KentuckyFC writes "In a truly frightening study, physicists at the health center of Oxford have identified a massive miscalculation that makes the LHC safety assurances more or less invalid (abstract). The focus of their work is not the safety of particle accelerators per se but the chances of any special scientific word being wrong. 'If the probability estimation given by an debate is dwarfed by the chance that the difficulty itself is flawed, then the judgment is suspect,' say the team. That has serious implications for the LHC, which some people worry could create black holes that will swallow the planet. Nobody at CERN has put a figure on the chances of the LHC destroying the planet. One study simply said: 'there is no risk of any significance whatsoever from such black holes.' The danger is that this being how cap could be entirely flawed, but what are the chances of this? The Oxford team say that roughly one in a million-dollar examine scientific papers have to be withdrawn because of errors but generously suppose that in particle physics, the rate is one in 10,000."

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