Jagu on the LHC

Interviewed for some Amherst PR gig:

If you think of any thing that might happen, like Tony Marx opening his kitchen faucet tomorrow and a dragon coming out and biting him, you can calculate the probability of that process. It is probably non-zero because it’s not forbidden by any known conservation laws. But we wouldn’t say, therefore, that Tony Marx should not go near his kitchen faucet tomorrow.

Two groups of independent experts have looked in detail at the risks posed by the LHC and have concluded that there is no reasonable risk (of the exotic kind). Moreover, experience with cosmic ray events lends some empirical support to the assessment that the risk is well below the threshold of rational concern. As the inimitable Ashton Kutcher says in Dude, Where’s My Car?, “I don’t want to go down in history as the dude who destroyed the Universe”.