Word: posner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Posner takes a midpoint between the two disaster estimates, and he posits—for the sake of argument—that the likelihood of a world-ending strangelet scenario over the next decade is 1 in 10 million. In other words, there’s a 1 in 10 million chance that 6 billion people will die at some point in the next decade because of RHIC. Thus on average, we would expect RHIC to kill 60 people per year. Is that a sacrifice we should be willing to make to push the frontiers of physics forward...
...Posner’s credit, Catastrophe does anticipate Gabrielse’s counter-argument. Posner writes that “a cosmic ray hitting a fixed target such as the moon will tend to scatter the nuclei that it hits, making it less likely that they will clump”—and thus produce strange matter—“than if the collision were head on,” as it would be inside RHIC. So, the fact that the moon has existed for 4.5 billion years without condensing into a tiny ball does not necessarily...
...Here, Posner turns to North Harvard Yard—and specifically, to Cogan Professor of Law and Economics W. Kip Viscusi...
...quite, Posner explains...
...Posner notes, it would take quite a large wad of cash—perhaps many billions of dollars—to convince most of us to engage in a round of Russian roulette, where the probability of death...