What are the Stakes Part 2?
Last week we started looking at the case which claims that a scientific experiment might be about to end the world.
The equipment concerned is the Large Hadron Collider, (hadron being the name of the class of sub-atomic particles to which protons belong) which has taken more than a decade to build, not to mention costing over £4,000,000,000. It is based at the European Centre for Nuclear Research, CERN. Deep beneath the Swiss-French border, there is a 17 mile tunnel with complicated equipment to allow the smashing of particles against one another and replication of cold conditions last seen a minute fraction after the Big Bang. Physicists and others are understandably enormously excited about this. Potentially there is so much which can be learnt from these experiments. Perhaps even at last it might lead to establishing and proving the "theory of everything" the Holy Grail of physicists, to bring together disparate aspects of the post-relativity world in one grand design. It is likely to provide enormous enrichment of the scientific stock of knowledge of mankind. The digital data produced by the experiments will be so huge that it will amount to perhaps 1% of all digital data being produced on earth during the experiment. That is an unbelievably large amount of data and it will be a "big bang" challenge to be able to sort, assimilate and interpret it.
Therefore what is at stake from the defence point of view is pretty clear. An enormously important scientific project which has taken an unimaginable amount of time and money to develop threatens to be derailed by ill-conceived litigation. One of the plaintiffs (Mr Wagner) they would presumably regard as "having form". This is because he took steps, ultimately dismissed in 2001, to stop the use of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider by the Brookhaven National Laboratory. That, as appears from its name, smashed ions together and has operated since 2000 without causing any apocalyptic scenarios. Their view will presumably be that, apart from being misconceived in any event, you can only realistically predict the end of the world once and can't expect to be taken seriously on a subsequent occasion.
Of course it will look very different from the other side of the fence. It always does. One of the plaintiffs has done physics and cosmic ray research, the other researches time theory. Whilst that does not put them at the level of the many eminent scientists operating on the project, it is not as though they are necessarily plaintiffs who are never likely to have heard of the relevant considerations and are just knee-jerk anti-science. As to the previous litigation, they would no doubt say that they are talking about risks not probabilities. If there was indeed let us say a 1% chance of the planet being destroyed within 10 years, at any one time that would make it unlikely to occur, but it would not mean the risk was not present.
Scientists involved in the project say that the risks have been considered, and the Domesday scenarios being put forward are either misconceived or fanciful. The plaintiffs say that these dismissive comments and any reviews are not undertaken by people independent of the project so as to be capable of being relied upon. This is a "wish is father to the thought" sort of observation. Either way it is obvious that the two parties are as far apart as it is possible to imagine. This will represent interesting challenges to both sides' lawyers. Next week we shall look at what they are.