Gauging a Collider’s Odds of Creating a Black Hole

from the NYTimes:

In Walker Percy’s “Love in the Ruins,” the protagonist, a doctor and an inventor, recites what he calls the scientist’s prayer. It goes like this:

“Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men.

“Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction.

“Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.”

Today we require more than prayers that a scientific experiment will not lead to the end of the world. We demand hard-headed calculations. But whom can we trust to do them?That question has been raised by the impending startup of the Large Hadron Collider." Critics have contended that the machine could produce a black hole that could eat the Earth or something equally catastrophic. ... Dr. Kent, in a 2003 paper, used the standard insurance company method to calculate expected losses to explore how stringent this bound on danger was. He multiplied the disaster probability times the cost, in this case the loss of the global population, six billion. A result was that, in actuarial terms, the Rhic collider could kill up to 120 people in a decade of operation"
[...]
"Besides the random nature of quantum physics means that there is always a minuscule, but nonzero, chance of anything occurring, including that the new collider could spit out man-eating dragons."

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