Goodbye to All That... and to all this. Oh, and to everything else too

I heard a troubling discussion on the Today programme the other day. It seems that someone is trying to take out an injunction to halt the new Hadron Collider at CERN. Apparently there are fears that if it were to be activated, a kind of micro-Black Hole may be created in the planned collisions. This would be a Health and Safety hazard as it would consume the whole of the Earth, reducing it to a mere teaspoonful of neutron-density matter in a fraction of a second. I can see why this would be inconvenient, but luckily a cheery British scientist was on hand to mock the protesters' ignorance and reassure the public that the chances of this happening were “negligible.” So, that’s all right then.
Hang on a second. No, it's not all right. “Negligible” does not mean “zero”. It means that there is a finite probability that this will happen. In fact, if I understand Quantum Mechanics aright, since it holds that every possible outcome of every possible quantum experiment actually does obtain, then “negligible” means that in some parallel universe, the Earth is guaranteed to be destroyed. And how are they so certain that that universe is not this one? I'm now more worried than I was, not less.
I think this is the result of no longer teaching would-be scientists the Philosophy of Science any more. Louis Wolpert and Richard Dawkins hate the idea of the Philosophy of Science, of course, because it means thinking about the consequences of your actions, and, since we scientists are God, we shouldn’t be made to. Because we have decided that the risk of oblivion is low, we don’t have to listen to a lot of stupid people who are worried that we might be wrong. The swine! We’re always right!
It also troubles me that the precautionary principle seems to have gone out of the window. A good many scientists these days keep coming up with this same retort, namely that, because there is no actual proof that something is dangerous, then it must be safe. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It may be dangerous - you just don’t know yet.
The assessment of risk also depends upon just how much potential damage could result from your being wrong. In this case, the potential damage is the loss of the whole world in the blink of an eye, so I would have said that a few blithe assurances from the physicists involved that they think Stephen Hawking’s untested hypothesis about the instant evaporation of micro-Black Holes is probably right - in spite of his having had to revise his opinions on Black Holes in general quite recently - isn’t really good enough, not given the somewhat high costs if he proves to be wrong.
In a sublimely Tralfamadorian moment, in which the button has always been pressed and always will be pressed, they are happy to sacrifice us all to their inevitable. I just hope this Hadron Collider of theirs has been better designed than Heathrow’s Terminal Five.
(Previously published at astvinr.livejournal.com)