A while ago I called the Large Hadron Collider a “Sucker’s Bet." It’s time for an update because the LHC Safety Assessment Group (or LSAG) has published its long awaited report on the safety of the collider. I am clearly completely unqualified to argue any of this on the substance, but the process is broken. This is yet another paper by a bunch of scientists (in this case five) who present their findings in a static PDF, at the end of having spent considerable time looking at the potential risks. As a result, we can only see their final paper. Any traces of process have been completely obliterated. What arguments did they have internally? Where do they disagree?
The right way to have done this would have been through an open process, ideally using a wiki, that would let all of those concerned contribute and engage. I will provide just one example of how this would have resulted in a better end product. The LSAG provides some detail on why they feel that cosmic rays provide "natural experiments” at greater energies than those that will be carried out in the LHC. But they do not address a question that has been raised repeatedly by the critics, which is that cosmic rays are unlikely to provide head on collissions between particles moving at exactly the opposite direction. Now as a lay person with a bit of understanding of Newtonian physics that seems like a reasonable question. It would probably take the scientists all of 5 minutes to answer why it doesn’t matter or apply here. By doing that on an official CERN wiki with their names signed to it we would get an accretive public record.
Bottomline, it’s nice to have the LSAG report out, but it’s ironic that the Web was invented at CERN and all they can muster is to put up a PDF instead of using the Web to its full power.
