“Why, then, would the Bundestag be disallowed to discuss CERN for the reason that the issue is already before the UN Security Council?”, I replied.
Nonetheless he has a point: I apparently have got to respond to Karl Hiltpolt’s and John Baez’s public assaults since at least one of them is endowed with a good name in science.
It is true that my often having an urgent undertone in my voice is at odds with all known journalistic rules. Such no-no behavior immediately costs you all public attention — it is obvious that I never took a media course. And even worse, 3 years ago I called on the International Court of Crimes Against Humanity (who would not reply). My excuse was the extinction of humankind risked by CERN’s not admitting the scientific safety conference logically required in the face of new evidence. Such an act is automatically perceived by the media as un-reportable.
So it is probably my fault that the incriminated LHC experiment could be switched on twice, the first time with a local disaster, the second time without fanfares two years after.
The risk level incurred is proportional to the luminosity – the total number of highest-energy nuclear collisions — achieved. This level has been announced by CERN to be raised by a factor of three during the three months ending on November the first. To the best of my knowledge, the risk level will by then amount to a probability of 3 percent Armageddon destined to occur after a symptom-free period of a few years during which the black-hole growth inside earth is undetectable.
No father or mother would ever allow a foreign company to plant a bomb into the basement of the house that they cannot leave, on the soothing assurance that the probability of its going off is “only three percent” — or would they?
In contrast, the good faith of CERN’s own employees makes sense. CERN forms a miniature territorial state with its own police. The risk to its own families is no greater than that taken by any other state ready to conquer a glorious future at the usual considerable costs.
I presume my readers are prepared to say that in a case like this in which the stakes are so high, every person on the planet can justly expect that the necessary precautionary measures are being taken (namely, a reassessment of the risks in light of new results). A public reassessment of those risks when potentially as high as described is therefore mandatory: the requested safety conference.
If the logically required reassessment is openly shunned, however, as this is the case as we saw, then there must be a pretty good reason for that. Particularly so in view of the fact that the planet’s media behave as if being placed under a press curfew. Either they must have a counter-proof lying on the table that they show to no one, or else the whistleblower must be a “burnt” person. This – so my journalist friend made clear to me – is obviously the case.
This assertion of his made me recall the fact that the most prestigious German weekly “Die Zeit,” headed by venerated former chancellor Helmut Schmidt, had in a different context two years ago called me an “elusive character” (“schillernd”). Could this publicly burnt image be the real reason why the current risk of globe-evaporation is not being taken seriously on the whole globe? This appeared a highly unlikely possibility to me at first.
Reluctantly I realized that I have to address this issue since it makes up the stuff of the two hate blogs mentioned above under the names of their unacknowledged masterminds. On March 8, 1994 I innocuously switched on the second German state TV channel (ZDF) to learn about an important national news topic: “Germany’s laziest professors.” Sounds like fun when good education is a public priority. Then I felt I was dreaming: Their names were identical with those of my wife and myself. My first thought was that this is something that could never occur in America.
She would subsequently be dishonorably discharged, retroactively over the past 5 years, with everything that this unprecedented punishment entails. And I would be ordered by state decree (“Verfügung”) to enter a closed psychiatric institution under supervision by the issuing minister. I would have to flee to Switzerland the night before I would be brought before the judge the next morning by police in case I did not come spontaneously, as the court order would read. I reckoned with the search warrant then remaining in charge for enforced psychiatrization for seven years, and was kindly offered asylum in England by a friend’s family. Luckily, I could return on the next evening since I had only been declared a convicted felon (“vorbestraft”) in absentia. However, the two honorable tenured professorships offered to my wife and me in Japan we could not take up before achieving rehabilitation until now because this would have looked like fleeing before the truth.
Now you are curious to learn about the two “terrible sins” the two of us are bound to have committed (which were never publicly disclosed): We had insisted on continuing in the professorships for which we had gotten our calls. But we both did so only very softly, she by pledging and being allowed to go to court by the university — since in medicine, you cannot say to your patient that you do not have the necessary qualification in gastroenterology (instead of endocrinology) to treat him when he comes to you as a specialized professor. In chemistry – my own new compulsory field – it was easier. I honestly answered to an inquiring student in the lecture hall (I had not had so many students sitting in front of me in my life) that I had never studied the field I was obliged to teach (chemistry) but that we jointly would surely be able to both fly this jumbo jet and “touch down” safely (referring to the obligatory exams at the end of the term). A few days later, I got the so far lacking teaching license for chemistry by state decree, and simultaneously the order to stop teaching the course and await punishment for “refusing to teach.” In this situation — which my friend Gregory Bateson had called a “double bind” (no matter what you do it is false) – it was easier to continue teaching than wait for your dismissal since nothing like this had ever happened before.
So I gave the same course outside the lecture hall as my subsidiary teacher whose salary I had to pay for was giving inside, with police guarding the doors. I had more students outside since no one likes to be locked in and out by police to see the bathroom (it was a long twice-weekly course). The vice chancellor always attended my lecture outside. Whenever I could I would sneak inside to my original students since I had accepted them which fact amounts to an academic oath (I once proved stronger than the vice chancellor in pushing on the same door in the opposite direction). But each successful time, the police would carry me out afterward while the students who had thought this was fun on the first time no longer applauded. I learned that it is more convenient for the police if you just wear a shirt without jacket. And every single time, the officer in charge – they were never the same — spontaneously apologized afterwards. This went on for months in a row. The media kept silence since police in the lecture hall had triggered a revolution in Greece not so long before.
The new obedience laws for university professors – a military-like command structure down from the minister via all intermediary university echelons to the individual docent – later enabled dismantling Humboldt for good. My family would eventually be expelled by the state from our inherited house – three weeks after the “Spiegel” had reported that my last-minute public protest was a sign of madness since the eviction had already happened. I told you the whole, for us un-bloody, story (a colleague of my wife’s who for his having a somewhat lower position would have been protected from the new law, a fact which the administration kept a secret from him, committed suicide) because the hate blogs do not tell the truth for lack of better knowledge. But the real reason is the fact that the world is wavering as we saw whether they should trust me as a scientist and a person. The same mentioned facts, by the way, were the reason why a wise colleague of ours in another faculty found a way to help without upsetting anyone by proposing me for the Nobel prize, which fact made the air breathable again in a small town.
Can you trust me? All I am asking for is the benefit of the doubt. No one will be more happy than I if my two black-hole theorems (the gothic-R theorem and the Telemach theorem) – or just one of them or just a fragment of the second – turn out to be false. Or if my independent exponential-growth result for black holes inside matter is provably false, or if my independent quantum result on neutron star cores’ frictionlessness is false. It never was easier to disprove a new theory and danger, and it never was more astonishing that no one has succeeded for 3 years in a row with so many switches waiting to be flipped even though a single one suffices to declare man-made mini-black holes safe for our planet.
I was asked why I had quoted the pope the other day. The day before yesterday in Freiburg, he reminded everyone to pay back for the infinite present given to each. I found him sweet: a humble voice. And I ask everyone’s forgiveness for any lack of humility on my part which is entirely unintentional. Tomorrow the all-clear evidence will come to a colleague I hope. Take care, dear reader and have a good year 5772. (For J.O.R.)