Pleased to meet you …

On the Big Island of Hawaii, the name of which I can never seem to remember, a former research physicist and retired Federal Safety Officer who specialized in the handling radioactive materials who currently runs a botanical garden, and his partner in the suit, a Spaniard named Sancho, have filed a Lawsuit in the Hawaiian US District Court to prevent CERN from operating the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator nearing completion on the border between France and Switzerland.

According to New York Times writer Dennis Overbye’s coverage of the suit, Walter L. Wagner and Sancho believe that the giant research instrument is actually a danger to the Earth, able to spin up all manner of ferocious theoretical subatomic monsters, such as long-lasting miniature Black Holes that could eventually swallow the planet, or generate “strangelets” which could convert all of the atoms of regular matter comprising our planet to “strange matter” in a runaway chain reaction, rendering Mother Earth a dense lifeless lump (any resemblance to The Author is unintentional). No word from the Plaintiffs if they would consider those results a Mortal Insult to Gaia, or simply make what’s left of this planet a lousy place to find a drink.

According to Overbye, this isn’t the first time Wagner has lowered his ‘Concerned Citizen Asks, What If’ lance at high-energy particle accelerators. Wagner filed suits in 1999 and 2000 against the Brookhaven National Laboratory in attempt to stop them from performing experiments using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The suits were dismissed, and the RHIC has been operating without incident for the past 8 years.

But I began asking myself some questions about all this, such as: What story could be presented to Wagner that would convince him to stop tilting at particle colliders, drop his suit and go back to his garden?

Suppose someone convinced Sancho to tell Wagner that the CERN Directors General signed an agreement with three Insurance companies for appropriate policies against any LHC accidents involving stable mini-Black Holes and Strange Matter?

Apparently, I think along the same lines as Overbye, wondering what professional oddsmakers (in this case, Insurance Companies actuaries) would think of this subsequent essay, “Gauging a Collider’s Odds of Creating a Black Hole.

Can this suit be settled out of court if the CERN scientists were able to get the appropriate insurance?

What would those policies look like, and who would pay for them? Would there be one policy for the CERN LHC itself, one for regular homeowners along the lines of earthquakes, floods and water damage, and one for the entire planet along the lines of auto insurance?

With that last: Do you try to save some money by sticking with a collision policy rather than comprehensive? How big of a deductible do you want to take? 

Can you imagine an insurance adjuster assessing the damage to the world if it were partially damaged in a LHC Black Hole/Strangelet accident?

What about a hemisphere-bender versus a big accident where the cost to repair is worth more than the value of the planet? Do you total the planet out, have it towed away and use the money to start shopping for a new one?

Does the insurance company offer a rider to specify Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) repair parts - such as continents and mountain ranges - rather than Chinese knock-offs?

A lot to think about there.

Hmm. This makes me wonder if Wagner, Sancho or other concerned citizens will retain lawyers to consider further suits seeking injunctions against Global Warming, an asteroid strike or the Second Coming.

And I’d like to see the insurance policies on those.

On the other hand maybe I wouldn’t. Personally, I have a hard time facing reality. Giant windmills are a lot easier to deal with.

bc

Copyright by the author 2008, all rights reserved.

In the April 13, 2008 Washington Post Outlook section, Joel Achenbach writes about the difficulty of predicting the future based on our perceptions of what’s happening today. He uses the now-ubiquitous Internet as an example of how seemingly insignificant events and inventions turn out to be portents of humanity’s technological and social futures.

And he notes that even the best futurists, practitioners of the “hard sciences,” and technologists rarely even come close to predicting how the future really unfolds.

There is some room for argument there, I think.

If one steps away from technology and engineering for a moment and considers some of the theoretical sciences, there may be some answers — from a philosophical point of view, anyway.

Quantum mechanics describes events at the smallest, must fundamental levels, in terms of probabilities, and uses terms like “uncertainty,” “indeterminacy,” “decoherence,” “interpretation,” and, of course, “relativity.”

Essentially, every quantum event can be described with a mathematical probability as to the chances of that event actually occurring over a given period of time, until some other event occurs as a result of that event. This can be described as a “measurement,” or, put another way, the result is information. In some theories, this requires an Observer with some sort of apparatus to measure and decide the result (as in the classic Copenhagen Interpretation), and in others, any subsequent event that occurs within the realm of certain possibilities (such as the environment surrounding the event) is a measurement apparatus itself and determines what the result of the original event was (as with the more flexible Many-Worlds Interpretations).

In either case, at the most basic levels, darn near anything can happen, mathematically speaking. And with the Many-Worlds Interpretations, Observers are not required to determine what the hell just happened — which is handy, because we humans can’t go around watching Everything All the Time (though the Internet and web cams are probably changing that.). And in a Relatively short period of Time, other Things happen because of that first Thing — but what?

Here’s an interesting part: The Many-Worlds Interpretations take their name from the idea that those chains of events - and the mathematical possibilities of subsequent events that they spawn - branch off into separate sequences of events, becoming new Worlds on separate timelines and taking that information with them, branching further and further like the root system of a great tree or the neural pathways of the human brain, but going out to infinity. Infinite information, infinite possibilities, infinite worlds, each just as “real” as any other for the entities that live and experience them. Determinism, only on an infinite scale.

Remember that guy you met at that conference a couple of years ago, the one you thought about hooking up with? Well, in some Multiverse somewhere, you did (no, I’m not going to tell you if he was any good). The time you lifted $20 from your Mom’s wallet and snuck out late on that Friday night during the summer between 11th and 12th grades? Well, you still did it, but in another Multiverse, you also took Mom’s car without asking, and got caught (grounded for the rest of the summer in that Multiverse, what were you thinking?). Anything that you could have done, you did — somewhere, somewhen. Talk about Too Much Information…

All of this is, of course, going to make that eventual conversation with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates very, very complicated. But I digress.

Let’s get back to Joel’s Outlook column for a minute.

In a Multiverse where just about anything can happen, predicting exactly what will happen becomes infinitely difficult - or easy, depending on you point of view.

In one sense, it’s essentially impossible to predict the events on any given Multiversal timeline. On the other hand, anything anyone predicts is likely to come true, if they happen to be in the right place on the right timeline.

But ultimately, in the Future, as in the Now, shit happens.

Whether you expect it or not.

And in my case, I’m essentially Infinitely wrong, which should please my teenage daughters to no end.

bc 

Copyright by the author 2008, all rights reserved.

UPDATE, 4/14/08: Don’t forget to submit questions for Joel’s Chat, Live From the Future today.