Nobel laureate Marie Curie died of aplastic anemia, the victim of radiation from the many fascinating glowing substances she had learned to isolate.

How could she have known? And the answer, as far as I can tell, is that she couldn't. The only way she could have avoided death was by being too scared of anything new to go near it. Would banning physics experiments have saved Curie from herself?

But far more cancer patients than just one person have been saved by radiation therapy. And the real cost of banning physics is not just losing that one experiment - it's losing physics. No more Industrial Revolution.

Some of us fall, and the human species carries on, and advances; our modern world is built on the backs, and sometimes the bodies, of people who took risks. My father is fond of saying that if the automobile were invented nowadays, the saddle industry would arrange to have it outlawed.

But what if the laws of physics had been different from what they are? What if Curie, by isolating and purifying the glowy stuff, had caused something akin to a fission chain reaction gone critical... which, the laws of physics being different, had ignited the atmosphere or produced a strangelet?

At the recent Global Catastrophic Risks conference, someone proposed a policy prescription which, I argued, amounted to a ban on all physics experiments involving the production of novel physical situations - as opposed to measuring existing phenomena. You can weigh a rock, but you can't purify radium, and you can't even expose the rock to X-rays unless you can show that exactly similar X-rays hit rocks all the time. So the Large Hadron Collider, which produces collisions as energetic as cosmic rays, but not exactly the same as cosmic rays, would be off the menu.

After all, whenever you do something new, even if you calculate that everything is safe, there is surely some probability of being mistaken in the calculation - right?

So the one who proposed the policy, disagreed that their policy cashed out to a blanket ban on physics experiments. And discussion is in progress, so I won't talk further about their policy argument.

But if you consider the policy of "Ban Physics", and leave aside the total political infeasibility, I think the strongest way to frame the issue - from the pro-ban viewpoint - would be as follows:

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Jennifer_Diane_Reitz

Jennifer_Diane_Reitz

Jennifer_Diane_Reitz

Jennifer_Diane_Reitz