chickenfeet: (quantum)
2007-04-30 05:24 pm
Entry tags:

I wonder if ignorance really is bliss

This gem appears as a comment to an article at www.theglobeandmail.com (Canada's National Newspaper!) in response to a not very good article about the search for the Higgs boson:

Jennifer Trueman from Gold River, Canada writes:
The possibility of creating a type of matter that swallows up the world as we know it is nothing to make light of. I have visited the area around the particle accelerator in Switzerland and France, and most of the people there are terrified of the possibility. Real estate values have plummeted, as people there know that should something go wrong and a black hole is created, they will be the first to go.

This has the potential to do massive damage to the global economy, and should it come to pass, there truly is no doubt -- every factory, every set of Parliament buildings, indeed, every mall and school will need to be rebuilt!

This is far bigger than the nebulous unproven concept of global warming. We need to stop it now.


The sheer bloody stupidity and ignorance of this comment is quite staggering. In the impossible event that the LHC produced a black hole big enough to suck in anything outside the collision chamber, property values would be the least of anyone's concerns, at least in the minute fraction of a second they had to have concerns.