Risk assessments seem to have become a part of a teacher’s life but this has to have been the strangest risk assessment ever. An anonymous committee at CERN had to evaluate the risk that experiments carried out using the Large Hadron Collider the world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building, might create a black hole which would swallow the world. You know the columns on the form. Multiply likelihood by severity of consequence. How do you multiply not very likely by doesn’t get any worse?

An easier calculation might be how many lives might have been saved using the billions pumped into this project to which might be added the billions spent rescuing financial institutions which by all accounts seem to have got greedy and overstretched themselves.