The myth of zero risk: Have two years of a pandemic taught us anything about navigating uncertainty?

In the months before September 2008, as physicists were getting ready to test-drive the Large Hadron Collider, a massive machine designed to smash bits of atoms together at high speed, public panic set in, fuelled by a debate between a handful of physicists about a theoretical possibility. What if the device, the most powerful ever made, created black holes by mistake that would swallow Earth? Physicists calculated that the chances were infinitesimal, but they couldn't absolutely guarantee that the risk of such a surreal catastrophe was zero.