L'Aquila quake: Italy scientists guilty of manslaughter

[chelle]

Hello people of the world,

I couldn't let this one pass by:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20025626

Prosecutors said the defendants gave a falsely reassuring statement before the quake, while the defence maintained there was no way to predict major quakes.*

The 6.3 magnitude quake devastated the city and killed 308 people.

*and than check the Wiki-page:

Italian laboratory technician Giampaolo Giuliani predicted a major earthquake on Italian television a month before, after measuring increased levels of radon emitted from the ground. He was accused of being alarmist by the Director of the Civil Defence, Guido Bertolaso, and forced to remove his findings from the Internet (old data and descriptions are still on line). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_L'Aquila_earthquake

If they had any common sense, they would have warned the people but no, noooooooo

... same goes for the LHC, a 100 000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun, and a frequency that is 10^9 higher than cosmic ray collisions in Nature, but no, noooo it's all safe. Well good luck!

---
I'm sorry that I doubted you, I was so unfair
You were in a car crash and you lost your hair

[DCWhitworth]

Your logic is backwards.

With the earthquake scientists said it was dangerous but some non-scientists disagreed with them.

With the LHC scientists say it is safe, but some non-scientists disagreed with them.

Following your logic, since the earthquake *was* dangerous the LHC is therefore safe.

QED

[chelle]

Your logic is backwards.

With the earthquake scientists said it was dangerous but some non-scientists disagreed with them.

Well the tittle said *scientists* and it were these people that got convicted:

Franco Barberi, head of Serious Risks Commission
Enzo Boschi, former president of the National Institute of Geophysics
Giulio Selvaggi, director of National Earthquake Centre
Gian Michele Calvi, director of European Centre for Earthquake Engineering
Claudio Eva, physicist
Mauro Dolce, director of the the Civil Protection Agency's earthquake risk office
Bernardo De Bernardinis, former vice-president of Civil Protection Agency's technical department


All pretty important experts, so I don't think that my logic is backward. Fact was that a little guy had to withdraw his conclusions due to peer pressure. I don't see anyone getting a paper published on the safety of the LHC due to the same peer pressure. Can you imagine one person saying that this experiment isn't safe jeopardising this whole project, because of a wild guess. I don't see him or her getting a chance to make a career in particle physics.