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Doomsday

Entry 849, on 2008-09-11 at 21:48:08 (Rating 2, Science)

Science and technology news rarely seems to cause a lot of excitement amongst the less scientifically literate members of the public. Sometimes a new tech gadget will cause a real stir: the iPhone, PS3, etc; and sometimes a science news item will capture people's attention: Space Shuttle accidents for example. Because of this seeming lack of interest I was quite surprised that the testing of the Large Hadron Collider yesterday seems to have received quite a lot of attention.

It is unfortunate that the attention was for the wrong reason. Most people I know who don't take a lot of interest in science knew about the LHC because they thought it might cause the end of the world. They saw it as a sort of doomsday device! One teenage girl I talked to said she couldn't sleep last night because she was worried the world would end.

And others seem to have used the event to forward their own agendas. A creationist I regularly debate with saw the LHC as a device which was designed to prove the Big Bang. He reasoned that, if they need to go to this trouble to prove it, then obviously the current certainty of the Big Bang can't be very great.

I enjoy explaining (within my own limited knowledge which is at least far greater than the average person's) what the LHC is really all about. I start enthusiastically describing protons, accelerating them to near the speed of light in a huge machine the size of a small city; what a hadron, quark, and Higg's boson are; and the possible production of mini black holes and strangelets. One of the great things about particle physics is the cool names you get to call the stuff they study: quarks, hadrons, bosons, strangelets... cool!

Well the world didn't end last night but there were two very good reasons why not. First, calculations indicate that the exotic particles and mini black holes, even if they were created, wouldn't be stable for long enough to cause any real problems. And second, the LHC was only being tested anyway and it won't be used to do any real proton smashing for a while yet (maybe a few months).

Even though the LHC is years behind schedule and cost many times what it was supposed to I still think it is a wonderful piece of technology and I am confident that many truly fundamental discoveries will be made using it. I am also confident that those basic discoveries will have practical benefits because one thing we always see from past experiments is that there's no such thing as bad science. All knowledge is useful and should be pursued, even when almost no one understands it!

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