The Large Hadron Collider: calm down people, seriously

By the time this article is printed, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator — will have been operating for a week. It’s not operating anywhere near full power yet, but even as it starts ramping up to full capacity, I want to ensure everyone that anything they might have heard about the LHC destroying the world is flat-out fiction.

What is the Large Hadron Collider? It’s a massive scientific tool, consisting of a 27 kilometre tunnel built 100 metres underground, straddling the Switzerland-France border. Two beams of particles — either protons or lead ions — are fired in different directions around the circular tunnel, guided by extremely powerful magnets. With each lap, the beams gain energy, eventually coming extremely close to the speed of light — at which point, the beams will be made to collide. These collisions emulate the conditions shortly after the Big Bang, and will help physicists answer questions that have plagued us for decades. The LHC represents an extremely exciting time in the state of science and technology worldwide.

The excitement in the scientific community, however, has not spread to the general public as smoothly as many had hoped. Treatment by the media has been skewed by a lawsuit filed on March 21 this year that argued that the LHC poses a threat to the safety of the entire earth.

“In layman’s terms, CERN is asking all of mankind to play a game of Russian roulette,” said cosmologist Luis Sancho. “This they propose to do in order to foster the career goals of a few thousand specialists.” Sancho and fellow plaintiff Walter Wagner claim that the LHC’s high-speed collisions will produce black holes and “dark matter” particles that could destroy Earth.

The lawsuit has sparked widespread media coverage, causing many to be skeptical of the safety of the LHC — so much controversy that CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the group behind the LHC) created the LHC Safety Assessment Group. On its website, the group notes, “whatever the LHC will do, nature has already done many times over during the lifetime of the Earth and other astronomical bodies.” CERN maintains that physicists not involved in the LHC experiments have deemed the LHC safe, and will monitor the experiments taking place at the LHC for safety concerns.

The hysteria surrounding the LHC is far from unique. The history of scientific breakthrough is wrought with other examples of baseless public outcry as a result of fear. In fact, there seems to be a common narrative running through much of the history of science: something interesting happens (or is about to happen), people get scared, it happens anyway, and everyone benefits. Even the fear that is generated can be a positive influence in the end.

Heliocentricism

In the late 16th and early 17th century, Galileo Galilei defended heliocentricism, the controversial theory that the sun was the centre of the solar system , first proposed by Nicolas Copernicus and refined by Johannes Kepler. It is almost comical in its obviousness to us now, but at that time it was a revolutionary idea and resulted in Galileo being publicly admonished by the Catholic Church. Galileo spent the last years of his life under house arrest.

His crime was heresy, as a heliocentric model of the universe directly contradicts passages in the bible. Martin Luther, the father of Protestantism, is quoted as saying, “when a man wishes to be clever he must [. . .] invent something special, and the way he does it must needs be the best! The fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside-down. However, as Holy Scripture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still and not the earth. ” It seems to me that the church feared wide acceptance of heliocentricism. The heretical theory would cause the populace to question the validity of the Bible as a source for knowledge.

Interestingly enough, even though heliocentricism is almost universally accepted (modern geocentrists do exist) the Bible is still one of the most influential books in the world. Accepting heliocentricism benefited astronomers, who were able to better explain the universe, and did not harm the spread of Christianity in Europe.

Space exploration

Voyages off of our familiar planet and into the unknown void of space have sparked much controversy and fear.

The 1957 launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik scared the pants off of the United States. On the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, New York Times writer John Noble Wilford wrote an article titled “With Fear and Wonder in Its Wake, Sputnik Lifted Us Into the Future.”

The fear he refers to was not only the initial fear that Sputnik was a weapon, but the terrifying thought that Russia had done something that Americans could not. Russian science and technology had proven, in this case, more advanced. And during a Cold War that was more about intimidation than actual firepower, the U.S. felt threatened.

We know now that Sputnik wasn’t a weapon. And we’ve seen that the fear instilled by losing the distinction of being the first to successfully launch a satellite only helped the U.S. in the long run. The field of aerospace technology moved forward at a breakneck speed after the launch of Sputnik. In July of 1969, only 12 years after the launch of Sputnik, Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon. “The warmth of shared experience was remarkable, given the origins of the space race in an atmosphere of fear and belligerence,” Wilford noted in his article.

Ironically, it was that period of rapid advance that should have inspired the most fear. I suppose for most, the memory of being second-best to Russia trumped that. If anything, it seems that the only thing that supersedes the fear of technological advancement is some other fear — much as we saw during the Second World War, when mortal fear spurred many firsts, like synthetic rubber and penicillin production, and the atomic bomb.

Science fiction author Sylvia Engdahl recognizes the role fear plays in science advancement. In her essay “Achieving Human Commitment to Space Colonization: Is Fear the Answer?” she writes, “I have long suspected that it is fear, rather than apathy, that has been holding the majority back — not conscious fear, but the stirring of an unconscious recognition that the universe is very much vaster, and more scary, than most people like to think. [. . .] Paradoxically, fear may be the answer both to why we haven't progressed in space and how we can motivate a push outward. For the danger we face is real. One way or another, whether or not terrorists employ dangerous technologies or asteroids strike Earth, to remain confined to our home forever would mean our extinction.”

The Y2K bug

The Y2K bug is not itself a scientific breakthrough, but came as a direct result of the technical breakthroughs that brought computers from million-dollar behemoths to ubiquitous devices found in everything from airplanes to toasters. The media reaction to the possibility of those devices failing, on the other hand, was a classic collection of “what if” scenarios that had the public so scared that the U.S. government’s Year 2000 Council was taken very seriously.

In the end, the worst casualties on Jan. 1, 2000 were 150 slot machines in a Delaware race track. And while other breakthroughs were mainly sensationalized by media outlets, in this case, governments were heavily involved. John Hamre, deputy secretary of defense at the time, said “The Y2K problem is the electronic equivalent of the El Niño and there will be nasty surprises around the globe.”

Again, the effects of the Y2K bug were, on the whole, positive. Many old computer systems were upgraded or replaced with more robust ones. MIT professor Rae Zimmerman claims that the Y2K bug had an impact on the relief effort after the attacks of 9-11. “System redundancies developed in anticipation of a Y2K glitch that never came helped the city's transportation and telecommunications sectors provide an impressive level of service in the wake of the enormous devastation,” reported Lois Slavin after a lecture by Zimmerman.

The big LHC bang

The LHC is looking to become another example of this narrative.

Reuters reported on Sept. 10 — the day the LHC was switched on — that a 16 year-old girl in central India committed suicide as a result of doomsday predictions by many Indian news channels. Officials and witnesses note that thousands are flocking to temples and observing fasts in a bid for salvation.

Am I saying that legitimate fears should not be addressed by the media? Certainly not. It is, in large part, the media’s job to search for matters of public concern where they exist. But the way those messages are delivered must be carefully considered.

Fortunately, North America is delivering these messages more responsibly. The vast majority of articles with doomsday-related headlines eventually conclude that there is no real cause for alarm. But people skim; they see the headline and it becomes water-cooler conversation. It spreads much like a rumour, despite the availability of correct information.

Whether it’s a survival instinct or a penchant for morbidity, it seems that these doomsday predictions quickly take hold with people not because of the media or the scientific community, but because we are innately interested in things that would mean our demise. And when “knowing your enemy” means having a non-trivial knowledge of particle physics, it should come as no surprise that people are scared.

If history does indeed repeat itself and the LHC is another example of the same sequence of events that heliocentricism, space exploration and the Y2K bug have roughly followed, then we should optimistically look forward to the benefits that we reap. The LHC is exciting. This is our generation’s walking on the moon; the discoveries made possible by the LHC will forever change how we see the universe. We’re going to see it clearer — and who knows what interesting things we might find when we uncover the universe’s secrets.