In the Dark

I thought I’d reblog this as it relates to the pronouncements about the LHC by Otto Rössler I mentioned yesterday.

As I predicted nearly two-and-a-half years ago, it looks like the Earth will survive the most powerful accelerator ever built. A recent article validates my prediction. On September 8, 2008, I recorded a Science News Flash podcast addressing concerns that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) would produce a shower of black holes that would, in turn, consume Earth from the inside out. I predicted that Earth would not only survive the experiments perfor … Read More

via Today's New Reason to Believe

You might also want to read this older blog post about the kerfuffle when the LHC was switched on. I quote:

Rössler turns out to be quite a strange fellow. He is an MD who stayed in academia, moved into biochemistry, and then made a name in the relatively new field of chaos theory. He seems to think of himself as a visionary, having founded a new field of physics called “endophysics,” which is supposed to take into account the observer’s inner state. Or something like that. Have you heard of it? Neither had I.

Recently, at the age of sixty-eight, Rössler, despite having no particle physics or blackhole physics credentials, announced that he had found important new results, alarmingly relevant to the destructive potential of microscopic black holes in LHC proton-proton collisions. Rössler variously estimates the likelihood of such blackhole production by LHC as being from 10% to 50% though he appears to have pulled these numbers out of a hat.

And there’s also this most excellent video that John Butterworth told me about because he’s in it…