A British physicist has claimed he can explain the secrets of the Big Bang Theory, but his controversial experiment has scientists believing he could bring about the end of the world, the U.K.’s Daily Mail reported.

For centuries, scientists have sought unsuccessfully to unlock the secrets of the Big Bang Theory — a model explaining the birth of the universe. But 63-year-old Dr. Lyn Evans of Aberdare, England, popularly known as “Evans the Atom,” claims to know the answers, and will test his experiment on Wednesday by using a 17-mile-long doughnut-shaped tunnel that will smash sub-atomic particles together at the speed of light, the Mail reported.

Evans’ ambitions, however, have brought widespread concern among scientists who say the experiment could create a shower of unstable black holes inside the Earth, and subsequently bring destruction to the planet.
…

Really? Widespread concern? The experiment is controversial? What the hell is this nut case scientist doing that can destroy the world? Dammit, I don’t want to die on Wednesday. That’s Hump Day. At least wait until Monday morning of next week, right?

So I clicked over to the full article at the Daily Mail (this is the correct link from the broken Fox News link) since the Fox news article didn’t say much more than that. Guess what Dr. Crazy is going to do on Wednesday to destroy the world: he’s flipping a switch to turn on *da da dum* the Earth Destroyer 4000 Large Hadron Collider (LHC). I *knew* that they were referring to the LHC, but secretly, deep down, I was hoping for a lunatic scientist to destroy the world I did not want to believe that this was another perverted article about a very legitimate experiment supported by a lot of smart scientists who understand what the hell they’re doing. My beef here is with the Fox News article, as the Daily Mail article is actually a pretty good piece. Let’s start looking at the facts. (More below the fold.)

For those who didn’t catch it from the articles, Dr. Lyn Evans is the program director for the LHC. That means he’s an expert on particle physics and accelerator physics. He knows what he’s talking about. Let’s look at the critics mentioned in the Daily Mail piece, of which only the first one is mentioned in the Fox News article. This is from the Daily Mail piece, linked above, with emphasis mine:

One of them, Professor Otto Rossler, a retired German chemist, said he feared the experiment may create a devastating quasar – a mass of energy fuelled by black holes – inside the Earth.

‘Nothing will happen for at least four years,’ he said. ‘Then someone will spot a light ray coming out of the Indian Ocean during the night and no one will be able to explain it.

…

‘The weather will change completely, wiping out life, and very soon the whole planet will be eaten in a magnificent scenario – if you could watch it from the moon. A Biblical Armageddon. Even cloud and fire will form, as it says in the Bible.’

He said that attempts were still being made in the European Court of Human Rights to halt the experiment on the grounds that it violated the right to life. The court has, however, already rejected calls for a temporary delay in the project, and it is unlikely to come to a speedy decision about whether the CERN experiment should be halted for good.

Meanwhile Dr Walter Wagner, an American scientist who has been warning about the dangers of particle accelerators for 20 years, is awaiting a ruling on a lawsuit he filed a fortnight ago in his home state of Hawaii.

He fears the experiments might unwittingly create something he calls a ‘strangelet’ that could result in a fusion reaction that might ultimately turn the Earth into a supernova, or an exploding star.

But Dr Evans, the leader of the project, who has devoted 14 years of his life to building the vast particle accelerator, is dismissive of the doom-mongers.

…

He said that Prof Rossler was a ‘crazy’ retired professor who had invented his own theory of relativity.

‘We have shown him where his elementary errors are, but of course people like that just will not listen,’ said Dr Evans.

Meanwhile, Dr Wagner’s fears were ‘totally and completely’ unfounded. ‘There are thousands of scientists around the world who have been preparing this machine and they know what they are talking about, unlike these guys,’ he added.

Unlike those guys indeed. Rossler seems to be an accomplished professor according to Wikipedia, but he’s a biochemist. He is NOT an expert at particle physics. I can’t really call him a nut, but being an expert in chaos theory does NOT make him an expert on Relativity and particle physics.

“Dr” Walter Wagner, though, is a nut. Here’s his bio:

Walter Wagner graduated UC Berkeley with a Minor in Physics, and a Major in Biology. Later, he discovered a novel particle in a balloon-borne cosmic ray detector, initially identified as a magnetic monopole. Though its identity remains uncertain, it is definitely not within the standard repertoire of known particles. After a three-year break from science to attend law school, Dr. Wagner resumed work in Physics and Biology at the US Veterans Administration Medical Center in San Francisco, working in Nuclear Medicine and Health Physics. He then embarked on teaching Science and Mathematics, from grade school to college. Dr. Wagner developed a botanical garden in Hawaii, and continues involvement with several professional associations, including Health Physics Society and Society of Nuclear Medicine.

Where did he get his PhD from? It doesn’t even say that he has one, so I’ll assume that he doesn’t. Wagner was also behind previous lawsuits trying to get the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) shut down for similar doomsday fears. RHIC has been running for awhile, and we’re still here. Wagner, according to Discover magazine, (hat tip: Entropy Bound)is facing some criminal charges:

He may also be no stranger to lawsuits, The Register also noted, and is currently in a legal battle with the board of the World Botanical Gardens in Umauma, Hawaii, which he founded. “According to the Hawaii Tribune-Herald (free registration required), he and his wife were indicted last month by a grand jury on counts of identity theft and attempted theft relating to an alleged attempt to obtain $340,000 from the gardens company.”

He does claim to have participated in the discovery of a magnetic monopole back in 1976 (a google search revealed Wagner posted this reference to the discovery: “Evidence for Detection of a Moving Magnetic Monopole”, Price et al., Physical Review Letters, August 25, 1975, Volume 35, Number 8. Wagner’s name is not included in the author list, but I didn’t pull up the article to see if he’s mentioned in the acknowledgements.

Fox News did quite a distortion there when they painted the LHC as a doomsday experiment based on the claims of these two.

So let’s clear this up: the LHC will NOT destroy the Earth…regardless of what the seemingly more reliable Cracked.com had to say on the topic.

Alex Lockwood has linked to my previous post titled Limits to Free Speech, and has given a pretty thoughtful analysis of why free speech should be regulated. Of course, I disagree with him, and I’d like to provide a rebuttal.

Alex’s post is in the context of censoring the climate change debate. For the record, I am a climate change “skeptic” as the label goes. That’s not to say that I don’t believe the climate of the earth is changing. I just question the “proven beyond a reasonable doubt” claim that man is the primary factor behind changes that have been going on in very drastic ways for 5 billion years. Now, I’m not a climatologist, and, as a scientist (PhD candidate), I do appreciate the subtleties that one outside of a field may not appreciate as regard to the data and models. However, when I look at the data, I see a much closer link between solar activity and temperature variability than I do carbon dioxide levels and temperature variability. I won’t expand on that here, for it’s not the purpose of this post. All I will say is that if I and a bunch of non-climate experts were the only ones seeing such a link, I would dismiss it to my own ignorance. It’s the fact that many climatologists have come out to say the same things, among other facts like global warming in locations that have had very little human activity present there…you know, remote places like Jupiter, Pluto, Mars, a moon around Neptune, etc…I don’t feel like looking up the links now, but if you want the links to the news stories about these things, please say so in the comments and I will be happy to provide.

Here’s an excerpt from Alex (more after the fold):

If the science is beyond reasonable doubt, and miscommunication and denial leads to damaging inaction, should it not be censored? Beyond reasonable doubt is all we need to put someone in prison, or in the US, put them to death.

This issue of censorship is complex. If you shut it up, does it go away? No.

However, Perhaps more importantly is the question. Where do we draw the line between the different gradations of skepticism…

…

I’m an advocate for something stronger. Call it regulation, law, or influence. Whatever name we give it, it should not be seen as regulation vs. freedom, but as a balancing of different freedoms. In the same way that to enjoy the freedom of a car you need insurance to protect the freedom of other drivers and pedestrians; in the same way that you enjoy the freedom to publish your views, you need a regulatory code to ensure the freedoms of those who can either disagree with or disprove your views. Either way, while I dislike Brendan O’Neill and know he’s wrong, I can’t stop him. But we need a body with teeth to be able to say, “actually Brendan, you can’t publish that unless you can prove it.” A body which can also say to me, and to James Hansen, and to the IPCC, the same.

(Which is of course peer-review in the academic/scientific world. Why is it not trusted?)

According to Alex’s suggestion, what I just wrote above, without the relevant links, could lead me to be taken to a court of law and forced to provide the evidence for my facts. If for some reason, the sites that I found those stories are also censored, there very well could be a chain reaction of litigation. In this case, since the stories came from prominent sources like LiveScience.com, it unlikely that the source would disappear, but nonetheless, so much of the information that comes from the blogosphere comes from amateur reporting by bloggers who know a little too much about Photoshop or pay a little too much attention to details (ask for links later for concrete examples, such as the photoshopping of smoke on several occassions in pictures posted by the MSM). What happens if someone decides to force these bloggers to prove something that is a matter of personal interpretation? Even if the evidence is on that blogger’s side, proving beyond a reasonable doubt is usually impossible in any situation – just ask the Canuck 6. Even capital murder cases get litigated on for decades about whether the reasonable doubt exists.

Furthermore, what if the people who I cite are “proven” (legally) wrong? Are they then held accountable? Am I for linking to them? Sure, we can legislate safety nets into the system, but undoubtedly, someone will find a legal loophole.

And how do we prove something true beyond a reasonable doubt? Is that really the case with climate change? In 1687, Isaac Newton published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which was considered, after 200 years of successfully explaining and standing up to the intense scrutiny of experimentation, was considered “proven beyond reasonable doubt.” Furthermore, one of the centerpieces of classical physics, Galilean Invariance, having been successfully tested, well-thought out, and philosophically and mathematically sound, was considered infallible as well. These concepts are the foundations for explaining phenomena we see everyday in our existence. Yet, starting in 1905, Albert Einstein, in an effort to explain some strange and surprising experimental results of an experiment that was designed to put one of final bricks on top of the physics pyramid (as physics was just about considered a “done” thing – proven beyond a reasonable doubt), completely ripped up the foundation of the pyramid by replacing Galilean invariance and Newtonian physics with Relativity.

There is no such thing as a scientific model being “proven beyond a reasonable doubt.” That applies equally well to climate change and even evolution. (Don’t get too excited Creationists and Intelligent Designers – evolution is still on completely solid ground and your arguments are still inadequate, wrong, illogical, and full of shit…no offense)

Censoring the “skeptics”, even when said “deniers” are hindering the majority view from completely screwing up the global economies in the name of an un-proven “science” is setting a horrible precedent that WILL (not “could”) do irreparable harm to scientific research. Science HAS to allow dissent and competing (scientific) theories in order for it to grow. We are already facing issues with scientists losing funding for studies that disagree with the “consensus” on climate change – which happens to be a growing body of research AGAINST the claims of the IPCC report.

Speaking of which. to answer the question about not trusting the IPCC: it’s a politically charged and biased committee, as has been reported by scientists who participated in the proceedings (not posting a link out of principle – but will on request). But even if it wasn’t, scientists are always questioning the peer-reviewed papers of other scientists. That’s what makes science work. One doesn’t have to agree with the paper/report just because it was peer-reviewed. Very often I hear colleagues disagreeing with works published in some of the most prominent journals – Nature, Science, Physical Review Letters. It doesn’t matter that the work was peer-reviewed. Skepticism drives experimentation, which, in turn, helps verify the theory or condemn it. Peer-reviewed articles are still subjected to the politics and other biases of the researchers and reviewers (lots of papers get published due in part to the micro-politics within a field).

I consider myself a “free-speecher” above and beyond the notion of a “global warming skeptic.” I am very much open to the strong possibility that I am wrong on that issue. Free-speech censorship, even under the disguise of regulation designed to “balance freedoms”, is, at its heart, an effort not to censor harmful language, but to control how individuals think. That’s not morally justifiable. The real answer to the issue is to promote the dialogue and not try to bury it.

Self-regulation, on the otherhand, is very effective. Whenever a prominent blogger or authority figure posts wrong information, he/she is usually quickly found out and the misinformation corrected when the community gets involved. If a central authority or micro-authorities are ever given the “job” of controlling information (the first step in controlling society – see the Chinese for example), it generally leads to less fact checking by the community at large. The end result is less accuracy rather than more (see the many examples of how inaccurate information gets passed along via the MSM because people trust that there is fact checking being done). Instead of working towards censorship of ideas that go against the majority opinion by forcing the writer to be able to provide “proof” on demand, it should come down to the community doing their homework before passing judgement one way or the other. There’s nothing wrong with demanding a person cite their sources, but making it “regulation, law, or influence” is asking for trouble.

The free-exchange of ideas on the open market of human thought is the best way to win any argument or make any changes to society, for it is only then that the “consensus” is real and not forced by tyrannical elements.

James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming…He is also considering personally targeting members of Congress who have a poor track record on climate change in the coming November elections.

WTF? And here’s the definition of irony:

His sharpest words are reserved for the special interests he blames for public confusion about the nature of the global warming threat. “The problem is not political will, it’s the alligator shoes – the lobbyists. It’s the fact that money talks in Washington, and that democracy is not working the way it’s intended to work.“

If democracy is not working, it’s because assholes like Hansen want to silence censor those who disagree with them. Whether it be taking oil execs to court, defunding scientists who disagree, or de-licensing meteorologists who disagree with the global warming “consensus,” instead of having an open and honest debate on the “settled” science that is quickly being riddled with more and more holes (unless you can believe that CO2 is actually causing sunspots to disappear, these people wish to silence the critics. They’re no different than the idiots in Canada fighting to silence “offensive” opinions there.

Luckily, down in the States, we have something called the First Amendment which would prohibit someone like Hansen from accomplishing his goal…at least for the time being…

Now I think there is plenty of room for debate on the causes of global warming, even if I do fall on the “it’s BS” side. However, censoring the debate to get the desired outcome makes Hansen and others a moron. Free speech and debate is fundamental to a democracy, is very necessary within the scientific community, and should NEVER be compromised.

But, I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here…

UPDATE: Comments are off due to spam on this one post.

MT BEST, AUSTRALIA – New research compiled by Australian scientist Dr Tom Chalko shows that global seismic activity on Earth is now five times more energetic than it was just 20 years ago.

The research proves that destructive ability of earthquakes on Earth increases alarmingly fast and that this trend is set to continue, unless the problem of “global warming” is comprehensively and urgently addressed.
…

The article goes on to explain how if we don’t get global warming under control the Earth is going to shake us all to death, or something (paraphrasing), quoting solely Chalko and his work. I’ll leave the part where I explain why physically this is crackpot science and focus on the great journalism aspects of the article. At NO POINT does it say in the CBS article where Chalko is employed or what field he’s in or where his work was published. So I googled Tom Chalko and got links to several sites with his name on them, but I thought it surely had to be a different Chalko (because it’s SUCH a common name). Then I found the MSNBC article, which did a better job than the AP/CBS article in explaining at the end of the article:

For further information please read Dr Chalko’s scientific article published at NU Journal of Discovery. http://nujournal.net/EarthquakeEnergyRise.pdf

Dr Tom Chalko, MSc, PhD, former Melbourne University academic (between 1982-2001) is Head of Geophysics Division at Scientific Engineering Research, Mt Best, Australia.

Image Available: http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/frame_mw?attachid=782087

Contact:
Dr Tom Chalko
Scientific Engineering Research
ph (+61 3) 5681 6361
email Email Contact
© MarketWire 2008

Some things stand out. First, I’ve never heard of NU Journal of Discovery, and I have never heard of a reputable, peer reviewed…(more after the fold) journal, that links directly to the PDF titled in such a simplistic way. So I click on the PDF and it’s obviously not a professionally made journal article, and hacking the URL shows that NU Journal has a lot of publications from only one author: Dr. Chalko, who also happens to be one of the editors of the “journal.” And by the way, it’s NOT a professionally done website. The publisher of the journal is Natural University, which is NOT a real university, and shares the same logo as the journal. The logo, by the way, appears to have some physics equations that look similar to Maxwell Equations, but with some extra terms that I don’t recognize. However, the speed of light equals infinity on top and zero on bottom with the Earth inbetween is a clear indicator of crackpot science. Scanning the titles of Chalko’s work shows that the crackpot part is definitely true.

Second red flag: He’s no longer associated with Melbourne University as of 2001. Instead he’s running a division at “Scientific Engineering Research” (website found via a google search). Now going to the website shows that it is definitely HIS website/company. It even has his picture on the front page. Again, I’m not going to address why his work is crackpot science (Auras? Come on, do I really have to explain this? If you’d like me to, please leave a comment), I’m just pointing out the lack of journalistic oversight.

And by the way, my initial google search with all the sites that I dismissed as another Chalko? Here they are:
The Freedom of Choice (advertising Chalko’s book)
Thiaoouba.com (WTF?)
Bioresonant.com (also advertising his book about Auras)
SelfHealing.net (more auras)

SAME GUY.

This guy is NOT a scientist. He’s a crackpot. He’s certainly not a reputable scientist that ANY mainstream journalist or news site should EVER quote, link to, or take seriously. Somebody, and probably more than one, needs to be fired for not doing their jobs. How does something like this get by those guys? Has their desperation for news stories really gone that far? More than likely, I think, someone’s left-leaning, evironmentalism got the better of them and they took this doomsday idiot’s word that he was a reputable scientist and quoted him because he said what they wanted to hear.

Now, let’s look at the science. Global Warming theory (whether you believe it or not) states that more heat is getting trapped between the ground and the upper atmosphere due to green house gases. The model predicts a rise in temperature of the air of around 1 degree (give or take). At no point, does it predict a significant increase in the core temperature of the much more massive (compared to the atmosphere) Earth. Yea, surface temperatures rise, but not enough to trickle down and cause a significant increase in earthquake energy. There’s just not enough energy being absorbed and trapped for us to significanly raise the the temperature of the inner Earth. I’m not going to bother with the calculations. It’s just unreasonable. This article should never have made it to the presses. Someone with half a brain should’ve questioned the source, but someone should’ve asked for a second opinion. They didn’t. I wonder if Chalko wrote the article and sent it to someone who was foolish enough to post it?

And get this: in 2001, Chalko wrote an article theorizing that the “greenhouse effect” can actually cause a “meltdown condition” due to the nuclear reactions heating the inside of the earth. This could, he predicts, cause the planet to EXPLODE. Nevermind that the Earth was a LOT warmer in the past than it is today and didn’t explode – at least as far as I can tell, but what do I know? Crackpot.

Seriously, someone needs to be FIRED. I want this story retracted, and AP, CBS, and MSNBS (and Market Watch?), but any chance of that?

I sure hope some other bloggers run with this. This is quite an outrage. It offends my scientific sensibilities to the deepest levels, but as a somewhat intelligent and informed reader of the news, it’s quite an insult. What do we pay these journalists for again?

Updated: According to Climate Donkey / Climate Audit, Chalko’s findings simply aren’t true. Earthquakes have NOT been more intense since 1990; they may even have decreased.

Update 2: Other bloggers have picked on on this bit of nonsense, too, e.g., here. Back in Dec 2007, another Nashville blogger noticed Chalko’s exploding Earth theory. Amazingly, the man even made news back in 2005 on Treehugger.com.

Update 3: Just wanted to say thank you to D.S. Hube for the Newsbuster’s link. It is very much appreciated.

I really agree with her 100%, but she raised some good points that I never thought of before. She points out that it was men that tended to spearhead the creation of new technology and engineering feats. Now, sociologists would probably argue that this is because men were in power and oppressing women. Ms. Lucas disagrees, apparently, and now I’ve thought about it and applying my intense scientific training, I think I agree with her.

What it comes down to is this: Men have more testosterone. More testosterone means men have the very strong, undeniable urge to do stupid shit. Stupid shit leads bad things happening 90% of the time. The other 10% of the time, it leads to great scientific and engineering discoveries. Nearly 99.9% of all fundamental science is driven by the scientist wanting to try something that is most likely going to fail, but is being done for no other reason that “wow, that sounds kinda cool…let’s what happens when we do this…” I.e., the science is driven by men and women wanting to do stupid shit. The more fundamental the science, the more men involved, the stupider and more dangerous the shit they do becomes. Hence, why I am in physics…

Now, scientists are pretty close to creating the first totally artificial life form since Hillary Clinton started running for president. Here’s the article (and if the article from the link differs from this one, it must be because they changed it earlier to hide their evil conservative bias):

WASHINGTON –Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they’re getting closer.

Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of “wet artificial life.”

“It’s going to be a big deal and everybody’s going to know about it,” said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. “We’re talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways — in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict.”

“Creating [wet life] has the potential to shed new light on our place in the universe,” Bedau said. “This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role.”

And several scientists believe man-made life forms will one day offer the potential for solving a variety of problems, from fighting diseases to locking up greenhouse gases to eating toxic waste, and most importantly: they will provide a necessary labor source for doing jobs that true Americans don’t want to do.

Bedau figures there are three major hurdles to creating synthetic life:

– A wall to keep bad wet-life out, allow good ones in, and the ability for them to multiply.

– A system that controls the functions of the wet-life, enabling it to reproduce and mutate in response to environmental changes.

– A metabolism that extracts raw materials from the environment and food, then changes it into something to sell very cheaply.

One of the leaders…… in the field, Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School, predicts that within the next six months, scientists will report evidence that the first step — creating a wall — is “not a big problem.” Scientists are using Mexicans in that effort.

Szostak is also optimistic about the next step — getting the wet-life agree on a working system.

His idea is that once the wall is made, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over and wet-life will accept thier roles in society.

“We aren’t smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened,” Szostak said.

Bedau said there are legitimate worries about creating life that could “run amok,” but there are ways of addressing it, and it will be a very long time before that is a problem. One only has to look at the pre-civil war era through to the 1960s to see the best ways to prevent a take-over.

“When these things are created, they’re going to be so weak, it’ll be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in this heat we’ve been experiencing,” he said. “But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen.”

(This version CORRECTS Bedau quote to “shed new light”)