User talk:60.242.93.208

Re: The 'you are insignificant and wrong' argument

I posted a response to to your comment the other day at Talk:Safety of particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, and am echoing it here, in case you are still active at this IP address. Cheers, Wwheaton (talk) 19:23, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

It is important to understand that people will come to this page with doubts about the future and need solid answers.

The page exists because some people have safety concerns about the LHC (so to imply that these safety concerns should be given a small amount of space because they are held by the minority of people is clearly illogical).

A large amount of the article is dedicated to repeating the same message. That message is simple and can be written on one line: CERN have reviewed the safety concerns and dismissed them (as you would expect since there is a large amount of money and personal time invested by all concerned). This should be stated once with references. Thereafter any line that repeats the statement should be removed.

The article should be dedicated to explaining the reasoning behind the dismissal of any concerns.

And please remember Fermilab director Pier Oddone when he stated "In this case we are dumbfounded that we missed some very simple balance of forces". 60.242.93.208 (talk) 21:16, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Of course course I hope "You are insignificant" would not appear explicitly (or even implicitly) in any Wiki article, nor in these article discussion pages; though such feelings in editors do inevitably slip through now and then (as do "you are part of a conspiracy of evil technologists", alas). Opinions and points of view can certainly be wrong, and have to be weighed on the scales of the opinions of qualified people, reported in reliable sources. I think the Apollo hoax claim is an example of an "insignificant" opinion (in some sense), despite its wide coverage. It has a Wiki article of some length and substance, which in my opinion it deserves.

I think your point asking for a clearer explanation here is good in principle, and I thank you for pointing it out, as it surely needs continuing attention and effort. But such an explanation is quite difficult in practice because the argument is logically fairly complex, and because some of the individual steps really require a very deep understanding of physics and mathematics to evaluate critically. If we were to give the argument fully it would be lengthy, and realistically, very few readers would be able to understand it (I would not, in particular). Essentially all of those who could evaluate it are or have been themselves professionally involved in elementary particle physics; and some would discount their opinions as biased by conflict of interest.

The Challenger accident is the best (ie, horrible...) example I know that shows we must address these matters seriously. I wish we had more Richard Feynman's in the world available to help us now. Brian Greene would be my candidate for the best communicator who is truly expert around today. Best, Wwheaton (talk) 19:17, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

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