So Wednesday this week is the day the new LHC supercollider is switched on at CERN. And apparently, worse case scenario doesn’t just include the usual suspects – like funding for the project running out – but a black hole being created and swallowing the earth.
I do love it what the media latches onto scientific events such as these, because they consistently feel duty bound to simplify things to the point where they no longer make sense. I mean – liking the supercollider to “An enormous microscope”? Right, that’s a perfect analogy, if you imagine a microscope working by smashing thing with an enormous hammer and then classifying the resulting bits by how far they flew.
Scientists conducting the experiment are essentially looking for something that hasn’t yet been observed in the Standard Model (the current accepted wisdom of particles physicists) – the Higgs Boson. So because they don’t know exactly what it will be, anything could happen, right?
I do have some sympathy for critics to this event. The Standard Model is a terrible theory – not because of it’s accuracy or predictive power (which has been very good thus far), but because of it’s seemingly lunatic-assembled rules and definitions – which sit together like some sort of ugly tangled web. If beauty is indeed truth, then we could safely assume that the theory presented in particle physics today is complete tosh, which might be why they’re having trouble finding the last few bits in experimental results…
But my sympathy quickly evaporates when you actually look at the postulated dangers from the scientists against the LHC (who are at present frantically filing lawsuits to try and delay it’s switching on). First off is the theory that micro-black holes could form and slowly eat the earth over a period of 4 years. This completely ignores the widely held belief that exactly the same kind of collisions are produced on the earth naturally, and even if micro black holes were formed, they cannot be surviving otherwise we’d already know. Second is the theory that the 120 tons of superfluid Helium II (used as coolant in the LHC’s superconducting magnets) could explode in a bosenova which would essentially be like an enormous thermonuclear detonation, but presumably with latin beats. These events are described as “inexplicable phenomenon”, which is not exactly hard evidence that one will be formed here. I mean, is there anything we know the LHC won’t do?
Sadly, i feel the media frenzy surrounding the fear of the unknown will quickly evaoprate once the damn thing actually goes online. And that’s a pity, because modern-day scientific discoveries do seem to suffer from a media blackout. For example, can you remember who won the Nobel prize for physics last year? Or in the last 10? Here’s hoping future LHC discoveries have a public interest that last a bit longer than a decaying Higgs Boson…
Update
Hooray! we’re still here! Although now CERN tell us they haven’t actually started smashing protons yet – and that won’t happen for another 2 months while things are calibrated. Doh! Another two months of suspense…