Yankee Doodle, the iconic US revolutionary war soldier, “stuck a feather in his hat,” like the American Indians he knew well. For them, feathers were like the symbols of enemy planes stencilled outside an ace pilot’s cockpit, symbols of enemies defeated. Yankee Doodle called his feather “macaroni,” contemporary slang for decorations on a military uniform. Indians called the process “counting coup,” French for “counting strikes or blows delivered.” It is time for us to count coup and award ourselves a few metaphorical medals. Our opponents are not going to do it for us.

In their too-frequent hubris, collider advocates tout the several studies they have done as a symbol of the great care they have exercised. How could anyone question all those studies? In fact the several studies are a sign of weakness, not strength. Subsequent studies were necessary because safety factors confidently asserted by earlier studies were soon outmoded by rapid developments in physics. This suggests that the confidence with which safety factors were asserted may have been misplaced. This suggests that physics in this area may not be mature enough to provide adequate safety factors.

We have not won everything, so it is easy to miss what we have won. It takes some philosophy to see it.

As a parable, consider a ride with a reckless bush pilot. As you get in the airplane for a flight over tough country, you ask, “Have you completed the checklist?” “Another bureaucrat!” the pilot grumps, then grabs a clipboard and pointedly circles the plane, looking at every tire and checking the dipstick in every oil reservoir. “See, nothing wrong!” he exclaims as he guns the plane down the runway. The philosophical question: is the plane safer now? In fact, there was nothing wrong. However, I would much rather fly after the checklist is completed. Running the checklist was a good thing. The subjective probability of trouble is lower.

When CERN’s safety factors were Hawking radiation and the collider/cosmic ray analogy as applied to Earth, safety factors later admitted by CERN’s Mangano to be inadequate, starting the LHC would have been like flying in a bush plane without doing a checklist. A checklist does not remove all risk, and neither does the LSAG study, but they reduce the risk. We helped push CERN to sponsor the LSAG study.

Estimates of the probability of collider disaster have ranged from 0.75 to 10^-40. Considering that the physics enabling disaster, while published in peer-reviewed literature, is rather speculative, I think that 0.75 is too high. Considering that physics is in flux, that physics contains several speculative theories enabling disaster, and that several safety factors evaporated, I think that 10^-40 is too low. As a very rough conservative guesstimate, consider that the subjective probability of disaster may have been as low as 1/10,000 before the LSAG study, and 1/100,000 afterward. It is standard decision theory to compute expected value, that is, to multiply the probability of something times what is gained or lost if that probability is actualized. In this case the prospective loss is the entire population of earth, 6.5 billion lives, to say nothing of the lives of those yet unborn. Using this standard calculation, the expected value in lives lost in the first case is 1/10,000 x 6,500,000,000 lives = 650,000 lives, and in the second case 65,000 lives. This means that from point of view of the bush pilot parable, in expected value terms, the LSAG study might be thought to have changed subjective probabilities in a way worth saving 650,000-65,0000 = 585,000 lives. Few heroes of legend have saved more lives than that.

Of course, there were not exactly 585,000 lives saved, but in a before-the-fact calculation, this is the value of the postulated reduction in the probability of disaster. CERN deserves some of the credit for this since they authorized the LSAG study. However, collider opponents also deserve some of the credit because they advocated a new study, and helped create the conditions that made CERN to see a new study as appropriate. Even if some probability of disaster remains, it is a very good thing to have reduced that probability.