800 out of 12.000 boat people have drowned in 2 months time in unappreciated heroism. One billion out of 7 billion people go hungry every day. Science no longer yearns for the unknown. Seen against this backdrop, CERN’s refusal for 3 years to allow for a scientific safety conference in the face of a comparable risk to the whole planet (to be shrunk to 2 cm in a few years’ time with a probability of about ten percent) fits in perfectly.
Are human beings the “ten percent killers” by nature? I doubt it. A corrupt system is almost everywhere active in society, or so it appears. The past fate of Lampsacus hometown could be taken for a sign. The hometown of all persons on the Internet is an option for 17 years but remains a non-topic. This even though it is quite affordable and would boost the nation or continent or institution that installs it. And in addition would do a lot for a healthy global economy.
What has all of this to do with CERN? I do not know — except that CERN invented the Internet. But there is the more recent fact that they are hostile to new scientific results and more specifically are unwilling to admit a discussion of the safety of their – by now for more than a year running at increasing luminosity — mega-experiment. I admit that I still hope that my results as to an apocalyptic danger residing in the latter can be relativized. But so far, no one tried to achieve this goal. And no one on the planet dares take up the issue.
In ordinary life one calls such behavior cowardice: Disappearing from sight when asked to respond. A very human attitude. Especially so when a monolithic giant like one of the few legally immune world institutions is involved.
Forgive me that I am still hopeful that this issue is going to be taken up by the world’s media such that either the planet is saved or – if it turns out that it was never in jeopardy – rationality is re-established. For human beings are the only animals capable of rationality – of seeing with the eyes of the other and doing so with their hearts involved. For as a young child, they invented the idea of benevolence – the suspicion that mom wants them to be happy so they turned the table and wanted mom to be happy. The inexplicable light of the day and the gift of the present now are part of this human discovery of mutual gratefulness.
Take care, everyone, and thanks for the fish. The fish of rationality. That CERN is allowed to interrupt operation until the safety issue is clarified. I wish them all the good luck of the world.
Otto E. Rossler, chaos researcher, University of Tubingen (For J.O.R., May 11, 2011)
No way for the average being to discuss the great details of particle physics. Such topics are based on math for those who got an intellect quite above the average. However. Some years ago, people watched a documentary in TV about scientists measuring the speed of a laser beam. Eventually I watched it too and I remember. When the beam was inside a tube, the scientists measured a shorter time for the beam to travel. But outside the tube, the light speed was unimpeded. Do you know how poor in knowledge many people were who watched? They saw that a beam of light had been altered by a tube surrounding it. But when the light speed had been replaced by something faster in a simple tube, people who watched were too poorly educated to calculate with the measurements for anything faster than light. So do I have done the math in the meantime to boast with knowledge about one event faster than light? Certainly not, there is little wealth in terms of knowledge about math I have accumulated so far! Here it goes on with the topics that most people understand: mass starvation and boat people. What do they have in common with consumers in developed countries? Fact is: many of them have barely earned a sufficient level of wealth in math and related education about physics and chemistry. Since we need scientists including those at CERN helping to seek more security without losses in wealth, here is what has not so extensively discussed: people have very limited time for educational progress due to the damage of aging. But when they suffer greatly from the illness that aging damage is causing, it is mostly already too late. Who believes that I, being over 40 years old and with a mathematical ability lower than high school skill, can learn how to demonstrate why the LHC has enclosing like the aforementioned tube in which a laser beam has been measured. Even if I had common math knowledge in college education, the increasing aging damages would completely disallow the accomplishment of such a learning. Just from aging damage people are loosing real wealth, so they will never learn how to calculate about the causes why the LHC has an effect different from any natural distribution of particles inside the solar system. Science and engineering who are not sufficiently working on medication against the aging damage are an existential risk of social breakdown and it disables the human race to choose the rational survival path.
Very interesting idea, dear Mr. Robomoon. Eventually everyone ought to be able to participate in discussions about Telemach (that T and L and M and Ch change on the surface of a gravitating body, as Einstein saw for T in 1907). I am trying to find a reason why this finding should not totally upset the safety equation for CERN. If CERN would engage in dialog, the problem would no longer exist since then any necessary consequences (or not) would be taken. Asking others to be so kind to communicate (like we do) should not be a problem on our planet no matter how old one is oneself, or should it?
Dr. Rössler, even someone not knowledgeable in particles physics could understand the risks if the media actually did their homework. Many networks could make the story simple to digest, but real journalism is no longer an interest anymore. Hand-me-down news over the internet and airwaves is the current trend. More profitable than doing their homework researching a story. No need for an army of investigative journalists. Last thing news networks want are businesses and organizations investing their advertising dollars elsewhere after outing an organization. They have investors to please.
Prof. Rössler, thanks for continuing your highly regarded messages. The idea that aging damage is the greatest destructive factor against mathematical progress like the comprehension of some relationship between Telemach and particles, stems from announcements about scientific research on performance issues between young and old. See http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/03/we-age-because-the-world-changes.php for related ideas. One observation showing that connections between educational progress and aging damage have not so extensively discussed is directly doable when looking at the tag cloud on the right to the blog article. Among others, minor common categories such as endometriosis are there while words more related to the highly common problem of aging or senescence are being excluded. But the special fields of geriatrics and gerontology are no longer the only opportunities against aging. Recent progress in the outline of engineering strategies like SENS should be given a much closer look too. Tell me one reason why we should not give senescence, the greatest destroyer of conservative education, enough attention to keep looking for better strategies against aging damage? Would mathematical progress not be the most important solution against our problems with Telemach and existential risks right now? Mr. Cleese, your observation about changes in journalism is right, but the result would be unemployment for the journalists. Yet, the connection between advertising dollars and media content is not the major problem. If you had searched enough, you could immediately get news over the Internet that are sufficiently researched for ad-sponsored content. Also get a free book like one announced here http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martin-ford/the-truth-about-unemploym_b_428619.html containing something interesting about unemployment in the news industry too.
Since I am no longer very young, aging is automatically of interest to me; and my wife wrote an in my opinion important book on aging and how to control it (unfortunately in German). If not all lives including those of children were threatened by CERN, this would no doubt deserve more planet-wide attention — as the Singularity movie also brings to life. Thank you also for addressing the problem of how to engage the interest of a single journalistic personality on the planet. Who is the best journalist? There must be a consensus on that. As soon as we have found that name, all it takes is ask her or him — right?
Dear journalists of the world! If your companies would not have fired so many of your colleges, the best of you would be here to help Prof. Rössler and the Lifeboat Foundation saving the world from an increasingly dangerous CERN. But you do not have the time, because you are mostly doing overwork for advertising dollars coming in. How dare of your former colleges trying to work for more than 30 dollars a day, more than any of the best journalists should be given only by the conditions of shareholder value which is even more important than the deepest researched scientific- or political affairs scaring away advertisers. Are not the few major investors and great economists in your media companies more important to you than just advertisers of whom there are thousands loving to advertise their products as long as they sell? No matter how deeply some potential news about CERN are being researched, no matter how many advertising dollars are being denied by the governments who own CERN, but something more than a 30-dollar-salary will be really too much in comparison to any operating costs deriving from the usage of software for automated routines in journalism. What shareholder value would allow a salary like this when one forefront of the Singularity is already helping to replace so many of your mostly unqualified former colleges by really useful software for automated routines in journalism? Certainly the unemployment would have been reversed by cutting the major costs of insurances for health care and retirement out of your incompetent colleges’ salary. But investors were only allowed deciding so if the aging damage leveraging your colleges’ incompetency is getting more restricted on their nerve cells! Your unemployed colleges would, by the power of youthful nerves, be fresh and healthy to get back to college til noon and back to work til the late afternoon, doing the job twice as fast, learning more quickly, and unburden you from the overwork for advertising dollars coming in. Then the best of you who are now silenced by the advertising industry would come to inform the whole world: “Yes, it was really such a very great and probably irreversibly dangerous mistake from governmental investors vitally giving billions of dollars to CERN instead of SENS! A medication against aging damage in a few qualified mathematicians’ nerve cells should have helped for a viable solution against this mathematical problem since not enough of them kept fresh enough for learning all the math to calculate Prof. Rössler got absolutely scientific proof in telling CERN they should schedule a security conference or stop taking more money if the conference would turn into a fiasco. Without more money, they would sure make their dangerous experiment getting less enforced before it probably gets even more dangerous!”
Dear philosophers of the world — could you invite a few high-ranking journalists to discuss Paul Virilio and O.E. Rossler’s YouTube calls for a scientific safety conference before an experiment continues that is explicitly based on not quoting results published in time that show it is the most dangerous endeavor ever launched on the planet?
I read your article quite informative.. Thanks..
I appreciate your kindness.