{"id":672,"date":"2008-10-01T03:25:47","date_gmt":"2008-10-01T08:25:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=672"},"modified":"2008-10-01T03:25:47","modified_gmt":"2008-10-01T08:25:47","slug":"can-everyone-get-on-with-their-normal-jobs-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/672","title":{"rendered":"Can Everyone Get on With Their Normal Jobs Now?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A question asked over at The Great Beyond<\/a><\/p>\n

A while back I ran across a blog post about the “dangers” of Bose-Einstein Condensates \u2014 the purported great peril of a “Bosenova” explosion happening in liquid He, and wrote a post about the various misconceptions<\/a> that were present. Malcolm Fairbairn and Bob McElrath wrote a response to this that is now available at arXiv. There is no explosion risk associated with superfluid Helium in the LHC cooling system<\/a>
\n(Yeah, that will calm the conspiracy fruitcakes)<\/p>\n

Liquid 4<\/sup>He has a monatomic structure with s-wave
\nelectrons, zero nuclear spin, no hyperfine splitting, and as a consequence no
\nFeshbach resonance which would allow one to change its normally repulsive
\ninteractions to be attractive. Because of this, a Bose-Nova style collapse
\nof 4<\/sup>He is impossible. Additional speculations concerning cold fusion during
\nthese events are easily dismissed using the usual arguments about the
\nCoulomb barrier at low temperatures, and are not needed to explain the
\nBose-Einstein condensate Bose-Nova phenomenon. We conclude that that
\nthere is no physics whatsoever which suggests that Helium could undergo
\nany kind of unforeseen catastrophic explosion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It turns out that there’s more of this fumbling and bumbling out there that I had missed. Collider Incidents<\/a> at LHC Facts (Not sure why “Facts” isn’t in scare quotes) takes things to a new level. There are responses from both Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman (and another researcher) that clarify some of the technical jargon and other statements that have been so badly mangled, and the wingnut conclusion is that the scientists are just covering up!<\/p>\n

\u201cI can state ABSOLUTELY CATEGORICALLY that it is totally inconceivable that a black hole could be produced by these phenomena.\u201d
\nMethinks Dr. Wieman doth protest TOO MUCH\u2026
\nThere are many physicists who can not only conceive it but believe it too. Not too mention those of us with \u201ca terrible ignorance of physics\u201d but an abundance of common sense.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and<\/p>\n

What I\u2019d really like to know, and maybe you can find out, is if the \u2018Bosenova\u2019 was such a fantastic experiment that raised so many interesting questions why they don\u2019t fire them up all the time. Seems like they would want to keep repeating the experiment wouldn\u2019t they? Unless, of course, they did make a stable MBH, they know it, and they\u2019re scared. They sound scared.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Funny, but not really “ha, ha” funny.<\/p>\n

There’s a nice takedown of this, and the original nonsense article by Alan Gillis, over at The Physics Anti-Crackpot Blog. There will be no Bose-Novae at the LHC<\/a><\/p>\n

So this claim of Gillis & R\u00f6ssler is completely and totally specious. Any responsible researcher, before making a claim that something will explode like a nuclear bomb, should look up the relevant physics, to see if his idea makes sense. In this case, R\u00f6ssler or Gillis didn’t even take the first step to see how a Bose-Nova works, and if his proposal is even remotely reasonable. The two crackpots in this story reinforce each other, neither checking their facts. It’s odd here that the “journalist” originates a crackpot idea, asks it of a crackpot, and of course he agrees. Crackpots are not in the business of proving or disproving things.<\/p>\n

Given the above article, I don’t think Alan Gillis should be allowed anywhere near the term “journalist”, but I think the term “crackpot” certainly applies. A good journalist, when hearing such a dangerous claim, should call up a few more physicists, to see if this guy is a crackpot, or whether this issue has any credibility in the scientific community. Perhaps he should also contact people who have done or mathematically explained Bose-Nova experiments (as Fairbairn and McElrath apparently did — judging by their acknowledgments they contacted one of the original Bose-Nova experimenters, Elizabeth Donley). <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But as we can see above, getting in contact with people who know \u2014 really know \u2014 what they are talking about doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot. To them, you either agree with the wingnuts or you are part of a coverup, trying to deceive the public. Which is why it can be frustrating<\/a> to talk science with some people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A question asked over at The Great Beyond A while back I ran across a blog post about the “dangers” of Bose-Einstein Condensates \u2014 the purported great peril of a “Bosenova” explosion happening in liquid He, and wrote a post … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,39],"tags":[290,291],"class_list":["post-672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antiscience","category-physics","tag-lhc","tag-lhc-bosenova"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}