Greetings, my friends.

There has been much talk of late of a new kinematic entertainment, entitled Angels and Demons: I was surprised last week to find that images drawn from it were even adorning the UCL home-page. Its plot apparently revolves around an infernally destructive engine containing antimatter which has been stolen from CERN in the city of Geneva. I am given to understand that the very notion of an antimatter bomb, as imagined here, is ludicrous, and a mere sensationalist conceit. But there are some who have proposed that the work which is in fact undertaken at CERN does indeed pose a terminal threat to the world.

A year or so ago, I caught a glimpse of a headline in the New York Times, ‘Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More’. It appeared that two gentlemen in Hawaii had initiated a suit at law to prevent scientists at CERN working on the Large Hadron Collider from creating a ‘black hole’, which—these litigants averred—might cause the world and even the universe to be destroyed. Permit me, for a moment, a short digression on the topic of Hawaii. A friend of mine was the first to bring the news to Europe of the death of Captain James Cook, the pre-eminent navigator of my time, the first European to reach the Sandwich Islands (which was our name for the Hawaiian archipelago) before being killed by the islanders.

But to return to the matter at hand. One of the questions posed in the article was: who was to decide whether this great experiment should be allowed to proceed? I would certainly say that I would not have entrusted it to the judiciary of my day. If you were to read my strictures on the eighteenth-century judicial system you would surely appreciate the reason why the headline caught my attention. While I generally stopped short of excoriating any particular judge, I frequently criticised the unrighteous judge, who was, in effect, any judge working within the fee-gathering and technical system of my era. This sinister system allowed the judges to wield a mendacity-licence in one hand, while the other was open to receive a multiplicity of fees. A suit at law was subject to unconscionable delay, vexation, and expense. Since legal cases brought to settle straightforward issues of the succession of property typically continued for decades, saving the world is not a question that I would have put to a judge.

In the event, the lawsuit in Hawaii failed: the Federal Judge declared that the American judicial system had no jurisdiction over the matter. In a quite different sense, the Large Hadron Collider also failed, or at least encountered certain technical difficulties which necessitated a temporary halt in its operations. However, it is due to be reactivated later this year; and, although most physicists regard doubts about its safety as risible, remains also the question, who is to decide? As the alleged danger is that the 7 billion inhabitants of the earth might be extinguished, this can not be a question for a single nation alone. It requires to be dealt with by a worldwide political system, in an international tribunal, which I understand exists in vestigial form, possessing none of the requisite powers. My writings opposed things as they are with things as they ought to be and it is in this vein that I will elaborate briefly.

I would have one judge—someone who is not, and never has been, a professional advocate. He must be fully informed by those best qualified to give evidence, and those, of course, are persons who have sufficient knowledge of the science concerned to give an informed judgement. In order to ensure that they were not concealing any sinister interest, we might stipulate that they should declare any expectation of profit should the project go ahead, which is to say that were they employed by CERN the public should be made aware of this fact. They would be required to be entirely forthcoming, for it is essential that the judge form a complete understanding of the issues. In the absence of understanding, he cannot make a reasonable decision. I formulated a calculus consisting of five dimensions of value to assist in the analysis of all human action, namely: intensity, duration, propinquity, certainty, and extent. Clearly, in a case of this magnitude, the dominant consideration is extent; at issue is the survival of the earth and its inhabitants. But the other dimensions should also be taken fully into consideration. It must be admitted that in my day science was entirely Newtonian and explicable to an educated audience. Apparently, quantum physics is open to the full comprehension of only a tiny group of specialists, and this complexity renders a solution of this issue so much more difficult.

On the question of the science involved I wear two hats. On the one hand, as a scientist myself, I would pursue knowledge for its own sake, and my inclination in this case is that this Large Hadron Collider in Geneva should be employed. On the other hand, as a utilitarian philosopher, my question is ‘is this useful’? Clearly, the destruction of the earth would constitute a not insignificant harm. The question then relates to the computation of the probability of this harm, and to the computation of the probability that significant benefits would arise from the successful operation of this colossal machine. Rationally, if we can give accurate values to these variables, the right course of action will be indicated simply by the application of the four rules of arithmetic. Should there be even a tiny chance that the experiment would destroy the earth, it should not be allowed to proceed, unless it promised to obviate an even greater danger. I confess I am not in a position to express an informed opinion on the issue. However, I can say that it should be resolved by investigation of the known facts, and that fallacious reasonings—or, more coarsely, lies which damn all innovation by summoning up preternatural fears of evil in the shape of phantastical Hobgoblins—should be excluded from the corpus of relevant evidence!

Your ever laborious and devoted Servant

J.B.