Saturday, July 5, 2008

Back, and then leaving.

I think I'll make another post. Me and my family are then leaving, going to a cottage in Quebec with no Internet access. I want to give everyone who may have read this blog at some point an apology for not continuing much, though I do have some thoughts for content. My previous post, having and essay I'd previously written about the similarities and differences in between the universe of Cat's Cradle and CERN with the LHC, drew comments. This is a rare and exciting event for me. I received fully two thirds of all comments that I have from that post. I now have... three comments. That aside, I've known what I would do next for a while, which is now to elaborate on the previous post.

Two main points were made clear in the last comments: one, I had no idea what I was talking about, and two, the LHC would doom us all. The former was, and still is, mostly correct, while the latter is still debated (as the commentators so thoughtfully did). I thought I would resume where I left off by checking the CERN site again, to refresh my memory. What I got was a revised defence. When I had last checked, around a month ago, the site had an incomplete defence to merely two of the warnings of critics. They now display a revised defence to all of the attacks I've seen from a cursory glance around the Internet. See http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html for the aforementioned revised defence. The main area that I like about this is the MBH counter, the most vocal attack (from what I can tell). Instead of relying entirely on Hawking radiation, as critics would expect, they called upon the enormous gravitational force of neutron stars and white dwarves as being strong enough to theoretically stop black holes of a dangerously charged nature from passing through them at relativistic speeds, and yet they still exist. Though I don't know if the calculations are actually sound (even if this sounds like crunching numbers in a realm we already understand), I like the elegance with which they countered the critics. When I return from our wonderful little rented place in idyllic rural Quebec, I'll get a post ready about the glaringly neglected offence that has almost certainly found its way around CERN's current rebuttals.