Dear SCUN:
My scientific results force me to be worried.
I feel that I must repeat my kind request to you: Please, endorse judge Niemeier and his Cologne Court’s request for a scientific “safety conference” regarding CERN’s currently running nuclear collisions experiment.
For this experiment is based on outdated scientific knowledge from more than three years ago. The ignored new knowledge (derived from Einstein’s 1907 equivalence principle, Pauli’s quantum mechanics and Poincaré’s chaos theory) implies that the experiment has by now accumulated an approximately 1 percent probability of “earth evaporation” with a 2-cm left-over called a black hole forming in a few years’ time.
Worse: If CERN continues as planned for the next two months, the risk rises to 3 percent according to the best currently available knowledge (three times higher luminosity).
If “three percent” does not look like a large risk to you, imagine your child not returning from the boarding school to which you sent him with a probability of three percent. No parent would accept such a risk.
Therefore, dear Security Council: please, do allow for a public hearing of the un-disproved danger entailed by CERN’s refusal to double-check.
Take care,
Sincerely yours,
Otto E. Rossler, Father of Lampsacus and the Rossler attractor
Physicists and their supporters in the media and politics made this existential risk very hard to perceive. But it might be only peer pressure and some jeopardized reputation that hinders them to confirm that deadly dangers to all advanced life on Earth after particle collision experiments could be real.
The real reason to me appears to be belief in authority.
Science has become so difficult in the curricula (unnecessarily so but for a long time) that a fresh attitude — re-invent everything that you learn before going on (depth is more important than breadth) — is no longer known.
So it happened that no one trusts himself or herself any longer as an autonomous thinker who has to take responsibility for what he believes.
In the jungle of difficult never fully understood “facts,” the ability to appreciate progress — a major deviation which nevertheless is fully linked to the truth in what was known before — is no longer habitual.
The important new insights are always on the high-school level. The more difficult ones at later levels are in general much smaller. So I explain the terror in the eyes of the “specialists” if you find something new in the basement of their theories.
Previously old men like John Wheeler or Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker or Bryce DeWitt were still there to help because they had learned to appreciate novelty in its primitive early stages.
I must tell here the story why Bryce married his wife who later became an equally famous colleagues. I never met her, and I am not sure she is happy if I tell the story (but actually I am sure since she can reconstruct the loving tome in his voice when he told me the story). And here maybe the fate of the planet depends on my giving away this secret of two people to you.
He was attending as a young scientist one of Einstein’s rare talks at Princeton — early fifties I believe. Einstein entered the lecture hall and everyone was stunned. The zipper had not been invented yet at that time for trousers for some reason. Many buttons were necessary, and Einstein had forgotten to close them. There went a wave of recognition through the young crowd, and one or the other hand was being raised to tell him. But a young colleague in the first row stood briefly up turning to the crowd making a “hush!” sign with her finger over her lips. The talk went flawlessly as usual.
He had to marry this woman.
This is science.
Remark: this message was submitted to http://lifeboat.com/blog/2011/09/why-the-lhc-wont-destroy-the-earth-still and oddly enough it was caught by a spam filter: Psychology remained stagnant for half a century, see comments at http://lifeboat.com/blog/2011/06/five-fateful-coincidences/comment-page-2 from June 24, 2011. Regarding experiments on the power of authority — see yesterday’s comments at http://lifeboat.com/blog/2011/08/open-letter-by-a-lifeboat-m…ty-council — in terms of social influence as identified by psychologists, Prof. Herbert Kelman for e.g., stagnancy can be seen in the Stanford prison experiment from 1971. The experiment had to be stopped after just six days instead of the planned 14. Thus, see the Hofling hospital experiment from 1966 researching social influence on nurses. The psychiatrist Charles K. Hofling found that 21 out of the 22 nurses would have given the patient a dangerous overdose of medicine. So far, the deficiency of progress in psychology science also leaves scientists clueless what dangerous dose of subnuclear matter with a delayed chain reaction on molecules they could have already earned from experimentation made by some highly admired particle physicists who are only right beyond any law of logic. Short addendum: also beyond a spam filter.
I had not seen the connection between the Milgram experiment and CERN before — thank you.
Bowing to authority and doing whatever one is told to do — even to electrocute strangers into screaming with pain — is not the kind of psychology that CERN induces,. It is more the fact that all there join in believing that any direction they are headed in must be the right one. It is more of the Rev Moon cult fantasy than the Nazi Fuhrer syndrome.
Yes. But the effect of the obedience is unprecedented.
A Huff Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/krisztina-holly/what-business-…07751.html article from 2009 yields a publicity as if LHC leaders are like the forefront of all managers in global business. Further, a CERN http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2009/PR08.09E.html press release from 2009 yields a publicity as if LHC leaders are like the forefront of all human rights advocates in worldwide politics and religion. What natural response to any LHC leadership task will derive among the public from such publicity but only obedience and confidence? What peer pressure and some jeopardized reputation in politics and further social sectors like religion will happen to anyone of those who respond to some potentially dangerous LHC leadership tasks with logical thinking and questions about safety? It would be astonishing to find the answers in the Milgram experiment which features only one pair: leader and servant, but not many different servants and their distortions of academic group dynamics due to peer pressure and some jeopardized reputation.
This is all correct. And CERN has great merits — for example with its most recent demonstration that there is no planetary greenhouse effect (most recently in “Nature”). This is almost as important as inventing the Internet has been.
So I am not unhappy that CERN is held in great esteem. What makes me unhappy is that no one outside CERN dares remind them that there is not a single scientist on the planet who says “I can prove the Telemach theorem wrong.”
It is this illogical loyalty that is pernicious. No one will be more grateful in the long run than CERNians themselves to the single scientist who pulls them out of their self-dug hole of being paid an all too great planetary loyalty.
Comparable only to Stephen Hawking’s well-deserved fame which also prevents him from acknowledging having made one mistake in a lifetime.
“Yes. But the effect of the obedience is unprecedented.” — Prof Rossler
Not in my book, actually, the examples of huge cult behavior in science grow in number with every day of my research.
It is quite extraordinary how crowd behavior in science so often approaches the religious impulse writ large in secular dimensions such as biology and even, as we have here, physics.
Progress in science depends on countering this phenomenon.
As you know — pardon me — it is not the blindness of the scientists which I deplore, it is the blindness of the media — that is, of the ordinary citizen who does not walk into the office of his local newspaper. But of course, how should he know.
The priests of our day are the journalists. It is this sect which is responsible. I know you are the only exception.
Biologists react more positive to religion but physicists. So this does not look like great news for some biologists, a stem cell researcher, for e.g. Nevertheless, science is just rallying with the latest high energy particle experiments to moral bankruptcy. No matter if they rally towards a temporary educational and financial prosperity, the sustainable results just matter. Next generations of prospectively living beings born as children within this Century have to pay the bill: one generation of them might have to bear the pain of becoming the last living descendants of humanity without any hope for survival or procreation. Better some kind of cult or religion to make journalists legally accountable under these immoral and dangerous circumstances instead of the fast route towards scientific progress with the unbearable existential risk for all of our only living space in this Universe. So the journalists have to be taken absolutely responsible, even when they are blogging for the church and Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu who would not mind when defense http://www.psr.org/nuclear-weapons/blog/ending-nuclear-evil.html is getting some great cuts http://www.psr.org/nuclear-weapons/blog/how-to-save-a-quarter-of-a.html in funding; better not to gain more funding for the LHC that he values so much as known from his visit to Geneva in 2009.
Thank you, dear robomoon. Allow me to repeat my yesterday’s answer to AnthonyL here, since there is no response yet from the quality media.
Dear AnthonyL:
I just realize you probably rather had in mind one of my influential detractors who after my repudiating their claims of falsification never retracted their proven-false statements. Especially Albert-Einstein-Institute co-director Nicolai (E-mail: Hermann.Nicolai@aei.mpg.de) would be capable of answering you in a most competent fashion. After my proving his defense of charge conservation wrong more than two years ago, he never replied again and also never retracted his outdated counterclaims. And he never responded later to my Telemach theorem after I had submitted it to him and his Institute’s journal “Einstein-online.”
This could give you the impression that he is my scientific enemy. I for my part would object to that. I am deeply obliged to Professor Nicolai because he forced me in 2009 to find a better proof of black hole non-chargedness than the one I had offered in my 2007 paper on the gothic-R theorem. If he is strong enough to prove the non-chargedness (ch) part of my Telemach theorem wrong, more than 2 years after I first sent him my pertinent proof, I shall immediately retract all my warnings against the CERN experiment. I also promise, of course, that I shall do my best to make his proof better understandable to you and the press in case he has one to offer.
Added September 4: Dear Professor Nicolai, please, be so kind as to respond. Sincerely yours, Otto E. Rossler
For science by definition is friendship. This fight with CERN is absolutely exceptional.