tendency for all these specialized controversies to exclude the general public who should be party to the concerns of their home planet.
A fool with a PhD is, unfortunately, still a fool.
3 - duane
Kinda makes you wish that human space travel and off-world colonization was a bit more advanced than it is now. The only solution will be to use the black hole, once it's big enough, to go back in time and cancel the entire LHC project. That should be straightforward.