Perverting science for politics

[TheMercenary]

March 29, 2008
Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More
By DENNIS OVERBYE
More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/sc...hp&oref=slogin

[tw]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

When does a machine underground in both France and Switzerland need to conform to American environmental laws? It is not a rhetorical question.

[richlevy]

Originally Posted by tw

When does a machine underground in both France and Switzerland need to conform to American environmental laws? It is not a rhetorical question.

I'm guessing because we can kick their asses anytime we want to?

You could probably get every single Republican lawmaker to agree to an immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq if you promised to send them to invade France.