Word: posner
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...physicists out to destroy the world? Richard A. Posner does not impute nefarious motives to researchers conducting high-energy particle collision experiments. But in his latest book, Catastrophe, Posner does suggest that one of these experiments could trigger a “strangelet scenario”—a chain reaction that will condense the entire Earth into a tiny ball just 100 meters in diameter...
...Posner is not a scientist: rather, he is a law professor at University of Chicago and a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit. Rumor has it Posner was considered—briefly—for the post of Harvard Law School dean in 2003. (He quickly took himself out of the running...
Beyond the legal world, Posner is renowned as a prolific and insightful scholar: he is the author of more than 30 books, and—according to one list—number 70 on the list of most frequently-cited public intellectuals alive. (Granted, Posner did compile the list himself...
...Posner is one of two prominent economists to wander into the tricky realm of the natural sciences in recent months. (The other, our esteemed University president, is thanked for his advice in the preface of Catastrophe.) Just as Lawrence H. Summers’ sojourn into behavioral genetics elicited several less-than-rave reviews, Posner gets mixed marks from physicists for his musings on subatomic matter...
...Posner writes, “social control of science cannot be left to the scientists.” In challenging his readers to wade into the arcane debate over strangelet disasters, Posner brings particle physics to the masses. By framing cost-benefit calculations in lucid prose, Posner helps the non-economists among us make decisions in the face of unlikely but potentially earth-shattering risks...